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The house was now perfectly silent, and John had time and space for reflection. More thoughts came crowding on him than he wished to welcome, but they would not be repulsed. He thought of his uncle’s habits and character, turned the matter over and over again in his mind, and he said to himself, “The last man on earth to be superstitious. He never thought of anything but the price of stocks, and the rate of exchange, and my college expenses, that hung heavier at his heart than all; and such a man to die of a fright,–a ridiculous fright, that a man living 150 years ago is alive still, and yet–he is dying.” John paused, for facts will confute the most stubborn logician. “With all his hardness of mind, and of heart, he is dying of a fright. I heard it in the kitchen, I have heard it from himself,–he could not be deceived. If I had ever heard he was nervous, or fanciful, or superstitious, but a character so contrary to all these impressions;–a man that, as poor Butler says, in his ‘Remains of the Antiquarian,’ would have ‘sold Christ over again for the numerical piece of silver which Judas got for him,’–such a man to die of fear! Yet he IS dying,” said John, glancing his fearful eye on the contracted nostril, the glazed eye, the drooping jaw, the whole horrible apparatus of the facies Hippocraticae displayed, and soon to cease its display.

Old Melmoth at this moment seemed to be in a deep stupor; his eyes lost that little expression they had before, and his hands, that had convulsively been catching at the blankets, let go their short and quivering grasp, and lay extended on the bed like the claws of some bird that had died of hunger,–so meager, so yellow, so spread. John, unaccustomed to the sight of death, believed this to be only a sign that he was going to sleep; and, urged by an impulse for which he did not attempt to account to himself, caught up the miserable light, and once more ventured into the forbidden room,– the BLUE CHAMBER of the dwelling. The motion roused the dying man;–he sat bolt upright in his bed. This John could not see, for he was now in the closet; but he heard the groan, or rather the choked and gurgling rattle of the throat, that announces the horrible conflict between muscular and mental convulsion. He started, turned away; but, as he turned away, he thought he saw the eyes of the portrait, on which his own was fixed, MOVE, and hurried back to his uncle’s bedside.

Old Melmoth died in the course of that night, and died as he had lived, in a kind of avaricious delirium. John could not have imagined a scene so horrible as his last hours presented. He cursed and blasphemed about three halfpence, missing, as he said, some weeks before, in an account of change with his groom, about hay to a starved horse that he kept. Then he grasped John’s hand, and asked him to give him the sacrament. “If I send to the clergyman, he will charge me something for it, which I cannot pay,– I cannot. They say I am rich,–look at this blanket;–but I would not mind that, if I could save my soul.” And, raving, he added, “Indeed, Doctor, I am a very poor man. I never troubled a clergyman before, and all I want is, that you will grant me two trifling requests, very little matters in your way,–save my soul, and (whispering) make interest to get me a parish coffin,–I have not enough left to bury me. I always told everyone I was poor, but the more I told them so, the less they believed me.”