In the meantime, Ines had dismissed her children, and sitting as near as she dared to the wretched father, attempted to address some soothing expressions to him. Her voice, which was exquisitely sweet and soft, seemed to produce a mechanical effect on him. He turned towards her at first—then leaning his head on his arm, he shed a few silent tears—then flinging it on his wife’s bosom, he wept aloud. Ines seized this moment to impress on his heart the horror she felt from the outrage he had committed, and adjured him to supplicate the mercy of God for a crime, which, in her eyes, appeared scarce short of parricide. Walberg wildly asked what she alluded to; and when, shuddering, she uttered the words—“Your father—your poor old father!”—he smiled with an expression of mysterious and supernatural confidence that froze her blood, and, approaching her ear, softly whispered, “I have no father! He is dead—long dead! I buried him the night I dug my mother’s grave! Poor old man,” he added with a sigh, “it was the better for him—he would have lived only to weep, and perish perhaps with hunger. But I will tell you, Ines—and let it be a secret, I wondered what made our provisions decrease so, till what was yesterday sufficient for four, is not today sufficient for one. I watched, and at last I discovered—it must be a secret—an old goblin, who daily visited this house. It came in the likeness of an old man in rags, and with a long white beard, and it devoured everything on the table, while the children stood hungry by! But I struck at—I cursed it—I chased it in the name of the All-powerful, and it is gone. Oh it was a fell devouring goblin!—but it will haunt us no more, and we shall have enough. Enough,” said the wretched man, involuntarily returning to his habitual associations—“enough for tomorrow!”
Ines, overcome with horror at this obvious proof of insanity, neither interrupted or opposed him; she attempted only to soothe him, internally praying against the too probable disturbance of her own intellects. Walberg saw her look of distrust, and, with the quick jealousy of partial insanity, said, “If you do not credit me in that, still less, I suppose, will you in the account of that fearful visitation with which I have latterly been familiar.”
“Oh, my beloved!” said Ines, who recognized in these words the source of a fear that had latterly, from some extraordinary circumstances in her husband’s conduct, taken possession of her soul, and made the fear even of famine trifling in comparison—“I dread lest I understand you too well. The anguish of want and of famine I could have borne—aye, and seen you bear, but the horrid words you have lately uttered, the horrid thoughts that escape you in your sleep—when I think on these, and guess at—”
“You need not guess,” said Walberg, interrupting her, “I will tell you all.” And, as he spoke, his countenance changed from its expression of wildness to one of perfect sanity and calm confidence—his features relaxed, his eye became steady, and his tone firm.—“Every night since our late distresses, I have wandered out in search of some relief, and supplicated every passing stranger;—latterly, I have met every night the enemy of man, who—”
“Oh cease, my love, to indulge these horrible thoughts—they are the results of your disturbed unhappy state of mind.”
“Ines, listen to me. I see that figure as plainly as I see yours—I hear his voice as distinctly as you hear mine this moment. Want and misery are not naturally fertile in the production of imagination—they grasp at realities too closely. No man, who wants a meal, conceives that a banquet is spread before him, and that the tempter invites him to sit down and eat at his ease. No—no, Ines, the evil one, or some devoted agent of his in human form, besets me every night—and how I shall longer resist the snare, I know not.”
“And in what form does he appear?” said Ines, hoping to turn the channel of his gloomy thoughts, while she appeared to follow their direction.
“In that of a middle-aged man, of a serious and staid demeanour, and with nothing remarkable in his aspect except the light of two burning eyes, whose lustre is almost intolerable. He fixes them on me sometimes, and I feel as if there was fascination in their glare. Every night he besets me, and few like me could have resisted his seductions. He has offered, and proved to me, that it is in his power to bestow all that human cupidity could thirst for, on the condition that—I cannot utter! It is one so full of horror and impiety, that, even to listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it!”
Ines, still incredulous, yet imagining that to soothe his delirium was perhaps the best way to overcome it, demanded what that condition was. Though they were alone, Walberg would communicate it only in a whisper; and Ines, fortified as she was by reason hitherto undisturbed, and a cool and steady temper, could not but recollect some vague reports she had heard in her early youth, before she quitted Spain, of a being permitted to wander through it, with power to tempt men under the pressure of extreme calamity with similar offers, which had been invariably rejected, even in the last extremities of despair and dissolution. She was not superstitious—but, her memory now taking part with her husband’s representation of what had befallen him, she shuddered at the possibility of his being exposed to similar temptation; and she endeavoured to fortify his mind and conscience, by arguments equally appropriate whether he was the victim of a
