life at least. I have heard, that this monster cut his own father’s
throat, as he sat at supper, to obtain a small sum which he had lost at
gambling. His partner, who was a loser also, had, it seems, made a vow
to an image of the Virgin, that was in the neighbourhood of the wretched
house where they gamed, to present two wax tapers before it in the event
of his success. He lost; and, in the fury of a gamester, as he repassed
the image, he struck and spit at it. This was very shocking--but what
was it to the crime of him who is now an inmate of your convent? The one
defaced an image, the other murdered his father: Yet the former expired
under tortures the most horrible, and the other, after some vain efforts
to elude justice, _took sanctuary_, and is now a lay-brother in your
convent. On the crimes of this wretch I build all my hopes. His soul
must be saturated with avarice, sensuality, and desperation. There is
nothing he will hesitate at if he be bribed;--for money he will
undertake your liberation--for money he will undertake to strangle you
in your cell. He envies Judas the thirty pieces of silver for which the
Redeemer of mankind was sold. _His_ soul might be purchased at
half-price. Such is the instrument with which I must work.--It is
horrible, but necessary. I have read, that from the most venomous
reptiles and plants, have been extracted the most sanative medicines. I
will squeeze the juice, and trample on the weed.

“Alonzo, tremble not at these words. Let not your habits prevail over
your character. Entrust your liberation to me, and the instruments I am
compelled to work with; and doubt not, that the hand which traces these
lines, will soon be clasping that of a brother in freedom.”

“I read these lines over and over again in the solitude of my cell, when
the excitement of watching for, secreting, and perusing it _for the
first time_, were over, and many doubts and fears began to gather round
me like twilight clouds. In proportion as Juan’s confidence increased,
mine appeared to diminish. There was a terrifying contrast between the
fearlessness, independence, and enterprise of _his_ situation, and the
loneliness, timidity, and danger of mine. While the hope of escape,
through his courage and address, still burnt like an inextinguishable
light in the depth of my heart, I still dreaded entrusting my destiny to
a youth so impetuous, though so affectionate; one who had fled from his
parents’ mansion, was living by subterfuge and imposture in Madrid, and
had engaged, as his coadjutor, a wretch whom nature must revolt from.
Upon whom and what did my hopes of liberation rest? On the affectionate
energies of a wild, enterprising, and unaided being, and the
co-operation of a demon, who might snatch at a bribe, and then shake it
in triumph in his ears, as the seal of our mutual and eternal despair,
while he flung the key of liberation into an abyss where no light could
penetrate, and from which no arm could redeem it.

“Under these impressions, I deliberated, I prayed, I wept in the agony
of doubt. At last I wrote a few lines to Juan, in which I honestly
stated my doubts and apprehensions. I stated first my doubts of the
possibility of my escape. I said, “Can it be imagined that a being whom
all Madrid, whom all Spain, is on the watch for, can elude their
detection? Reflect, dear Juan, that I am staked against a community, a
priesthood, a nation. The escape of a monk is almost impossible,--but
his concealment afterwards is downright impossible. Every bell in every
convent in Spain would ring out _untouched_ in pursuit of the fugitive.
The military, civil, and ecclesiastical powers, would all be on the “qui
vive.” Hunted, panting, and despairing, I might fly from place to
place--no place affording me shelter. The incensed powers of the
church--the fierce and vigorous gripe of the law--the execration and
hatred of society--the suspicions of the lowest order among whom I must
lurk, to shun and curse their penetration; think of encountering all
this, while the fiery cross of the Inquisition blazes in the van,
followed by the whole pack, shouting, cheering, hallooing on to the
prey. Oh Juan! if you knew the terrors under which I live--under which I
would rather die than encounter them again, even on the condition of
liberation! Liberation! Great God! what chance of liberation for a monk
in Spain? There is not a cottage where I could rest one night in
security--there is not a cavern whose echoes would not resound to the
cry of my apostacy. If I was hid in the bowels of the earth, they would
discover me, and tear me from its entrails. My beloved Juan, when I
consider the omnipotence of the ecclesiastical power in Spain, may I not
address it in the language applied to Omnipotence itself: “If I climb up
to heaven, thou art _there_;--if I go down to hell, thou art _there_
also;--if I take the wings of the morning, and flee unto the _uttermost
parts of the sea_, _even there_--” And suppose my liberation was
accomplished--suppose the convent plunged in a profound torpor, and the
unsleeping eye of the Inquisition winked at my apostacy--where am I to
reside? how am I to procure subsistence? The luxurious indolence of my
early years unfit me for active employment. The horrible conflict of
apathy the deepest, with hostility the most deadly, in monastic life,
disqualifies me for society. Throw the doors of every convent in Spain
open, and for what will their inmates be fit? For nothing that will
either embellish or improve it. What could I do to serve myself?--what
could I do that would not betray me? I should be a persecuted,
breathless fugitive,--a branded _Cain_. Alas!--perhaps expiring in
flames, I might see _Abel_ not _my_ victim, but that of the
Inquisition.”

“When I had written these lines, with an impulse for which all can
account but the writer, I tore them to atoms, burnt them deliberately by
the assistance of the lamp in my cell, and went to watch again at the
door in the passage--the door of hope. In passing through the gallery, I
encountered, for a moment, a person of a most forbidding aspect. I drew
on one side--for I had made it a point not to mix, in the slightest
degree, with the community, beyond what the discipline of the house
compelled me to. As he passed, however, he touched my habit, and gave a
most significant look. I immediately comprehended this was the person
Juan alluded to in his letter. And in a few moments after, on descending
to the garden, I found a note that confirmed my conjectures. It
contained these words: “I have procured the money--I have secured our
agent. He is an incarnate devil, but his resolution and intrepidity are
unquestionable. Walk in the cloister to-morrow evening--some one will
touch your habit--grasp his left wrist, that will be the signal. If he
hesitates, whisper to him--“Juan,” he will answer--“Alonzo.” That is
your man, consult with him. Every step that I have taken will be
communicated to you by him.”

“After reading these lines, I appeared to myself like a piece of
mechanism wound up to perform certain functions, in which its
co-operation was irresistible. The precipitate vigour of Juan’s
movements seemed to impel mine without my own concurrence; and as the
shortness of the time left me no opportunity for deliberation, it left
me also none for choice. I was like a clock whose hands are pushed
forward, and I struck the hours I was impelled to strike. When a
powerful agency is thus exercised on us,--when another undertakes to
think, feel, and act for us, we are delighted to transfer to him, not
only our physical, but our moral responsibility. We say, with selfish
cowardice, and self-flattering passiveness, “Be it so--you have decided
for me,”--without reflecting that at the bar of God there is no bail. So
I walked the next evening in the cloister. I composed my habit,--my
looks; any one would have imagined me plunged in profound
meditation,--and so I was, but not on the subjects with which they
conceived I was occupied. As I walked, some one touched my habit. I
started, and, to my consternation, one of the monks asked my pardon for
the sleeve of his tunic having touched mine. Two minutes after another
touched my habit. I felt the difference,--there was an intelligential
and communicative force in his grasp. He seized it as one who did not
fear to be known, and who had no need to apologise. How is it that crime
thus seizes us in life with a fearless grasp, while the touch of
conscience trembles on the verge of our garment. One would almost parody
the words of the well known Italian proverb, and say that guilt is
masculine, and innocence feminine. _I grasped his wrist_ with a
trembling hand, and whispered--“Juan,” in the same breath. He
answered--“Alonzo,” and passed me onward in a moment. I had then a few
moments leisure to reflect on a destiny thus singularly entrusted to a
being whose affections honoured humanity, and a being whose crimes
disgraced it. I was suspended like Mahomet’s tomb between heaven and
earth. I felt an antipathy indescribable to hold any communication with
a monster who had tried to hide the stains of parricide, by casting over
their bloody and ineffaceable traces the shroud of monasticism. I felt
also an inexpressible terror of Juan’s passions and precipitancy; and I
felt ultimately that I was in the power of all I dreaded most, and must
submit to the operation of that power for my liberation.

“I was in the cloisters the following evening. I cannot say I walked
with a step so equal, but I am sure I did with a step much more
artificially regular. For the second time the same person touched my
habit, and whispered the name of Juan. After this I could no longer
hesitate. I said, in passing, “I am in your power.” A hoarse repulsive
voice answered, “No, I am in yours.” I murmured, “Well, then, I
understand you, we belong to each other.”--“Yes. We must not speak here,
but a fortunate opportunity presents itself for our communication.
To-morrow will be the eve of the feast of Pentecost; the vigil is kept
by the whole community, who go two and two every hour to the altar, pass
their hour in prayer, and then are succeeded by two more, and this
continues all night. Such is the aversion with which you have inspired
the community, that they have one and all refused to accompany you
during your hour, which is to be from two till three. You will therefore
be alone, and during your hour I will come and visit you,--we shall be
undisturbed and unsuspected.” At these words he quitted me. The next
night was the eve of Pentecost, the monks went two and two all night to
the altar,--at two o’clock my turn arrived. They rapped at my cell, and
I descended to the church alone.”

CHAPTER VIII.

    Ye monks and nuns throughout the land,
      Who go to church at night in pairs,
    Never take bell-ropes in your hands,
      To raise you up again from prayers.

    COLMAN.

“I am not superstitious, but, as I entered the church, I felt a chill of
body and soul inexpressible. I approached the altar, and attempted to
kneel,--an invisible hand repelled me. A voice seemed to address me from
the recesses of the altar, and demand what brought me there? I reflected
that those who had just quitted that spot had been absorbed in prayer,
that those who were to succeed me would be engaged in the same profound
homage, while I sought the church with a purpose of imposture and
deception, and abused the hour allotted to the divine worship in
contriving the means to escape from it. I felt I was a deceiver,
shrouding my fraud in the very veils of the temple. I trembled at my
purpose and at myself. I knelt, however, though I did not dare to pray.
The steps of the altar felt unusually cold,--I shuddered at the silence
I was compelled to observe. Alas! how can we expect that object to
succeed, which we dare not entrust to God. Prayer, Sir, when we are
deeply engaged in it, not only makes us eloquent, but communicates a
kind of answering eloquence to the objects around us. At former times,
while I poured out my heart before God, I felt as if the lamps burnt
brighter, and the images smiled,--the silent midnight air was filled
with forms and voices, and every breeze that sighed by the casement bore
to my ear the harpings of a thousand angels. Now all was stilled,--the
lamps, the images, the altar, the roof, seemed to behold me in silence.
They surrounded me like witnesses, whose presence alone is enough to
condemn you, without their uttering a word. I dared not look up,--I
dared not speak,--I dared not pray, lest it would unfold a thought I
could not supplicate a blessing on; and this kind of keeping a secret,
which God must know, is at once so vain and impious.

