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 Aeneas 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were raging in contact with my eyeballs, and I saw only a pale light, held by a paler hand—close to my eyes indeed, but withdrawn the moment I awoke.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 lifetime.”
“His lifetime!” 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
