Frankenstein's Bride (45 page)

“But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless;
I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat
who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the
select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery;
I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white
and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with
which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on
the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for the moment
when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my
thoughts no more.

“Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is
nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man's death is needed to consummate
the series of my being and accomplish that which must be done, but it requires
my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit
your vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most
northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to
ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious
and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall
die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of
feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and
when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.
I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light,
feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness.
Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened
upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of
the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have
wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the
bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?

“Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of humankind whom these eyes
will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive and yet cherished
a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than
in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might
not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou
hadst not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a
vengeance greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was
still superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in
my wounds until death shall close them forever.

“But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and
what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct.
I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing
flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be
swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it
will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

He sprang from the cabin window as he said this, upon the ice raft which
lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness
and distance.