“I had not remained long in this state of agitation, when I heard a step
approach,--it was that of him I expected. “Rise,” said he, for I was on
my knees; “rise,--we have no time to lose. You have but an hour to
remain in the church, and I have much to tell you in that hour.” I rose.
“To-morrow night is fixed for your escape.”--“To-morrow night,--merciful
God!”--“Yes; in desperate steps there is always more danger from delay
than from precipitation. A thousand eyes and ears are on the watch
already,--a single sinister or ambiguous movement would render it
impossible to escape their vigilance. There may be some danger in
hastening matters thus, but it is unavoidable. To-morrow night, after
midnight, descend to the church, it is probable no one will then be
here. If any one should, (engaged in recollection or in penance), retire
to avoid suspicion. Return as soon as the church is empty,--I will be
here. Do you observe that door?” and he pointed to a low door which I
had often observed before, but never remembered to have seen opened; “I
have obtained the key of that door,--no matter by what means. It
formerly led to the vaults of the convent, but, for some extraordinary
reasons, which I have not time to relate, another passage has been
opened, and the former has not been employed or frequented for many
years. From thence branches another passage, which, I have heard, opens
by a trap-door into the garden.”--“Heard,” I repeated; “Good God! is it
on report, then, you depend in a matter so momentous? If you are not
certain that such a passage exists, and that you will be able to trace
its windings, may we not be wandering amid them all night? Or
perhaps----” “Interrupt me no more with those faint objections; I have
no time to listen to fears which I can neither sympathise with or
obviate. When we get through the trap-door into the garden, (if ever we
do), another danger awaits us.” He paused, I thought, like a man who is
watching the effect of the terrors he excites, not from malignity but
vanity, merely to magnify his own courage in encountering them. I was
silent; and, as he heard neither flattery nor fear, he went on. “Two
fierce dogs are let loose in the garden every night,--but they must be
taken care of. The wall is sixteen feet high,--but your brother has
provided a ladder of ropes, which he will fling over, and by which you
may descend on the other side in safety.”--“Safety! but then Juan will
be in danger.”--“Interrupt me no more,--the danger within the walls is
the least you have to dread, beyond them, where can you seek for refuge
or secrecy? Your brother’s money will enable you possibly to escape from
Madrid. He will bribe high, and every inch of your way must be paved
with his gold. But, after that, so many dangers present themselves, that
the enterprise and the danger seem but just begun. How will you cross
the Pyrennees? How----” and he passed his hand over his forehead, with
the air of a man engaged in an effort beyond his powers, and sorely
perplexed about the means to effect it. This expression, so full of
sincerity, struck me forcibly. It operated as a balance against all my
former prepossessions. But still the more confidence I felt in him, the
more I was impressed by his fears. I repeated after him, “How is it
possible for me to escape ultimately? I may, by your assistance,
traverse those intricate passages, whose cold dews I feel already
distilling on me. I may emerge into light, ascend and descend the wall,
but, after that, how am I to escape?--how am I even to live? All Spain
is but one great monastery,--I must be a prisoner every step that I
take.”--“Your brother must look to that,” said he abruptly; “I have done
what I have undertaken.” I then pressed him with several questions
relating to the details of my escape. His answer was monotonous,
unsatisfactory, and evasive, to a degree that again filled me first with
suspicion, and then with terror. I asked, “But how have you obtained
possession of the keys?”--“It is not your business to inquire.” It was
singular that he returned the same answer to every question I put to
him, relative to his becoming possessed of the means to facilitate my
escape, so that I was compelled to desist unsatisfied, and revert to
what he had told me.--“But, then, that terrible passage near the
vaults,--the chance, the fear that we may never emerge to light! Think
of wandering amid sepulchral ruins, of stumbling over the bones of the
dead, of encountering what I cannot describe,--the horror of being among
those who are neither the living or the dead;--those dark and shadowless
things that sport themselves with the reliques of the dead, and feast
and love amid corruption,--ghastly, mocking, and terrific. _Must_ we
pass near the vaults?”--“What matter? perhaps I have more reason to
dread them than you. Do _you_ expect the spirit of your father to start
from the earth to blast you?” At these words, which he uttered in a tone
intended to inspire me with confidence, I shuddered with horror. They
were uttered by a parricide, boasting of his crime in a church at
midnight, amid saints, whose images were silent, but seemed to tremble.
For relief I reverted to the unscaleable wall, and the difficulty of
managing the ladder of ropes without detection. The same answer was on
his lips,--“Leave that to me,--all that is settled.” While he answered
thus, he always turned his face away, and broke his words into
monosyllables. At last I felt that the case was desperate,--that I must
trust every thing to him. _To him!_ Oh, my God! what I felt when I said
this to myself! The conviction thrilled on my soul,--I am in his power.
And yet, even under the impression, I could not help recurring to the
impracticable difficulties that appeared to obstruct my escape. He then
lost patience,--reproached me with timidity and ingratitude; and, while
resuming his naturally ferocious and menacing tone, I actually felt more
confidence in him than when he had attempted to disguise it.
Half-remonstrance, half-invective as it was, what he said displayed so
much ability, intrepidity, and art, that I began to feel a kind of
doubtful security. I conceived, at least, that if any being on earth
could effect my liberation, this was the man. He had no conception of
fear,--no idea of conscience. When he hinted at his having murdered his
father, it was done to impress me with an idea of his hardihood. I saw
this from his expression, for I had involuntarily looked up at him. His
eye had neither the hollowness of remorse, or the wandering of fear,--it
glared on me bold, challenging, and prominent. He had but one idea
annexed to the word danger,--that of strong excitement. He undertook a
perilous attempt as a gamester would sit down to encounter an antagonist
worthy of him; and, if life and death were the stake, he only felt as if
he were playing at a higher rate, and the increased demands on his
courage and talent actually supplied him with the means of meeting them.
Our conference was now nearly at an end, when it occurred to me that
this man was exposing himself to a degree of danger which it was almost
incredible he should brave on my account; and this mystery, at least, I
was resolved to penetrate. I said, “But how will you provide for your
own safety? What will become of you when my escape is discovered? Would
not the most dreadful punishments attend even the suspicion of your
having been an agent in it, and what must be the result when that
suspicion is exchanged for the most undeniable certainty?” It is
impossible for me to describe the change his expression underwent while
I uttered these words. He looked at me for some time without speaking,
with an indefinable mixture of sarcasm, contempt, doubt, and curiosity
in his countenance, and then attempted to laugh, but the muscles of his
face were too stubborn and harsh to admit of this modulation. To
features like his, frowns were a habit, and smiles a convulsion. He
could produce nothing but a _rictus Sardonicus_, the terrors of which
there is no describing. It is very frightful to behold crime in its
merriment,--its smile must be purchased by many groans. My blood ran
cold as I looked at him. I waited for the sound of his voice as a kind
of relief. At length he said, “Do you imagine me such an ideot as to
promote your escape at the risk of imprisonment for life,--perhaps of
immurement,--perhaps of the Inquisition?” and again he laughed. “No, we
must escape together. Could you suppose I would have so much anxiety
about an event, in which I had no part but that of an assistant? It was
of my own danger I was thinking,--it was of my own safety I was
doubtful. Our situation has happened to unite very opposite characters
in the same adventure, but it is an union inevitable and _inseparable_.
Your destiny is now bound to mine by a tie which no human force can
break,--we part no more for ever. The secret that each is in possession
of, must be watched by the other. Our lives are in each other’s hands,
and a moment of absence might be that of treachery. We must pass life in
each watching every breath the other draws, every glance the other
gives,--in dreading sleep as an involuntary betrayer, and watching the
broken murmurs of each other’s restless dreams. We may hate each other,
torment each other,--worst of all, we may be weary of each other, (for
hatred itself would be a relief, compared to the tedium of our
inseparability), but separate we must never.” At this picture of the
liberty for which I had risked so much, my very soul recoiled. I gazed
on the formidable being with whom my existence was thus incorporated. He
was now retiring, when he paused at some distance to repeat his last
words, or perhaps to observe their effect. I was sitting on the
altar,--it was late,--the lamps in the church burned very dimly, and, as
he stood in the aisle, he was placed in such a position, with regard to
that which hung from the roof, that the light fell only on his face and
one hand, which he extended towards me. The rest of his figure,
enveloped in darkness, gave to this bodyless and spectre head an effect
truly appalling. The ferocity of his features, too, was softened into a
heavy and death-like gloom, as he repeated, “We part never,--I must be
near you for ever,” and the deep tones of his voice rolled like
subterranean thunder round the church. A long pause followed. He
continued to stand in the same posture, nor had I power to change mine.
The clock struck three, its sound reminded me that my hour had expired.
We separated, each taking different directions; and the two monks who
succeeded me luckily came a few minutes late, (both of them yawning most
fearfully), so our departure was unobserved.

“The day that followed I have no more power of describing, than of
analysing a dream to its component parts of sanity, delirium, defeated
memory, and triumphant imagination. The sultan in the eastern tale, who
plunged his head in a bason of water, and, before he raised it again,
passed through adventures the most vicissitudinous and incredible--was a
monarch, a slave, a husband, a widower, a father, childless,--in five
minutes, never underwent the changes of _mind_ that I did during that
memorable day. I was a prisoner,--free,--a happy being, surrounded by
smiling infants,--a victim of the Inquisition, writhing amid flames and
execrations. I was a maniac, oscillating between hope and despair. I
seemed to myself all that day to be pulling the rope of a bell, whose
alternate knell was _heaven_--_hell_, and this rung in my ears with all
the dreary and ceaseless monotony of the bell of the convent. Night came
at last. I might almost say _day came_, for that day had been my night.
Every thing was propitious to me,--the convent was all hushed. I put my
head several times out of my cell, to be assured of this,--_all was
hushed_. There was not a step in the corridor,--not a voice, not a
whisper to be heard under a roof containing so many souls. I stole from
my cell, I descended to the church. This was not unusual for those whose
consciences or nerves were disturbed, during the sleepless gloom of a
conventual night. As I advanced to the door of the church, where the
lamps were always kept burning, I heard a human voice. I retreated in
terror;--then I ventured to give a glance. An old monk was at prayers
before one of the images of the saints, and the object of his prayers
was to be relieved, not from the anguish of conscience, or the
annihilation of monasticism, but from the pains of a toothache, for
which he had been desired to apply his gums to the image of a saint
quite notorious for her efficacy in such cases(5). The poor, old,
tortured wretch, prayed with all the fervency of agony, and then rubbed
his gums over and over again on the cold marble, which increased his
complaint, his suffering, and his devotion. I watched, listened,--there
was something at once ludicrous and frightful in my situation. I felt
inclined to laugh at my own distress, while it was rising almost to
agony every moment. I dreaded, too, the approach of another intruder,
and feeling my fear about to be realized by the approach of some one, I
turned round, and, to my inexpressible relief, saw my companion. I made
him comprehend, by a sign, how I was prevented from entering the church;
he answered me in the same way, and retreated a few steps, but not
without shewing me a bunch of huge keys under his habit. This revived my
spirits, and I waited for another half-hour in a state of mental
excruciation, which, were it inflicted on the bitterest enemy I have on
earth, I think I would have cried, “Hold,--hold, spare him.” The clock
struck two,--I writhed and stamped with my feet, as loud as I dared, on
the floor of the passage. I was not at all tranquillized by the visible
impatience of my companion, who started, from time to time, from his
hiding-place behind a pillar of the cloister, flung on me a
glance----no, a glare--of wild and restless inquiry, (which I answered
with one of despondency), and retired, grinding curses between his
teeth, whose horrible grating I could hear distinctly in the intervals
of my long-withheld breath. At last I took a desperate step. I walked
into the church, and, going straight up to the altar, prostrated myself
on the steps. The old monk observed me. He believed that I had come
there with the same purpose, if not with the same feelings, as himself;
and he approached me, to announce his intention of joining in my
aspirations, and intreating an interest in them, _as the pain had now
reached from the lower jaw to the upper_. There is something that one
can hardly describe in this union of the lowest with the highest
interests of life. I was a prisoner, panting for emancipation, and
staking my existence on the step I was compelled to take,--my whole
interest for time, and perhaps for eternity, hung on a moment; and
beside me knelt a being whose destiny was decided already, who could be
nothing but a monk for the few years of his worthless existence, and who
was supplicating a short remission from a temporary pain, that I would
have endured my whole life for an hour’s liberty. As he drew near me,
and supplicated an interest in my prayers, I shrunk away. I felt a
difference in the object of our addresses to God, that I dared not
search my heart for the motive of. I knew not, at the moment, which of
us was right,--he, whose prayer did no dishonour to the place,--or I,
who was to struggle against a disorganized and unnatural state of life,
whose vows I was about to violate. I knelt with him, however, and prayed
for the removal of his pain with a sincerity that cannot be questioned,
as the success of my petitions might be the means of procuring his
absence. As I knelt, I trembled at my own hypocrisy. I was profaning the
altar of God,--I was mocking the sufferings of the being I supplicated
for,--I was the worst of all hypocrites, a hypocrite on my knees, and at
the altar. Yet, was I not compelled to be so? If I _was_ a hypocrite,
who had made me one? If I profaned the altar, who had dragged me there,
to insult it by vows my soul belied and reversed faster than my lips
could utter them? But this was no time for self-examination. I knelt,
prayed, and trembled, till the poor sufferer, weary of his ineffectual
and unanswered supplications, rose, and began to crawl away. For a few
minutes I shivered in horrible anxiety, lest some other intruder might
approach, but the quick decisive step that trod the aisle restored my
confidence in a moment,--it was my companion. He stood beside me. He
uttered a few curses, which sounded very shocking in my ears, more from
the force of habit, and influence of the place, than from the meaning
attached to them, and then hurried on _to the door_. A large bunch of
keys was in his hand, and I followed instinctively this pledge of my
liberation.

  (5) Vide Moore’s View of France and Italy.

“The door was very low--we descended to it by four steps. He applied his
key, muffling it in the sleeve of his habit to suppress the sound. At
every application he recoiled, gnashed his teeth, stamped--then applied
both hands. The lock did not give way--I clasped my hands in agony--I
tossed them over my head. “Fetch a light,” he said in a whisper; “take a
lamp from before one of those figures.” The levity with which he spoke
of the holy images appalled me, and the act appeared to me nothing short
of sacrilege; yet I went and took a lamp, which, with a shuddering hand,
I held to him as he again tried the key. During this second attempt, we
communicated in whispers those fears that left us scarce breath even for
whispers. “Was not that a noise?”--“No, it was the echo of this jarring,
stubborn lock. Is there no one coming?”--“Not one.”--“Look out into the
passage.”--“Then I cannot hold the light to you.”--“No matter--any thing
but detection.”--“Any thing for escape,” I retorted with a courage that
made him start, as I set down the lamp, and joined my strength to his to
turn the key. It grated, resisted; the lock seemed invincible. Again we
tried, with cranched teeth, indrawn breath, and fingers stripped almost
to the bone,--in vain.--Again--in vain.--Whether the natural ferocity of
his temper bore disappointment worse than mine, or that, like many men
of undoubted courage, he was impatient of a _slight_ degree of physical
pain, in a struggle where he would have risked and lost life without a
murmur,--or how it was, I know not,--but he sunk down on the steps
leading to the door, wiped away the big drops of toil and terror from
his forehead with the sleeve of his habit, and cast on me a look that
was at once the pledge of sincerity and of despair. The clock struck
three. The sound rung in my ears like the trumpet of the day of
doom--the trumpet that _will sound_. He clasped his hands with a fierce
and convulsive agony, that might have pictured the last struggles of the
impenitent malefactor,--that agony without remorse, that suffering
without requital or consolation, that, if I may say so, arrays crime in
the dazzling robe of magnanimity, and makes us admire the fallen spirit,
with whom we dare not sympathize. “We are undone,” he cried; “_you_ are
undone. At the hour of three another monk is to enter on his hour of
recollection.” And he added, in a lower tone of horror inexpressible, “I
hear his steps in the passage.” At the moment he uttered these words,
the key, that I had never ceased to struggle with, turned in the lock.
The door opened, the passage lay free to us. My companion recovered
himself at the sight, and in the next moment we were both in the
passage. Our first care was to remove the key, and lock the door on the
inside; and during this, we had the satisfaction to discover, that there
was no one in the church, no one approaching it. Our fears had deceived
us; we retired from the door, looked at each other with a kind of
breathless, half-revived confidence, and began our progress through the
vault in silence and in safety. In safety! my God! I yet tremble at the
thought of that subterranean journey, amid the vaults of a convent, with
a parricide for my companion. But what is there that danger will not
familiarize us with? Had I been told such a story of another, I would
have denounced him as the most reckless and desperate being on
earth--yet _I was the man_. I had secured the lamp, (whose light
appeared to reproach me with sacrilege at every gleam it shed on our
progress), and followed my companion in silence. Romances have made your
country, Sir, familiar with tales of subterranean passages, and
supernatural horrors. All these, painted by the most eloquent pen, must
fall short of the breathless horror felt by a being engaged in an
enterprise beyond his powers, experience, or calculation, driven to
trust his life and liberation to hands that reeked with a father’s
blood. It was in vain that I tried _to make up my mind_,--that I said to
myself, “This is to last but for a short time,”--that I struggled to
force on myself the conviction that it was necessary to have such
associates in desperate enterprises;--it was all in vain. I trembled at
my situation,--at myself, and that is a terror we can never overcome. I
stumbled over the stones,--I was chilled with horror at every step. A
blue mist gathered before my eyes,--it furred the edges of the lamp with
a dim and hazy light. My imagination began to operate, and when I heard
the curses with which my companion reproached my involuntary delay, I
began almost to fear that I was following the steps of a demon, who had
lured me there for purposes beyond the reach of imagination to picture.
Tales of superstition crowded on me like images of terror on those who
are in the dark. I had heard of infernal beings who deluded monks with
the hopes of liberation, seduced them into the vaults of the convent,
and then proposed conditions which it is almost as horrible to relate as
to undergo the performance of. I thought of being forced to witness the
unnatural revels of a diabolical feast,--of seeing the rotting flesh
distributed,--of drinking the dead corrupted blood,--of hearing the
anthems of fiends howled in insult, on that awful verge where life and
eternity mingle,--of hearing the hallelujahs of the choir, echoed even
through the vaults, where demons were yelling the _black mass_ of their
infernal Sabbath.--I thought of all that the interminable passages, the
livid light, and the diabolical companion, might suggest.

“Our wanderings in the passage seemed to be endless. My companion turned
to right, to left,--advanced, retreated, paused,--(the pause was
dreadful)!--Then advanced again, tried another direction, where the
passage was so low that I was obliged to crawl on my hands and knees to
follow him, and even in this posture my head struck against the ragged
roof. When we had proceeded for a considerable time, (at least so it
appeared to me, for minutes are hours in the _noctuary_ of
terror,--terror has no _diary_), this passage became so narrow and so
low, that I could proceed no farther, and wondered how my companion
could have advanced beyond me. I called to him, but received no answer;
and, in the darkness of the passage, or rather hole, it was impossible
to see ten inches before me. I had the lamp, too, to watch, which I had
held with a careful trembling hand, but which began to burn dim in the
condensed and narrow atmosphere. A gush of terror rose in my throat.
Surrounded as I was by damps and dews, my whole body felt in a fever. I
called again, but no voice answered. In situations of peril, the
imagination is unhappily fertile, and I could not help recollecting and
_applying_ a story I had once read of some travellers who attempted to
explore the vaults of the Egyptian pyramids. One of them, who was
advancing, as I was, on his hands and knees, stuck in the passage, and,
whether from terror, or from the natural consequences of his situation,
swelled so that it was impossible for him to retreat, advance, or allow
a passage for his companions. The party were on their return, and
finding their passage stopped by this irremoveable obstruction, their
lights trembling on the verge of extinction, and their guide terrified
beyond the power of direction or advice, proposed, in the selfishness to
which the feeling of vital danger reduces all, to cut off the limbs of
the wretched being who obstructed their passage. He heard this proposal,
and, contracting himself with agony at the sound, was reduced, by that
strong muscular spasm, to his usual dimensions, dragged out, and
afforded room for the party to advance. He was suffocated, however, in
the effort, and left behind a corse. All this detail, that takes many
words to tell, rushed on my soul in a moment;--on my soul?--no, on my
body. I was all physical feeling,--all intense corporeal agony, and God
only knows, and man only can feel, how that agony can absorb and
annihilate all other feeling within us,--how we could, in such a moment,
feed on a parent, to gnaw out our passage into life and liberty, as
sufferers in a wreck have been known to gnaw their own flesh, for the
support of that existence which the unnatural morsel was diminishing at
every agonizing bite.

“I tried to crawl backwards,--I succeeded. I believe the story I
recollected had an effect on me, I felt a contraction of muscles
corresponding to what I had read of. I felt myself almost liberated by
the sensation, and the next moment I was actually so;--I had got out of
the passage I knew not how. I must have made one of those extraordinary
exertions, whose energy is perhaps not only increased by, but dependent
on, our unconsciousness of them. However it was, I was extricated, and
stood breathless and exhausted, with the dying lamp in my hand, staring
around me, and seeing nothing but the black and dripping walls, and the
low arches of the vault, that seemed to lower over me like the frown of
an eternal hostility,--a frown that forbids hope or escape. The lamp was
rapidly extinguishing in my hand,--I gazed on it with a fixed eye. I
knew that my life, and, what was dearer than my life, my liberation,
depended on my watching its last glimpse, yet I gazed on it with the eye
of an ideot,--a stupified stare. The lamp glimmered more faintly,--its
dying gleams awoke me to recollection. I roused myself,--I looked
around. A strong flash discovered an object near me. I shuddered,--I
uttered cries, though I was unconscious of doing so, for a voice said to
me,--“Hush, be silent; I left you only to reconnoitre the passages. I
have made out the way to the trap-door,--be silent, and all is well.” I
advanced trembling, my companion appeared trembling too. He whispered,
“Is the lamp so nearly extinguished?”--“You see.”--“Try to keep it in
for a few moments.”--“I will; but, if I cannot, what then?”--“Then we
must perish,” he added, with an execration that I thought would have
brought down the vaults over our heads. It is certain, Sir, however,
that desperate sentiments are best suited to desperate emergencies, and
this wretch’s blasphemies gave me a kind of horrible confidence in his
courage. On he went, muttering curses before me; and I followed,
watching the last light of the lamp with agony increased by my fear
of further provoking my horrible guide. I have before mentioned how
our feelings, even in the most fearful exigencies, dwindle into
petty and wretched details. With all my care, however, the lamp
declined,--quivered,--flashed a pale light, like the smile of despair
on me, and was extinguished. I shall never forget the look my guide
threw on me by its sinking light. I had watched it like the last
beatings of an expiring heart, like the shiverings of a spirit about to
part for eternity. I saw it extinguished, and believed myself already
among those for “whom the blackness of darkness is reserved for ever.”

“It was at this moment that a faint sound reached our frozen ears;--it
was the chaunt of matins, performed by candle-light at this season of
the year, which was begun in the chapel now far above us. This voice of
heaven thrilled us,--we seemed the pioneers of darkness, on the very
frontiers of hell. This superb insult of celestial triumph, that amid
the strains of hope spoke despair to us, announced a God to those who
were stopping their ears against the sound of his name, had an effect
indescribably awful. I fell to the ground, whether from stumbling from
the darkness, or shrinking from emotion, I know not. I was roused by the
rough arm, and rougher voice of my companion. Amid execrations that
froze my blood, he told me this was no time for failing or for fear. I
asked him, trembling, what I was to do? He answered, “Follow me, and
feel your way in darkness.” Dreadful sounds!--Those who tell us _the
whole_ of our calamity always appear malignant, for our hearts, or our
imaginations, always flatter us that it is not so great as reality
proves it to be. Truth is told us by any mouth sooner than our own.

“In darkness, total darkness, and on my hands and knees, for I could no
longer stand, I followed him. This motion soon affected my head; I grew
giddy first, then stupified. I paused. He growled a curse, and I
instinctively quickened my movements, like a dog who hears the voice of
a chiding master. My habit was now in rags from my struggles, my knees
and hands stript of skin. I had received several severe bruises on my
head, from striking against the jagged and unhewn stones which formed
the irregular sides and roof of this eternal passage. And, above all,
the unnatural atmosphere, combined with the intensity of my emotion, had
produced a thirst, the agony of which I can compare to nothing but that
of a burning coal dropt into my throat, which I seemed to suck for
moisture, but which left only drops of fire on my tongue. Such was my
state, when I called out to my companion that I could proceed no
farther. “Stay there and rot, then,” was the answer; and perhaps the
most soothing words of encouragement could not have produced so strong
an effect on me. This confidence of despair, this bravado against
danger, that menaced the power in his very citadel, gave me a temporary
courage,--but what is courage amid darkness and doubt? From the
faultering steps, the suffocated breath, the muttered curses, I guessed
what was going on. I was right. The final--hopeless stop followed
instantly, announced by the last wild sob, the cranching of despairing
teeth, the clasping, or rather clap, of the locked hands, in the
terrible extacy of utter agony. I was kneeling behind him at that
moment, and I echoed every cry and gesture with a violence that started
my guide. He silenced me with curses. Then he attempted to pray; but his
prayers sounded so like curses, and his curses were so like prayers to
the evil one, that, choaking with horror, I implored him to cease. He
did cease, and for nearly half an hour neither of us uttered a word. We
lay beside each other like two panting dogs that I have read of, who lay
down to die close to the animal they pursued, whose fur they fanned with
their dying breath, while unable to mouthe her.

“Such appeared emancipation to us,--so near, and yet so hopeless. We lay
thus, not daring to speak to each other, for who could speak but of
despair, and which of us dared to aggravate the despair of the other.
This kind of fear which we know already felt by others, and which we
dread to aggravate by uttering, _even to those who know it_, is perhaps
the most horrible sensation ever experienced. The very thirst of my body
seemed to vanish in this fiery thirst of the soul for communication,
where all communication was unutterable, impossible, hopeless. Perhaps
the condemned spirits will feel thus at their final sentence, when they
know all that is to be suffered, and dare not disclose to each other
that horrible truth which is no longer a secret, but which the profound
silence of their despair would seem to make one. The secret of silence
is the only secret. Words are a blasphemy against that taciturn and
invisible God, whose presence enshrouds us in our last extremity. These
moments that appeared to me endless, were soon to cease. My companion
sprung up,--he uttered a cry of joy. I imagined him deranged,--he was
not. He exclaimed, “Light, light,--the light of heaven; we are near the
trap-door, I see the light through it.” Amid all the horrors of our
situation, he had kept his eye constantly turned upwards, for he knew
that, if we were near it, the smallest glimmering of light would be
visible in the intense darkness that enveloped us. He was right. I
started up,--I saw it too. With locked hands, with dropt and wordless
lips, with dilated and thirsting eyes, we gazed upwards. A thin line of
grey light appeared above our heads. It broadened, it grew brighter,--it
_was_ the light of heaven, and its breezes too came fluttering to us
through the chinks of the trap-door that opened into the garden.”

CHAPTER IX.

“Though life and liberty seemed so near, our situation was still very
critical. The morning light that aided our escape, might open many an
eye to mark it. There was not a moment to be lost. My companion proposed
to ascend first, and I did not venture to oppose him. I was too much in
his power to resist; and in early youth superiority of depravity always
seems like a superiority of power. We reverence, with a prostituted
idolatry, those who have passed through the degrees of vice before us.
This man was criminal, and crime gave him a kind of heroic immunity in
my eyes. Premature knowledge in life is always to be purchased by guilt.
He knew more than I did,--he was my all in this desperate attempt. I
dreaded him as a demon, yet I invoked him as a god.

“In the end I submitted to his proposal. I was very tall, but he was
much stronger than I. He rose on my shoulders, I trembled under his
weight, but he succeeded in raising the trap-door,--the full light of
day broke on us both. In a moment he dropt his hold of the door,--he
fell to the ground with a force that struck me down. He exclaimed, “The
workmen are there, they have come about the repairs, we are lost if we
are discovered. They are there, the garden is full of them already, they
will be there the whole day. That cursed lamp, it has undone us! Had it
but kept in for a few moments, we might have been in the garden, might
have crossed the wall, might have been at liberty, and now----” He fell
to the ground convulsed with rage and disappointment, as he spoke. To me
there was nothing so terrible in this intelligence. That we were
disappointed for a time was evident, but we had been relieved from the
most horrible of all fears, that of wandering in famine and darkness
till we perished,--we had found the way to the trap-door. I had
unfailing confidence in Juan’s patience and zeal. I was sure that if he
was watching for us on that night, he would watch for many a successive
night. Finally, I felt we had but twenty-four hours or less to wait, and
what was that to the eternity of hours that must otherwise be wasted in
a convent. I suggested all this to my companion as I closed the
trap-door; but I found in his complaints, imprecations, and tossing
restlessness of impatience and despair, the difference between man and
man in the hour of trial. He possessed active, and I passive fortitude.
Give him something to do, and he would do it at the risk of limb, and
life, and soul,--he never murmured. Give me something to suffer, to
undergo, to submit, and I became at once the _hero of submission_. While
this man, with all his physical strength, and all his mental hardihood,
was tossing on the earth with the imbecillity of an infant, in a
paroxysm of unappeasable passion, I was his consoler, adviser, and
supporter. At last he suffered himself to hear reason; he agreed that we
must remain twenty-four hours more in the passage, on which he bestowed
a whole litany of curses. So we determined to stand in stillness and
darkness till night; but such is the restlessness of the human heart,
that this arrangement, which a few hours before we would have embraced
as the offer of a benignant angel for our emancipation, began to
display, as we were compelled to examine its aspect more closely,
certain features that were repulsive almost to hideousness. We were
exhausted nearly to death. Our physical exertions had been, for the last
few hours, almost incredible; in fact, I am convinced that nothing but
the consciousness that we were engaged in a struggle for life or death,
could have enabled us to support it, and now that the struggle was over,
we began to feel our weakness. Our mental sufferings had not been
less,--we had been excruciated body and soul alike. Could our mental
struggles have operated like our bodily ones, we would have been seen to
weep drops of blood, as we felt we were doing at every step of our
progress. Recollect too, Sir, the unnatural atmosphere we had breathed
so long, amid darkness and danger, and which now began to show its
anti-vital and pestilent effect, in producing alternately on our bodies
deluges of perspiration, succeeded by a chill that seemed to freeze the
very marrow. In this state of mental fever, and bodily exhaustion, we
had now to wait many hours, in darkness, without food, till Heaven
pleased to send us night. But how were those hours to be passed? The
preceding day had been one of strict abstinence,--we began already to
feel the gnawings of hunger, a hunger not to be appeased. We must fast
till the moment of liberation, and we must fast amid stone walls, and
damp seats on floors of stone, which diminished every moment the
strength necessary to contend with their impenetrable hardness,--their
withering chillness.

“The last thought that occurred to me was,--with what a companion those
hours must be passed. With a being whom I abhorred from my very soul,
while I felt that his presence was at once an irrepealable curse, and an
invincible necessity. So we stood, shivering under the trap-door, not
daring to whisper our thoughts to each other, but feeling _that despair
of incommunication_ which is perhaps the severest curse that can be
inflicted on those who are compelled to be together, and compelled, by
the same necessity that imposes their ungenial union, not even to
communicate their fears to each other. We _hear_ the throb of each
others hearts, and yet dare not say, “My heart beats in unison with
yours.”

“As we stood thus, the light became suddenly eclipsed. I knew not from
what this arose, till I felt a shower, the most violent perhaps that
ever was precipitated on the earth, make its way even through the
trap-door, and drench me in five minutes to the skin. I retreated from
the spot, but not before I had received it in every pore of my body.
You, Sir, who live in happy Ireland, blessed by God with an exemption
from those vicissitudes of the atmosphere, can have no idea of their
violence in continental countries. This rain was followed by peals of
thunder, that made me fear God was pursuing me into the abysses where I
had shrunk to escape from his vengeance, and drew from my companion
blasphemies more loud than thunder, as he felt himself drenched by the
shower, that now, flooding the vault, rose almost to our ancles. At last
he proposed our retiring to a place which he said he was acquainted
with, and which would shelter us. He added, that it was but a few steps
from where we stood, and that we could easily find our way back. I did
not dare to oppose him, and followed to a dark recess, only
distinguished from the rest of the vault by the remains of what had once
been a door. It was now light, and I could distinguish objects plainly.
By the deep hollows framed for the shooting of the bolt, and the size of
the iron hinges that still remained, though covered with rust, I saw it
must have been of no common strength, and probably intended to secure
the entrance to a dungeon,--there was no longer a door, yet I shuddered
to enter it. As we did so, both of us, exhausted in body and mind, sunk
on the hard floor. We did not say a word to each other, an inclination
to sleep irresistibly overcame us; and whether that sleep was to be my
last or not, I felt a profound indifference. Yet I was now on the verge
of liberty, and though drenched, famishing, and comfortless, was, in any
rational estimate, an object much more enviable than in the
heart-withering safety of my cell. Alas! it is too true that our souls
always contract themselves on the approach of a blessing, and seem as if
their powers, exhausted in the effort to obtain it, had no longer energy
to embrace the object. Thus we are always compelled to substitute the
pleasure of the pursuit for that of the attainment,--to reverse the
means for the end, or confound them, in order to extract any enjoyment
from either, and at last fruition becomes only another name for
lassitude. These reflections certainly did not occur to me, when, worn
out with toil, terror, and famine, I fell on the stone floor in a sleep
that was not sleep,--it seemed the suspension both of my mortal and
immortal nature. I ceased from animal and intellectual life at once.
There are cases, Sir, where the thinking power appears to accompany us
to the very verge of slumber, where we sleep full of delightful
thoughts, and sleep only to review them in our dreams: But there are
also cases when we feel that our sleep is a “sleep for ever,”--when we
resign the hope of immortality for the hope of a profound repose,--when
we demand from the harassings of fate, “Rest, rest,” and no more,--when
the soul and body faint together, and all we ask of God or man is to let
us sleep.

“In such a state I fell to the ground; and, at that moment, would have
bartered all my hopes of liberation for twelve hours profound repose, as
Esau sold his birth-right for a small but indispensible refreshment. I
was not to enjoy even this repose long. My companion was sleeping too.
Sleeping! great God! what was his sleep?--that in whose neighbourhood no
one could close an eye, or, worse, an ear. He talked as loudly and
incessantly as if he had been employed in all the active offices of
life. I heard involuntarily the secret of his dreams. I knew he had
murdered his father, but I did not know that the vision of parricide
haunted him in his broken visions. My sleep was first broken by sounds
as horrible as any I ever had heard at my bed-side in the convent. I
heard sounds that disturbed me, but I was not yet fully awake. They
increased, they redoubled,--the terrors of my habitual associations
awoke me. I imagined the Superior and the whole community pursuing us
with lighted torches. I felt the blaze of the lights in contact with my
very eye-balls. I shrieked. I said, “Spare my sight, do not blind me, do
not drive me mad, and I will confess all.” A deep voice near me
muttered, “Confess.” I started up fully awake,--it was only the voice of
my sleeping companion. I stood on my feet, I viewed him as he lay. He
heaved and wallowed on his bed of stone, as if it had been down. He
seemed to have a frame of adamant. The jagged points of stone, the
hardness of the floor, the ruts and rudenesses of his inhospitable bed,
produced no effect on him. He could have slept, but his dreams were from
within. I have heard, I have read, of the horrors attending the dying
beds of the guilty. They often told us of such in the convent. One monk
in particular, who was a priest, was fond of dwelling on a death-bed
scene he had witnessed, and of describing its horrors. He related that
he had urged a person, who was sitting calmly in his chair, though
evidently dying, to intrust him with his confession. The dying person
answered, “I will, when those leave the room.” The monk, conceiving that
this referred to the relatives and friends, motioned them to retire.
They did so, and again the monk renewed his demands on the conscience of
the penitent. The room was now empty. The monk renewed his adjuration to
the dying man to disclose the secrets of his conscience. The answer was
the same,--“I will, when those are gone.”--“_Those!_”--“Yes, those whom
you cannot see, and cannot banish,--send them away, and I will tell you
the truth.”--“Tell it now, then; there are none here but you and
me.”--“There are,” answered the dying man. “There are none that I can
see,” said the monk, gazing round the room. “But there are those that I
do see,” replied the dying wretch, “and that see me; that are watching,
waiting for me, the moment the breath is out of my body. I see them, I
feel them,--stand on my right side.” The monk changed his position. “Now
they are on the left.” The monk shifted again. “Now they are on my
right.” The monk commanded the children and relatives of the dying
wretch to enter the room, and surround the bed. They obeyed the command.
“Now they are every where,” exclaimed the sufferer, and expired(6).

  (6) Fact,--me ipso teste.

“This terrible story came freshly to my recollection, accompanied by
many others. I had heard much of the terrors that surrounded the dying
bed of the guilty, but, from what I was compelled to hear, I almost
believe them to be less than the terrors of a guilty sleep. I have said
my companion began at first with low mutterings, but among them I could
distinguish sounds that reminded me too soon of all I wished to forget,
at least while we were together. He murmured, “An old man?--yes,--well,
the less blood in him. Grey hairs?--no matter, my crimes have helped to
turn them grey,--he ought to have rent them from the roots long ago.
They are white, you say?--well, to-night they shall be dyed in blood,
then they will be white no longer. Aye,--he will hold them up at the day
of judgment, like a banner of condemnation against me. He will stand at
the head of an army stronger than the army of martyrs,--the host of
those whose murderers have been their own children. What matter whether
they cut their parents’ hearts or their throats. I have cut _one_
through and through, to the very core,--now for the other, it will give
him less pain, I feel that,”--and he laughed, shuddered, and writhed on
his stony bed. Trembling with horror ineffable, I tried to awake him. I
shook his muscular arms, I rolled him on his back, on his face,--nothing
could awake him. It seemed as if I was only rocking him on his cradle of
stone. He went on, “Secure the purse, I know the drawer of the cabinet
where it lies, but secure him first. Well, then, you cannot,--you
shudder at his white hairs, at his calm sleep!--ha! ha! that villains
should be fools. Well, then, I must be the man, it is but a short
struggle with him or me,--he may be damned, and I must. Hush,--how the
stairs creak, they will not tell him it is his son’s foot that is
ascending?--They dare not, the stones of the wall would give them the
lie. Why did you not oil the hinges of the door?--now for it. He sleeps
intensely,--aye, how calm he looks!--the calmer the fitter for heaven.
Now,--now, my knee is on his breast,--where is the knife?--where is the
knife?--if he looks at me I am lost. The knife,--I am a coward; the
knife,--if he opens his eyes I am gone; the knife, ye cursed
cravens,--who dare shrink when I have griped my father’s throat?
There,--there,--there,--blood to the hilt,--the old man’s blood; look
for the money, while I wipe the blade. I cannot wipe it, the grey hairs
are mingled with the blood,--those hairs brushed my lips the last time
he kissed me. I was a child then. I would not have taken a world to
murder him then, now,--now, what am I? Ha! ha! ha! Let Judas shake his
bag of silver against mine,--he betrayed his Saviour, and I have
murdered my father. Silver against silver, and soul against soul. I have
got more for mine,--he was a fool to sell his for thirty. But for which
of us will the last fire burn hotter?--no matter, I am going to try.” At
these horrible expressions, repeated over and over, I called, I shrieked
to my companion to awake. He did so, with a laugh almost as wild as the
chattering of his dreams. “Well, what have you heard? I murdered
him,--you knew that long before. You trusted me in this cursed
adventure, which will risk the life of both, and can you not bear to
hear me speak to myself, though I am only telling what you knew
before?”--“No, I cannot bear it,” I answered, in an agony of horror;
“not even to effect my escape, could I undertake to sustain another hour
like the past,--the prospect of seclusion here for a whole day amid
famine, damps, and darkness, listening to the ravings of a ----. Look
not at me with that glare of mockery, I know it all, I shudder at your
sight. Nothing but the iron link of necessity could have bound me to you
even for a moment. I _am_ bound to you,--I must bear it while it
continues, but do not make those moments insupportable. My life and
liberty are in your hands,--I must add my reason, too, in the
circumstances in which we are plunged,--I cannot sustain your horrible
eloquence of sleep. If I am forced to listen to it again, you may bear
me alive from these walls, but you will bear me away an ideot, stupified
by terrors which my brain is unable to support. Do not sleep, I adjure
you. Let me watch beside you during this wretched day,--this day which
is to be measured by darkness and suffering, instead of light and
enjoyment. I am willing to famish with hunger, to shudder with cold, to
couch on these hard stones, but I cannot bear your dreams,--if you
sleep, I must rouse you in defence of my reason. All physical strength
is failing me fast, and I am become more jealous of the preservation of
my intellect. Do not cast at me those looks of defiance, I am your
inferior in strength, but despair makes us equal.” As I spoke, my voice
sounded like thunder in my own ears, my eyes flashed visibly to myself.
I felt the power that passion gives us, and I saw that my companion felt
it too. I went on, in a tone that made myself start, “If you dare to
sleep, I will wake you,--if you dose even, you shall not have a moment
undisturbed,--you shall wake with me. For this long day we must starve
and shiver together, I have wound myself up to it. I can bear every
thing,--every thing but the dreams of him whose sleep reveals to him the
vision of a murdered parent. Wake,--rave,--blaspheme,--but sleep you
shall not!”

“The man stared at me for some time, almost incredulous of my being
capable of such energy of passion and command. But when he had, by the
help of his dilated eyes, and gaping mouth, appeared to satisfy himself
fully of the fact, his expression suddenly changed. He appeared to feel
a community of nature with me for the first time. Any thing of ferocity
appeared congenial and balsamic to him; and, with oaths, that froze my
blood, swore he liked me the better for my resolution. “I _will_ keep
awake,” he added, with a yawn that distended like the jaws of an Ogre
preparing for his cannibal feast. Then suddenly relaxing, “But how shall
we keep awake? We have nothing to eat, nothing to drink, what shall we
do to keep awake?” And incontinently he uttered a volley of curses. Then
he began to sing. But what songs?--full of such ribaldry and looseness,
that, bred as I was first in domestic privacy, and then in the
strictness of a convent, made me believe it was an incarnate demon that
was howling beside me. I implored him to cease, but this man could pass
so instantaneously from the extremes of atrocity to those of
levity,--from the ravings of guilt and horror ineffable, to songs that
would insult a brothel, that I knew not what to make of him. This _union
of antipodes_, this unnatural alliance of the extremes of guilt and
light-mindedness, I had never met or imagined before. He started from
the visions of a parricide, and sung songs that would have made a harlot
blush. How ignorant of life I must have been, not to know that guilt and
insensibility often join to tenant and deface the same mansion, and that
there is not a more strong and indissoluble alliance on earth, than that
between the hand that dare do any thing, and the heart that can feel
nothing.

“It was in the midst of one of his most licentious songs, that my
companion suddenly paused. He gazed about him for some time; and faint
and dismal as the light was by which we beheld each other, I thought I
could observe an extraordinary expression overshadow his countenance. I
did not venture to notice it. “Do you know where we are?” he whispered.
“Too well;--in the vault of a convent, beyond the help or reach of
man,--without food, without light, and almost without hope.”--“Aye, so
its last inhabitants might well say.”--“Its last inhabitants!--who were
they?”--“I can tell you, if you can bear it.”--“_I cannot bear it_,” I
cried, stopping my ears, “I will not listen to it. I feel by the
narrator it must be something horrid.”--“It was indeed a horrid night,”
said he, unconsciously adverting to some circumstance in the narrative;
and his voice sunk into mutterings, and he forbore to mention the
subject further. I retired as far from him as the limits of the vault
admitted; and, burying my head between my knees, tried to _forbear to
think_. What a state of mind must that be, in which we are driven to
wish we no longer had one!--when we would willingly become “as the
beasts that perish,” to forget that privilege of humanity, which only
seems an undisputed title to superlative misery! To sleep was
impossible. Though sleep seems to be only a necessity of nature, it
always requires an act of the mind to concur in it. And if I had been
willing to rest, the gnawings of hunger, which now began to be exchanged
for the most deadly sickness, would have rendered it impossible. Amid
this complication of physical and mental suffering, it is hardly
credible, Sir, but it is not the less true, that my principal one arose
from the inanity, the want of occupation, inevitably attached to my
dreary situation. To inflict a suspension of the action on a being
conscious of possessing the powers of action, and burning for their
employment,--to forbid all interchange of mutual ideas, or acquirement
of new ones to an intellectual being,--to do this, is to invent a
torture that might make Phalaris blush for his impotence of cruelty.

“I had felt other sufferings almost intolerable, but I felt this
impossible to sustain; and, will you believe it, Sir, after wrestling
with it during an hour (as I counted hours) of unimaginable misery, I
rose, and supplicated my companion to relate the circumstance he had
alluded to, as connected with our dreadful abode. His ferocious good
nature took part with this request in a moment; and though I could see
that his strong frame had suffered more than my comparatively feeble
one, from the struggles of the night and the privations of the day, he
prepared himself with a kind of grim alacrity for the effort. He was now
in his element. He was enabled to daunt a feeble mind by the narration
of horrors, and to amaze an ignorant one with a display of crimes;--and
he needed no more to make him commence. “I remember,” said he, “an
extraordinary circumstance connected with this vault. I wondered how I
felt so familiar with this door, this arch, at first.--I did not
recollect immediately, so many strange thoughts have crossed my mind
every day, that events which would make a life-lasting impression on
others, pass like shadows before me, while thoughts appear like
substances. _Emotions are my events_--you know what brought me to this
cursed convent--well, don’t shiver or look _paler_--you were pale
before. However it was, I found myself in the convent, and I was obliged
to subscribe to its discipline. A part of it was, that extraordinary
criminals should undergo what they called extraordinary penance; that
is, not only submit to every ignominy and rigour of conventual life,
(which, fortunately for its penitents, is never wanting in such amusing
resources), but act the part of executioner whenever any distinguished
punishment was to be inflicted or witnessed. They did me the honour to
believe me particularly qualified for this species of recreation, and
perhaps they did not flatter me. I had all the humility of a saint on
trial; but still I had a kind of confidence in my talents of this
description, provided they were put to a proper test; and the monks had
the goodness to assure me, that I never could long be without one in a
convent. This was a very tempting picture of my situation, but I found
these worthy people had not in the least exaggerated. An instance
occurred a few days after I had the happiness to become a member of this
amiable community, of whose merits you are doubtless sensible. I was
desired to attach myself to a young monk of distinguished family, who
had lately taken the vows, and who performed his duties with that
heartless punctuality that intimated to the community that his heart was
elsewhere. I was soon put in possession of the business; from their
ordering me to _attach_ myself to him, I instantly conceived I was bound
to the most deadly hostility against him. The friendship of convents is
always a treacherous league--we watch, suspect, and torment each other,
for the love of God. This young monk’s only crime was, that he was
suspected of cherishing an earthly passion. He was, in fact, as I have
stated, the son of a distinguished family, who (from the fear of his
contracting what is called a degrading marriage, _i. e._ of marrying a
woman of inferior rank whom he loved, and who would have made him happy,
as fools, that is, half mankind, estimate happiness) forced him to take
the vows. He appeared at times broken-hearted, but at times there was a
light of hope in his eye, that looked somewhat ominous in the eyes of
the community. It is certain, that hope not being an indigenous plant in
the parterre of a convent, must excite suspicion with regard both to its
origin and its growth.

“Some time after, a young novice entered the convent. From the moment he
did so, a change the most striking took place in the young monk. He and
the novice became inseparable companions--there was something suspicious
in that. My eyes were on the watch in a moment. Eyes are particularly
sharpened in discovering misery when they can hope to aggravate it. The
attachment between the young monk and the novice went on. They were for
ever in the garden together--they inhaled the odours of the
flowers--they cultivated the same cluster of carnations--they entwined
themselves as they walked together--when they were in the choir, their
voices were like mixed incense. Friendship is often carried to excess in
conventual life, but this friendship was too like love. For instance,
the psalms sung in the choir sometimes breathe a certain language; at
these words, the young monk and the novice would direct their voices to
each other in sounds that could not be misunderstood. If the least
correction was inflicted, one would intreat to undergo it for the other.
If a day of relaxation was allowed, whatever presents were sent to the
cell of one, were sure to be found in the cell of the other. This was
enough for me. I saw that secret of mysterious happiness, which is the
greatest misery to those who never can share it. My vigilance was
redoubled, and it was rewarded by the discovery of a secret--a secret
that I had to communicate and raise my consequence by. You cannot guess
the importance attached to the discovery of a secret in a convent,
(particularly when the remission of our own offences depends on the
discovery of those of others.)

“One evening as the young monk and his darling novice were in the
garden, the former plucked a peach, which he immediately offered to his
favourite; the latter accepted it with a movement I thought rather
awkward--it seemed like what I imagined would be the reverence of a
female. The young monk divided the peach with a knife; in doing so, the
knife grazed the finger of the novice, and the monk, in agitation
inexpressible, tore his habit to bind up the wound. I saw it all--my
mind was made up on the business--I went to the Superior that very
night. The result may be conceived. They were watched, but cautiously at
first. They were probably on their guard; for, for some time it defied
even my vigilance to make the slightest discovery. It is a situation
incomparably tantalizing, when suspicion is satisfied of her own
suggestions, as of the truth of the gospel, but still wants the _little
fact_ to make them credible to others. One night that I had, by
direction of the Superior, taken my station in the gallery, (where I was
contented to remain hour after hour, and night after night, amid
solitude, darkness, and cold, for the chance of the power of retaliating
on others the misery inflicted on myself)--One night, I thought I heard
a step in the gallery--I have told you that I was in the dark--a light
step passed me. I could hear the broken and palpitating respiration of
the person. A few moments after, I heard a door open, and knew it to be
the door of the young monk. I knew it; for by long watching in the dark,
and accustoming myself to number the cells, by the groan from one, the
prayer from another, the faint shriek of restless dreams from a third,
my ear had become so finely graduated, that I could instantly
distinguish the opening of _that door_, from which (to my sorrow) no
sound had ever before issued. I was provided with a small chain, by
which I fastened the handle of the door to a contiguous one, in such a
manner, that it was impossible to open either of them from the inside. I
then hastened to the Superior, with a pride of which none but the
successful tracer of a guilty secret in convents, can have any
conception. I believe the Superior was himself agitated by the luxury of
the same feelings, for he was awake and up in his apartment, attended by
_four monks_, whom you may remember.” I shuddered at the remembrance. “I
communicated my intelligence with a voluble eagerness, not only unsuited
to the respect I owed these persons, but which must have rendered me
almost unintelligible, yet they were good enough not only to overlook
this violation of decorum, which would in any other case have been
severely punished, but even to supply certain pauses in my narrative,
with a condescension and facility truly miraculous. I felt what it was
to acquire importance in the eyes of a Superior, and gloried in all the
dignified depravity of an informer. We set out without losing a
moment,--we arrived at the door of the cell, and I pointed out with
triumph the chain unremoved, though a slight vibration, perceptible at
our approach, showed the wretches within were already apprised of their
danger. I unfastened the door,--how they must have shuddered! The
Superior and his satellites burst into the cell, and _I_ held the light.
You tremble,--why? I was guilty, and I wished to witness guilt that
palliated mine, at least in the opinion of the convent. I had only
violated the laws of nature, but they had outraged the decorum of a
convent, and, of course, in the creed of a convent, there was no
proportion between our offences. Besides, I was anxious to witness
misery that might perhaps equal or exceed my own, and this is a
curiosity not easily satisfied. It is actually possible to become
_amateurs in suffering_. I have heard of men who have travelled into
countries where horrible executions were to be daily witnessed, for the
sake of that excitement which the sight of suffering never fails to
give, from the spectacle of a tragedy, or an _auto da fe_, down to the
writhings of the meanest reptile on whom you can inflict torture, and
feel that torture is the result of your own power. It is a species of
feeling of which we never can divest ourselves,--a triumph over those
whose sufferings have placed them below us, and no wonder,--suffering is
always an indication of weakness,--we glory in our impenetrability. _I_
did, as we burst into the cell. The wretched husband and wife were
locked in each others arms. You may imagine the scene that followed.
Here I must do the Superior reluctant justice. He was a man (of course
from his conventual feelings) who had no more idea of the intercourse
between the sexes, than between two beings of a different species. The
scene that he beheld could not have revolted him more, than if he had
seen the horrible loves of the baboons and the Hottentot women, at the
Cape of Good Hope; or those still more loathsome unions between the
serpents of South America and their human victims(7), when they can
catch them, and twine round them in folds of unnatural and ineffable
union. He really stood as much astonished and appalled, to see two human
beings of different sexes, who dared to love each other in spite of
monastic ties, as if he had witnessed the horrible conjunctions I have
alluded to. Had he seen vipers engendering in that frightful knot which
seems the pledge of mortal hostility, instead of love, he could not have
testified more horror,--and I do him the justice to believe he felt all
he testified. Whatever affectation he might employ on points of
conventual austerity, there was none here. Love was a thing he always
believed connected with sin, even though consecrated by the name of a
sacrament, and called marriage, as it is in our church. But, love in a
convent!--Oh, there is no conceiving his rage; still less is it possible
to conceive the majestic and overwhelming extent of that rage, when
strengthened by principle, and sanctified by religion. I enjoyed the
scene beyond all power of description. I saw those wretches, who had
triumphed over me, reduced to my level in a moment,--their passions all
displayed, and the display placing me a hero triumphant above all. I had
crawled to the shelter of their walls, a wretched degraded outcast, and
what was my crime? Well,--you shudder, I have done with that. I can only
say want drove me to it. And here were beings whom, a few months before,
I would have knelt to as to the images round the shrine,--to whom, in
the moments of my desperate penitence, I would have clung as to the
“horns of the altar,” all brought as low, and lower than myself. “Sons
of the morning,” as I deemed them in the agonies of my humiliation, “how
were they fallen!” I feasted on the degradation of the apostate monk and
novice,--I enjoyed, to the core of my ulcerated heart, the passion of
the Superior,--I felt that they were all men like myself. Angels, as I
had thought them, they had all proved themselves mortal; and, by
watching their motions, and flattering their passions, and promoting
their interest, or setting up my own in opposition to them all, while I
made them believe it was only theirs I was intent on, I might make shift
to contrive as much misery to others, and to carve out as much
occupation to myself, as if I were actually living in the world. Cutting
my father’s throat was a noble feat certainly, (I ask your pardon, I did
not mean to extort that groan from you), but here were hearts to be
cut,--and to the core, every day, and all day long, so I never could
want employment.”

  (7) Vide Charlevoix’s History of Paraguay.

“Here he wiped his hard brow, drew his breath for a moment, and then
said, “I do not quite like to go through the details by which this
wretched pair were deluded into the hope of effecting their escape from
the convent. It is enough that I was the principal agent,--that the
Superior connived at it,--that I led them through the very passages you
have traversed to-night, they trembling and blessing me at every
step,--that----” “Stop,” I cried; “wretch! you are tracing my course
this night step by step.”--“What?” he retorted, with a ferocious laugh,
“you think I am betraying you, then; and if it were true, what good
would your suspicions do you,--you are in my power? My voice might
summon half the convent to seize you this moment,--my arm might fasten
you to that wall, till those dogs of death, that wait but my whistle,
plunged their fangs into your very vitals. I fancy you would not find
their bite less keen, from their tusks being so long sharpened by an
immersion in holy water.” Another laugh, that seemed to issue from the
lungs of a demon, concluded this sentence. “I know I am in your power,”
I answered; “and were I to trust to that, or to your heart, I had better
dash out my brains at once against these walls of rock, which I believe
are not harder than the latter. But I know your interests to be some way
or other connected with my escape, and therefore I trust you,--because I
must. Though my blood, chilled as it is by famine and fatigue, seems
frozen in every drop while I listen to you, yet listen I must, and trust
my life and liberation to you. I speak to you with the horrid confidence
our situation has taught me,--I hate,--I dread you. If we were to meet
in life, I would shrink from you with loathings of unspeakable
abhorrence, but here mutual misery has mixed the most repugnant
substances in unnatural coalition. The force of that alchemy must cease
at the moment of my escape from the convent and from you; yet, for these
miserable hours, my life is as much dependent on your exertions and
presence, as my power of supporting them is on the continuance of your
horrible tale,--go on, then. Let us struggle through this dreadful day.
_Day!_ a name unknown _here_, where noon and night shake hands that
never unlock. Let us struggle through it, “hateful and hating one
another;” and when it has passed, let us curse and part.”

“As I uttered these words, Sir, I felt that terrible _confidence of
hostility_ which the worst beings are driven to in the worst of
circumstances, and I question whether there is a more horrible situation
than that in which we cling to each other’s hate, instead of each
other’s love,--in which, at every step of our progress, we hold a dagger
to our companion’s breast, and say, “If you faulter for a moment, this
is in your heart. I hate,--I fear, but I must bear with you.” It was
singular to me, though it would not be so to those who investigate human
nature, that, in proportion as my situation inspired me with a ferocity
quite unsuited to our comparative situations, and which must have been
the result of the madness of despair and famine, my companion’s respect
for me appeared to increase. After a long pause, he asked, might he
continue his story? I could not speak, for, after the slightest
exertion, the sickness of deadly hunger returned on me, and I could only
signify, by a feeble motion of my hand, that he might go on.

“They were conducted here,” he continued; “I had suggested the plan, and
the Superior consented to it. He would not be present, but his dumb nod
was enough. I was the conductor of their (intended) escape; they
believed they were departing with the connivance of the Superior. I led
them through those very passages that you and I have trod. I had a map
of this subterranean region, but my blood ran cold as I traversed it;
and it was not at all inclined to resume its usual temperament, as I
felt what was to be the destination of my attendants. Once I turned the
lamp, on pretence of trimming it, to catch a glimpse of the devoted
wretches. They were embracing each other,--the light of joy trembled in
their eyes. They were whispering to each other hopes of liberation and
happiness, and blending my name in the interval they could spare from
their prayers for each other. That sight extinguished the last remains
of compunction with which my horrible task had inspired me. They dared
to be happy in the sight of one who must be for ever miserable,--could
there be a greater insult? I resolved to punish it on the spot. This
very apartment was near,--I knew it, and the map of their wanderings no
longer trembled in my hand. I urged them to enter this recess, (the door
was then entire), while I went to examine the passage. They entered it,
thanking me for my precaution,--they knew not they were never to quit it
alive. But what were their lives for the agony their happiness cost me?
The moment they were inclosed, and clasping each other, (a sight that
made me grind my teeth), I closed and locked the door. This movement
gave them no immediate uneasiness,--they thought it a friendly
precaution. The moment they were secured, I hastened to the Superior,
who was on fire at the insult offered to the sanctity of his convent,
and still more to the purity of his penetration, on which the worthy
Superior piqued himself as much as if it had ever been possible for him
to acquire the smallest share of it. He descended with me to the
passage,--the monks followed with eyes on fire. In the agitation of
their rage, it was with difficulty they could discover the door after I
had repeatedly pointed it out to them. The Superior, with his own hands,
drove several nails, which the monks eagerly supplied, into the door,
that effectually joined it to the staple, _never to be disjoined_; and
every blow he gave, doubtless he felt as if it was a reminiscence to the
accusing angel, to strike out a sin from the catalogue of his
accusations. The work was soon done,--the work never to be undone. At
the first sound of steps in the passage, and blows on the door, the
victims uttered a shriek of terror. They imagined they were detected,
and that an incensed party of monks were breaking open the door. These
terrors were soon exchanged for others,--and worse,--as they heard the
door nailed up, and listened to our departing steps. They uttered
another shriek, but O how different was the accent of its despair!--they
knew their doom. * * * * * It was my penance (no,--my delight) to watch
at the door, under the pretence of precluding the possibility of their
escape, (of which they knew there was no possibility); but, in reality,
not only to inflict on me the indignity of being the convent gaoler, but
of teaching me that callosity of heart, and induration of nerve, and
stubbornness of eye, and apathy of ear, that were best suited to my
office. But they might have saved themselves the trouble,--I had them
all before ever I entered the convent. Had I been the Superior of the
community, I should have undertaken the office of watching the door. You
will call this cruelty, I call it curiosity,--that curiosity that brings
thousands to witness a tragedy, and makes the most delicate female feast
on groans and agonies. I had an advantage over them,--the groan, the
agony I feasted on, were real. I took my station at _the door_--that
door which, like that of Dante’s hell, might have borne the inscription,
“Here is no hope,”--with a face of mock penitence, and genuine--cordial
delectation. I could hear every word that transpired. For the first
hours they tried to comfort each other,--they suggested to each other
hopes of liberation,--and as my shadow, crossing the threshold, darkened
or restored the light, they said, “That is he;”--then, when this
occurred repeatedly, without any effect, they said, “No,--no, it is not
he,” and swallowed down the sick sob of despair, to hide it from each
other. Towards night a monk came to take my place, and to offer me food.
I would not have quitted my place for worlds; but I talked to the monk
in his own language, and told him I would make a merit with God of my
sacrifices, and was resolved to remain there all night, with the
permission of the Superior. The monk was glad of having a substitute on
such easy terms, and I was glad of the food he left me, for I was hungry
now, but I reserved the appetite of my soul for richer luxuries. I heard
them talking within. While I was eating, I actually lived on the famine
that was devouring them, but of which they did not dare to say a word to
each other. They debated, deliberated, and, as misery grows ingenious in
its own defence, they at last assured each other that it was impossible
the Superior had locked them in there to perish by hunger. At these
words I could not help laughing. This laugh reached their ears, and they
became silent in a moment. All that night, however, I heard their
groans,--those groans of physical suffering, that laugh to scorn all the
sentimental sighs that are exhaled from the hearts of the most
intoxicated lovers that ever breathed. I heard them all that night. I
had read French romances, and all their unimaginable nonsense. Madame
Sevignè herself says she would have been tired of her daughter in a long
tete-a-tete journey, but clap me two lovers into a dungeon, without
food, light, or hope, and I will be damned (that I am already, by the
bye) if they do not grow sick of each other within the first twelve
hours. The second day hunger and darkness had their usual influence.
They shrieked for liberation, and knocked loud and long at their dungeon
door. They exclaimed they were ready to submit to any punishment; and
the approach of the monks, which they would have dreaded so much the
preceding night, they now solicited on their knees. What a jest, after
all, are the most awful vicissitudes of human life!--they supplicated
now for what they would have sacrificed their souls to avert
four-and-twenty hours before. Then the agony of hunger increased, they
shrunk from the door, and grovelled apart from each other. _Apart!_--how
I watched that. They were rapidly becoming objects of hostility to each
other,--oh what a feast to me! They could not disguise from each other
the revolting circumstances of their mutual sufferings. It is one thing
for lovers to sit down to a feast magnificently spread, and another for
lovers to couch in darkness and famine,--to exchange that appetite which
cannot be supported without dainties and flattery, for that which would
barter a descended Venus for a morsel of food. The second night they
raved and groaned, (as occurred); and, amid their agonies, (I must do
justice to women, whom I hate as well as men), the man often accused the
female as the cause of all his sufferings, but the woman never,--never
reproached him. Her groans might indeed have reproached him bitterly,
but she never uttered a word that could have caused him pain. There was
a change which I well could mark, however, in their physical feelings.
The first day they clung together, and every movement I felt was like
that of one person. The next the man alone struggled, and the woman
moaned in helplessness. The third night,--how shall I tell it?--but you
have bid me go on. All the horrible and loathsome excruciations of
famine had been undergone; the disunion of every tie of the heart, of
passion, of nature, had commenced. In the agonies of their famished
sickness they loathed each other,--they could have cursed each other, if
they had had breath to curse. It was on the fourth night that I heard
the shriek of the wretched female,--her lover, in the agony of hunger,
had fastened his teeth in her shoulder;--that bosom on which he had so
often luxuriated, became a meal to him now.” * * * * * “Monster! and you
laugh?”--“Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition they dare to
practise when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human
cares,--vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result
of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one
severe and abrupt lesson from the tintless and shrivelled lip of
necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have
presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. Oh! it silences
in a second all the feeble sophistry of _conventional_ life, and
ascetitious passion. Here were a pair who would not have believed all
the world on their knees, even though angels had descended to join in
the attestation, that it was possible for them to exist without each
other. They had risked every thing, trampled on every thing human and
divine, to be in each others sight and arms. One hour of hunger
undeceived them. A trivial and ordinary want, whose claims at another
time they would have regarded as a vulgar interruption of their
spiritualised intercourse, not only, by its natural operation, sundered
it for ever, but, before it ceased, converted that intercourse into a
source of torment and hostility inconceivable, except among cannibals.
The bitterest enemies on earth could not have regarded each other with
more abhorrence than _these lovers_. Deluded wretches! you boasted of
having hearts, I boast I have none, and which of us gained most by the
vaunt, let life decide. My story is nearly finished, and so I hope is
the day. When I was last here I had something to excite me;--talking of
those things is poor employment to one who has been a witness to them.
On the _sixth_ day all was still. The door was unnailed, we
entered,--they were no more. They lay far from each other, farther than
on that voluptuous couch into which their passion had converted the mat
of a convent bed. She lay contracted in a heap, a lock of her long hair
in her mouth. There was a slight scar on her shoulder,--the rabid
despair of famine had produced no farther outrage. He lay extended at
his length,--his hand was between his lips; it seemed as if he had not
strength to execute the purpose for which he had brought it there. The
bodies were brought out for interment. As we removed them into the
light, the long hair of the female, falling over a face no longer
disguised by the novice’s dress, recalled a likeness I thought I could
remember. I looked closer, she was my own sister,--my only one,----and I
had heard her voice grow fainter and fainter. I had heard----” and his
own voice grew fainter--it ceased.

“Trembling for a life with which my own was linked, I staggered towards
him. I raised him half up in my arms, and recollecting there must be a
current of air through the trap-door, I attempted to trail him along
thither. I succeeded, and, as the breeze played over him, I saw with
delight unutterable the diminution of the light that streamed through
it. It was _evening_,--there was no longer any necessity, no longer any
time for delay. He recovered, for his swoon arose not from exhausted
sensibility, but from mere inanition. However it was, I found my
interest in watching his recovery; and, had I been adequate to the task
of observing extraordinary vicissitudes of the human mind, I would have
been indeed amazed at the change that he manifested on his recovery.
Without the least reference to his late story, or late feelings, he
started from my arms at the discovery that the light had diminished, and
prepared for our escape through the trap-door, with a restored energy of
strength, and sanity of intellect, that might have been deemed
miraculous if it had occurred in a convent:--Happening to occur full
thirty feet below the proper surface for a miracle, it must be put to
the account of strong excitement merely. I could not indeed dare to
believe a miracle was wrought in favour of my profane attempt, and so I
was glad to put up with second causes. With incredible dexterity he
climbed up the wall, with the help of the rugged stones and my
shoulders,--threw open the trap-door, pronounced that all was safe,
assisted me to ascend after him,--and, with gasping delight, I once more
breathed the breath of heaven. The night was perfectly dark. I could not
distinguish the buildings from the trees, except when a faint breeze
gave motion to the latter. To this darkness, I am convinced, I owe the
preservation of my reason under such vicissitudes,--the glory of a
resplendent night would have driven me mad, emerging from darkness,
famine, and cold. I would have wept, and laughed, and knelt, and turned
idolater. I would have “worshipped the host of heaven, and the moon
walking in her brightness.” Darkness was my best security, in every
sense of the word. We traversed the garden, without feeling the ground
under our feet. As we approached the wall, I became again deadly
sick,--my senses grew giddy, I reeled. I whispered to my companion, “Are
there not lights gleaming from the convent windows?”--“No, the lights
are flashing from your own eyes,--it is only the effect of darkness,
famine, and fear,--come on.”--“But I hear a sound of bells.”--“The bells
are ringing only in your ears,--an empty stomach is your sexton, and you
fancy you hear bells. Is this a time to faulter?--come on, come on.
Don’t hang such a dead weight on my arm,--don’t fall, if you can help
it. Oh God, he has swooned!”

“These were the last words I heard. I had fallen, I believe, into his
arms. With that instinct that acts most auspiciously in the absence of
both thought and feeling, he dragged me in his brawny arms to the wall,
_and twisted my cold fingers_ in the ropes of the ladder. The touch
restored me in a moment; and, almost before my hand had touched the
ropes, my feet began to ascend them. My companion followed extempore. We
reached the summit,--I tottered from weakness and terror. I felt a
sickly dread, that, though the ladder was there, Juan was not. A moment
after a lanthorn flashed in my eyes,--I saw a figure below. I sprung
down, careless, in that wild moment, whether I met the dagger of an
assassin, or the embrace of a brother. “Alonzo, dear Alonzo,” murmured a
voice. “Juan, dear Juan,” was all I could utter, as I felt my shivering
breast held close to that of the most generous and affectionate of
brothers. “How much you must have suffered,--how much I have suffered,”
he whispered; “during the last horrible twenty-four hours, I almost gave
you up. Make haste, the carriage is not twenty paces off.” And, as he
spoke, the shifting of a lanthorn shewed me those imperious and
beautiful features, which I had once dreaded as the pledge of eternal
emulation, but which I now regarded as the smile of the proud but
benignant god of my liberation. I pointed to my companion, I could not
speak,--hunger was consuming my vitals. Juan supported me, consoled me,
encouraged me; did all, and more, than man ever did for man,--than man
ever did, perhaps, for the most shrinking and delicate of the other sex
under his protection. Oh, with what agony of heart I retrace his manly
tenderness! We waited for my companion,--he descended the wall. “Make
haste, make haste,” Juan whispered; “I am famishing too. I have not
tasted food for four-and-twenty hours, watching for you.” We hurried on.
It was a waste place,--I could only distinguish a carriage by the light
of a dim lanthorn, but that was enough for me. I sprung lightly into it.
“_He is safe_,” cried Juan, following me. “_But are you?_” answered a
voice of thunder. Juan staggered back from the step of the carriage,--he
fell. I sprung out, I fell too--on his body. I was bathed in his
blood,----he was no more.”

CHAPTER X.

    Men who with mankind were foes.
     * * * *
    Or who, in desperate doubt of grace.--
     * * * *

    SCOTT’S MARMION.

“One wild moment of yelling agony,--one flash of a fierce and fiery
light, that seemed to envelope and wither me soul and body,--one sound,
that swept through my ears and brain like the last trumpet, as it will
thrill on the senses of those who slept in guilt, and awake in
despair,--one such moment, that condenses and crowds all imaginable
sufferings in one brief and intense pang, and appears exhausted itself
by the blow it has struck,--one such moment I remember, and no more.
Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or
notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as
_one_. I have a dim recollection of refusing food, of resisting change
of place, &c. but they were like the faint and successless attempts we
make under the burden of the night-mare; and those with whom I had to
do, probably regarded any opposition I could make no more than the
tossings of a restless sleeper.

“From dates that I have since been enabled to collect, I must have been
four months at least in this state; and ordinary persecutors would have
given me up as a hopeless subject for any further sufferings; but
religious malignity is too industrious, and too ingenious, to resign the
hope of a victim but with life. If the fire is extinguished, it sits and
watches the embers. If the strings of the heart crack in its hearing, it
listens if it be the _last_ that has broken. It is a spirit that
delights to ride on the _tenth wave_, and view it whelm and bury the
sufferer for ever. * * * * * * *

“Many changes had taken place, without any consciousness on my part of
them. Perhaps the profound tranquillity of my _last_ abode contributed
more than any thing else to the recovery of my reason. I distinctly
remember awaking at once to the full exercise of my senses and reason,
and finding myself in a place which I examined with the most amazed and
jealous curiosity. My memory did not molest me in the least. Why I was
there? or what I had suffered before I was brought there? it never
occurred to me to inquire. The return of the intellectual powers came
slowly in, like the waves of an advancing tide, and happily for me
memory was the last,--the occupation of my senses was at first quite
enough for me. You must expect no romance-horrors, Sir, from my
narrative. Perhaps a life like mine may revolt the taste that has
feasted to fastidiousness; but truth sometimes gives full and dreadful
compensation, in presenting us facts instead of images.

“I found myself lying on a bed, not very different from that in my cell,
but the apartment was wholly unlike the latter. It was somewhat larger,
and covered with matting. There was neither crucifix, painting, or
vessel for holy water;--the bed, a coarse table which supported a
lighted lamp, and a vessel containing water for the purpose, were all
the furniture. There was no window; and some iron knobs in the door, to
which the light of the lamp gave a kind of dismal distinctness and
prominence, proved that it was strongly secured. I raised myself on my
arm, and gazed round me with the apprehensiveness of one who fears that
the slightest motion may dissolve the spell, and plunge him again in
darkness. At that moment the recollection of all the past struck me like
a thunder-bolt. I uttered a cry, that seemed to drain me of breath and
being at once, and fell back on the bed, not senseless but exhausted. I
remembered every event in a moment, with an intenseness that could only
be equalled by actual and present agency in them,--my escape,--my
safety,--my despair. I felt Juan’s embrace,--then I felt his blood
stream over me. I saw his eyes turn in despair, before they closed for
ever, and I uttered another cry, such as had never before been heard
within those walls. At the repetition of this sound the door opened, and
a person, in a habit I had never seen before, approached, and signified
to me by signs, that I must observe the most profound silence. Nothing,
indeed, could be more expressive of this meaning, than his denying
himself the use of his voice to convey it. I gazed on this apparition in
silence,--my amazement had all the effect of an apparent submission to
his injunctions. He retired, and I began to wonder where I was. Was it
among the dead? or some subterranean world of the mute and voiceless,
where there was no air to convey sounds, and no echo to repeat them, and
the famished ear waited in vain for its sweetest banquet,--the voice of
man? These wanderings were dispelled by the re-entrance of the person.
He placed bread, water, and a small portion of meat on the table,
motioned me to approach, (which I did mechanically), and, when I was
seated, _whispered_ me, That my unhappy situation having hitherto
rendered me incapable of understanding the regulations of the place
where I was, he had been compelled to postpone acquainting me with them;
but _now_ he was obliged to warn me, that my voice must never be raised
beyond the key in which he addressed me, and which was sufficient for
all proper purposes of communication; finally, he assured me that cries,
exclamations of any kind, or even _coughing too loud_(8), (which might
be interpreted as a signal), would be considered as an attempt on the
inviolable habits of the place, and punished with the utmost severity.
To my repeated questions of “Where am I? what is this place, with its
mysterious regulations?” he replied in a whisper, that his business was
to issue orders, not to answer questions; and so saying he departed.
However extraordinary these injunctions appeared, the manner in which
they were issued was so imposing, peremptory, and _habitual_,--it seemed
so little a thing of local contrivance and temporary display,--so much
like the established language of an absolute and long-fixed system, that
obedience to it seemed inevitable. I threw myself on the bed, and
murmured to myself, “Where am I?” till sleep overcame me.

  (8) This is a fact well established.

“I have heard that the first sleep of a recovered maniac is intensely
profound. Mine was not so, it was broken by many troubled dreams. One,
in particular, brought me back to the convent. I thought I was a boarder
in it, and studying Virgil. I was reading that passage in the second
book, where the vision of Hector appears to Æneas in his dream, and his
ghastly and dishonoured form suggests the mournful exclamation,

    “----Heu quantum mutatus ab illo,--
    ----Quibus ab oris, Hector expectate venis?”

Then I thought Juan was Hector,--that the same pale and bloody phantom
stood calling me to fly--“Heu fuge,” while I vainly tried to obey him.
Oh that dreary mixture of truth and delirium, of the real and visionary,
of the conscious and unconscious parts of existence, that visits the
dreams of the unhappy! He was Pantheus, and murmured,

    “Venit summa dies, et ineluctabile tempus.”

I appeared to weep and struggle in my dream. I addressed the figure that
stood before me sometimes as Juan, and sometimes as the image of the
Trojan vision. At last the figure uttered, with a kind of querulous
shriek,--that _vox stridula_ which we hear only in dreams,

    “Proximus ardet Ucalegon,”

and I started up fully awake, in all the horrors of an expected
conflagration.

“It is incredible, Sir, how the senses and the mind can operate thus,
during the apparent suspension of both; how sound can affect organs that
seem to be shut, and objects affect the sight, while its sense appears
to be closed,--can impress on its dreaming consciousness, images more
horribly vivid than even reality ever presented. I awoke with the idea
that flames were raging in contact with my eye-balls, and I saw only a
pale light, held by a paler hand--close to my eyes indeed, but withdrawn
the moment I awoke. The person who held it shrouded it for a moment, and
then advanced and flashed its full light on me, and along with it--the
person of my companion. The associations of our last meeting rushed on
me. I started up, and said, “Are we free, then?”--“Hush,--one of us is
free; but you must not speak so loud.”--“Well, I have heard that before,
but I cannot comprehend the necessity of this whispering secrecy. If I
am free, tell me so, and tell me whether Juan has survived that last
horrible moment,--my intellect is but just respiring. Tell me how Juan
fares.”--“Oh, sumptuously. No prince in all the land reposes under a
more gorgeous canopy,--marble pillars, waving banners, and nodding
plumes. He had music too, but he did not seem to heed it. He lay
stretched on velvet and gold, but he appeared insensible of all these
luxuries. There was a curl on his cold white lip, too, that seemed to
breathe ineffable scorn on all that was going on,--but he was proud
enough even in his life-time.”--“His life-time!” I shrieked; “then he
_is_ dead?”--“Can you doubt that, when you know who struck the blow?
None of my victims ever gave me the trouble of a second.”--“You,--you?”
I swam for some moments in a sea of flames and blood. My frenzy
returned, and I remember only uttering curses that would have exhausted
divine vengeance in all its plenitude to fulfil. I might have continued
to rave till my reason was totally lost, but I was silenced and stunned
by his laugh bursting out amid my curses, and overwhelming them.

“That laugh made me cease, and lift up my eyes to him, as if I expected
to see another being,--it was still the same. “And you dreamt,” he
cried, “in your temerity, you dreamt of setting the vigilance of a
convent at defiance? Two boys, one the fool of fear, and the other of
temerity, were fit antagonists for that stupendous system, whose roots
are in the bowels of the earth, and whose head is among the
stars,--_you_ escape from a convent! _you_ defy a power that has defied
sovereigns! A power whose influence is unlimited, indefinable, and
unknown, even to those who exercise it, as there are mansions so vast,
that their inmates, to their last hour, have never visited all the
apartments;--a power whose operation is like its motto,--one and
indivisible. The soul of the Vatican breathes in the humblest convent in
Spain,--and you, an insect perched on a wheel of this vast machine,
imagined you were able to arrest its progress, while its rotation was
hurrying on to crush you to atoms.” While he was uttering these words,
with a rapidity and energy inconceivable, (a rapidity that literally
made one word seem to devour another), I tried, with that effort of
intellect which seems like the gasping respiration of one whose breath
has long been forcibly suppressed or suspended, to comprehend and follow
him. The first thought that struck me was one not very improbable in my
situation, that he was not the person he appeared to be,--that it was
not the companion of my escape who now addressed me; and I summoned all
the remains of my intellect to ascertain this. A few questions must
determine this point, if I had breath to utter them. “Were you not the
agent in my escape? Were you not the man who---- What tempted you to
this step, in the defeat of which you appear to rejoice?”--“A
bribe.”--“And you have betrayed me, you say, and boast of your
treachery,--what tempted you to this?”--“A higher bribe. Your brother
gave gold, but the convent promised me salvation,--a business I was very
willing to commit to their hands, as I was totally incompetent to manage
it myself.”--“Salvation, for treachery and murder?”--“Treachery and
murder,--hard words. Now, to talk sense, was not yours the vilest
treachery? You reclaimed your vows,--you declared before God and man,
that the words you uttered before both were the babble of an infant;
then you seduced your brother from his duty to his and your
parents,--you connived at his intriguing against the peace and sanctity
of a monastic institution, and dare _you_ talk of treachery? And did you
not, with a callosity of conscience unexampled in one so young, accept,
nay, cling to an associate in your escape whom you knew you were
seducing from his vows,--from all that man reveres as holy, and all that
God (if there be a God) must regard as binding on man? You knew my
crime, you knew my atrocity, yet you brandished me as your banner of
defiance against the Almighty, though its inscription was, in glaring
characters,--impiety--parricide--irreligion. Torn as the banner was, it
still hung near the altar, till you dragged it away, to wrap yourself
from detection in its folds,--and _you_ talk of treachery?--there is not
a more traitorous wretch on earth than yourself. Suppose that I was all
that is vile and culpable, was it for you to double-dye the hue of my
crime in the crimson of your sacrilege and apostacy? And for murder, I
know I am a parricide. I cut my father’s throat, but he never felt the
blow,--nor did I,--I was intoxicated with wine, with passion, with
blood,--no matter which; but you, with cold deliberate blows, struck at
the hearts of father and mother. You killed by inches,--I murdered at a
blow,--which of us is the murderer?--And _you_ prate of treachery and
murder? I am as innocent as the child that is born this hour, compared
to you. Your father and mother have separated,--she is gone into a
convent, to hide her despair and shame at your unnatural conduct,--your
father is plunging successively into the abysses of voluptuousness and
penitence, wretched in both; your brother, in his desperate attempt to
liberate you, has perished,--you have scattered desolation over a whole
family,--you have stabbed the peace and heart of each of them, with a
hand that deliberated and paused on its blow, and then struck it
calmly,--and you dare to talk of treachery and murder? You are a
thousand times more culpable than I am, guilty as you think me. I stand
a blasted tree,--I am struck to the heart, to the root,--I wither
alone,--but you are the Upas, under whose poisonous droppings all things
living have perished,--father--mother--brother, and last yourself;--the
erosions of the poison, having nothing left to consume, strike inward,
and prey on your own heart. Wretch, condemned beyond the sympathy of
man, beyond the redemption of the Saviour, what can you say to this?”--I
answered only, “Is Juan dead, and were you his murderer,--were you
indeed? I believe all you say, I must be very guilty, but is Juan dead?”
As I spoke, I lifted up to him eyes that no longer seemed to see,--a
countenance that bore no expression but that of the stupefaction of
intense grief. I could neither utter nor feel reproaches,--I had
suffered beyond the power of complaint. I awaited his answer; he was
silent, but his diabolical silence spoke. “And my mother retired to a
convent?” he nodded. “And my father?” he smiled, and I closed my eyes. I
could bear any thing but his smile. I raised my head a few moments
after, and saw him, with an habitual motion, (it could not have been
more), make the sign of the cross, as a clock in some distant passage
struck. This sight reminded me of the play so often acted in Madrid, and
which I had seen in my few days of liberation,--El diablo Predicador.
You smile, Sir, at such a recollection operating at such a moment, but
it is a fact; and had you witnessed that play under the singular
circumstances I did, you would not wonder at my being struck with the
coincidence. In this performance the infernal spirit is the hero, and in
the disguise of a monk he appears in a convent, where he torments and
persecutes the community with a mixture of malignity and mirth truly
Satanic. One night that I saw it performed, a groupe of monks were
carrying the Host to a dying person; the walls of the theatre were so
slight, that we could distinctly hear the sound of the bell which they
ring on that occasion. In an instant, actors, audience, and all, were on
their knees, and the devil, who happened to be on the stage, knelt among
the rest, and crossed himself with visible marks of a devotion equally
singular and edifying. You will allow the coincidence to be irresistibly
striking.

“When he had finished his monstrous profanation of the holy sign, I
fixed my eyes on him with an expression not to be mistaken. He saw it.
There is not so bitter a reproach on earth as silence, for it always
seems to refer the guilty to their own hearts, whose eloquence seldom
fails to fill up the pause very little to the satisfaction of the
accused. My look threw him into a rage, that I am now convinced not the
most bitter upbraidings could have caused. The utmost fury of
imprecation would have fallen on his ear like the most lulling
harmony;--it would have convinced him that his victim was suffering all
he could possibly inflict. He betrayed this in the violence of his
exclamations. “What, wretch!” he cried;--“Do you think it was for your
masses and your mummeries, your vigils, and fasts, and mumbling over
senseless unconsoling beads, and losing my rest all night watching for
the matins, and then quitting my frozen mat to nail my knees to stone
till they grew there,--till I thought the whole pavement would rise with
me when I rose,--do you think it was for the sake of listening to
sermons that the preachers did not believe,--and prayers that the lips
that uttered them yawned at in the listlessness of their
infidelity,--and penances that might be hired out to a lay-brother to
undergo for a pound of coffee or of snuff,--and the vilest
subserviencies to the caprice and passion of a Superior,--and the
listening to men with God for ever in their mouths, and the world for
ever in their hearts,--men who think of nothing but the aggrandizement
of their temporal distinction, and screen, under the most revolting
affectation of a concern in spiritualities, their ravening cupidity
after earthly eminence:--Wretch! do you dream that it was for
this?--that this _atheism of bigotry_,--this creed of all the priests
that ever have existed in connexion with the state, and in hope of
extending their interest by that connexion,--could have any influence
over _me_? I had sounded every depth in the mine of depravity before
them. I knew them,--I despised them. I crouched before them in body, I
spurned them in my soul. With all their sanctimony, they had hearts so
worldly, that it was scarce worth while to watch their hypocrisy, the
secret developed itself so soon. There was no discovery to be made, no
place for detection. I have seen them on their high festivals, prelates,
and abbots, and priests, in all their pomp of office, appearing to the
laity like descended gods, blazing in gems and gold, amid the lustre of
tapers and the floating splendour of an irradiated atmosphere alive with
light, and all soft and delicate harmonies and delicious odours, till,
as they disappeared amid the clouds of incense so gracefully tossed from
the gilded censers, the intoxicated eye dreamed it saw them ascending to
Paradise. Such was the _scene_, but what was _behind the scene_?--_I saw
it all._ Two or three of them would rush from service into the vestry
together, under the pretence of changing their vestments. One would
imagine that these men would have at least the decency to refrain, while
in the intervals of the holy mass. No, I overheard them. While shifting
their robes, they talked incessantly of promotions and appointments,--of
this or that prelate, dying or dead,--of a wealthy benefice being
vacant,--of one dignitary having bargained hard with the state for the
promotion of a relative,--of another who had well-founded hopes of
obtaining a bishoprick, for what? neither for learning or piety, or one
feature of the pastoral character, but because he had valuable benefices
to resign in exchange, that might be divided among numerous candidates.
Such was their conversation,--such and such only were their thoughts,
till the last thunders of the allelujah from the church made them start,
and hurry to resume their places at the altar. Oh what a compound of
meanness and pride, of imbecillity and pretension, of sanctimony so
transparently and awkwardly worn, that the naked frame of the natural
mind was visible to every eye beneath it,--that mind which is “earthly,
sensual, devilish.” Was it to live among such wretches, who, all-villain
as I was, made me hug myself with the thought that at least I was not
like them, a passionless prone reptile,--a thing made of forms and
dressings, half satin and shreds, half ave’s and credo’s,--bloated and
abject,--creeping and aspiring,--winding up and up the pedestal of power
at the rate of an inch a day, and tracking its advance to eminence by
the flexibility of its writhings, the obliquity of its course, and the
filth of its slime,--was it for this?”--he paused, half-choaked with his
emotions.

“This man might have been a better being under better circumstances; he
had at least a disdain of all that was mean in vice, with a wild avidity
for all that was atrocious. “Was it for this,” he continued, “that I
have sold myself to work their works of darkness,--that I have become in
this life as it were an apprentice to Satan, to take anticipated lessons
of torture,--that I have sealed those indentures here, which must be
fulfilled below? No, I despise--I loathe it all, the agents and the
system,--the men and their matters. But it is the creed of that system,
(and true or false it avails not,--some kind of creed is necessary, and
the falser perhaps the better, for falsehood at least flatters), that
the greatest criminal may expiate his offences, by vigilantly watching,
and severely punishing, those of the enemies of heaven. Every offender
may purchase his immunity, by consenting to become the executioner of
the offender whom he betrays and denounces. In the language of the laws
of another country, they may turn “king’s evidence,” and buy their own
lives at the price of another’s,--a bargain which every man is very
ready to make. But, in religious life, this kind of transfer, this
substitutional suffering, is adopted with an avidity indescribable. How
we love to punish those whom the church calls the enemies of God, while
conscious that, though our enmity against him is infinitely greater, we
become acceptable in his sight by tormenting those who may be less
guilty, but who are in our power! I hate you, not because I have any
natural or social cause to do so, but because the exhaustion of my
resentment on you, may diminish that of the Deity towards me. If I
persecute and torment the enemies of God, must I not be the friend of
God? Must not every pang I inflict on another, be recorded in the book
of the All-remembering, as an expurgation of at least one of the pangs
that await me hereafter? I have no religion, I believe in no God, I
repeat no creed, but I have that superstition of fear and of futurity,
that seeks its wild and hopeless mitigation in the sufferings of others
when our own are exhausted, or when (a much more common case) we are
unwilling to undergo them. I am convinced that my own crimes will be
obliterated, by whatever crimes of others I can promote or punish. Had I
not, then, every motive to urge you to crime? Had I not every motive to
watch and aggravate your punishment? Every coal of fire that I heaped on
your head, was removing one from that fire that burns for ever and ever
for mine. Every drop of water that I withheld from your burning tongue,
I expect will be repaid to me in slaking the fire and brimstone into
which I must one day be hurled. Every tear that I draw, every groan that
I extort, will, I am convinced, be repaid me in the remission of my
own!--guess what a price I set on yours, or those of any other victim.
The man in ancient story trembled and paused over the scattered limbs of
his child, and failed in the pursuit,--the true penitent rushes over the
mangled members of nature and passion, collects them with a hand in
which there is no pulse, and a heart in which there is no feeling, and
holds them up them in the face of the Divinity as a peace-offering. Mine
is the best theology,--the theology of utter hostility to all beings
whose sufferings may mitigate mine. In this flattering theory, your
crimes become my virtues,--I need not any of my own. Guilty as I am of
the crime that outrages nature, your crimes (the crimes of those who
offend against the church) are of a much more heinous order. But your
guilt is my exculpation, your sufferings are my triumph. I need not
repent, I need not believe; if you suffer, I am saved,--that is enough
for me. How glorious and easy it is to erect at once the trophy of our
salvation, on the trampled and buried hopes of another’s! How subtle and
sublime that alchemy, that can convert the iron of another’s contumacy
and impenitence into the precious gold of your own redemption! I have
literally worked out _my_ salvation by _your_ fear and trembling. With
this hope I appeared to concur in the plan laid by your brother, every
feature of which was in its progress disclosed to the Superior. With
this hope I passed that wretched night and day in the dungeon with you,
for, to have effected our escape by day-light, would have startled
credulity as gross as even yours. But all the time I was feeling the
dagger I bore in my breast, and which I had received for a purpose amply
accomplished. As for you,--the Superior consented to your attempt to
escape, merely that he might have you more in his power. He and the
community were tired of you, they saw you would never make a monk,--your
appeal had brought disgrace on them, your presence was a reproach and a
burden to them. The sight of you was as thorns in their eyes,--they
judged you would make a better victim than a proselyte, and they judged
well. You are a much fitter inmate for your present abode than your
last, and from hence there is no danger of your escaping.”--“And where,
then, am I?”--“_You are in the prison of the Inquisition._”

CHAPTER XI.

    Oh! torture me no more, I will confess.

    HENRY THE SIXTH.

    You have betrayed her to her own reproof.

    COMEDY OF ERRORS.

“And it was true,--I was a prisoner in the Inquisition. Great
emergencies certainly inspire us with the feelings they demand; and many
a man has braved a storm on the wide wild ocean, who would have shrunk
from its voice as it pealed down his chimney. I believe so it fared with
me,--the storm had risen, and I braced myself to meet it. I was in the
Inquisition, but I knew that my crime, heinous as it was, was not one
that came properly under the cognizance of the Inquisition. It was a
conventual fault of the highest class, but liable only to be punished by
the ecclesiastical power. The punishment of a monk who had dared to
escape from his convent, might be dreadful enough,--immurement, or death
perhaps, but still I was not legitimately a prisoner of the Inquisition.
I had never, under all my trials, spoken a disrespectful word of the
holy Catholic church, or a doubtful one of our most holy faith,--I had
not dropped one heretical, obnoxious, or equivocal expression, relative
to a single point of duty, or article of faith. The preposterous charges
of sorcery and possession, brought against me in the convent, had been
completely disproved at the visitation of the Bishop. My aversion to the
monastic state was indeed sufficiently known and fatally proved, but
that was no subject for the investigation or penalties of the
Inquisition. I had nothing to fear from the Inquisition,--at least so I
said to myself in my prison, and I believed myself. The seventh day
after the recovery of my reason was fixed on for my examination, and of
this I received due notice, though I believe it is contrary to the usual
forms of the Inquisition to give this notice; and the examination took
place on the day and hour appointed.

“You are aware, Sir, that the tales related in general of the interior
discipline of the Inquisition, must be in nine out of ten mere fables,
as the prisoners are bound by an oath never to disclose what happens
within its walls; and they who could violate this oath, would certainly
not scruple to violate truth in the details with which their
emancipation from it indulges them. I am forbidden, by an oath which I
shall never break, to disclose the circumstances of my imprisonment or
examination. I am at liberty to mention some general features of both,
as they are connected with my extraordinary narrative. My first
examination terminated rather favourably; my contumacy and aversion to
monasticism were indeed deplored and reprobated, but there was no