Another source of uneasiness was added to the distraction my mind
already endured. The stranger did not appear. It was in the morning
that the officers of justice arrived; they departed about noon; and
in two hours afterwards I entered the wood in search of my guest.
The wood was of some leagues in extent; it was intersected by paths
in various directions; it was interspersed with caverns; its growth
was of all kinds,--in some places lofty trees that seemed to form a
support for the clouds, in others an underwood impenetrable alike to
the feet and to the eye. As I entered the wood, I however conceived
that the discovery of the stranger, to me who was acquainted with its
lurking-places, would be an affair of little toil; his feebleness and
decrepitude would not suffer him to proceed to any great distance. In
this I was mistaken. I looked carefully on all sides; I examined every
recess and corner with which I was acquainted: but I found no trace of
the stranger. The scene was so complicated and involved, that even this
was a labour of considerable duration. At length I became satisfied
that he was not in the nearer division of the wood.
I paused. I felt at once that it was little less than a Herculean
task to hunt through the whole of its dimensions. It would probably
be of little use to call, and endeavour by that means to discover his
retreat. I knew of no name by which he was to be recognised; and,
if my own voice was but a slight resource to penetrate this immense
labyrinth of foliage, the voice of the stranger, weakened by age, and
now probably still more enfeebled by hunger and fatigue, could not be
expected to make itself heard. Beside which, as I knew not what the
source of information had been to the officers who had just left me, I
was unwilling to expose my guest to the danger that might arise from
this mode of seeking him. I could not even be sure, though I had seen
their boat stand off from the shore, that they might not afterwards
land one or more of their party, and be at this very moment within
ear-shot of me. I therefore proceeded in anxiety and silence.
My search was no more successful in the part of the wood with which I
was little acquainted, than in the part with which I was most familiar.
I had already been engaged four hours in the task, and night began
to come on. It shut in with heavy clouds, that on all sides appeared
deeply loaded with rain. I now began to consider my own situation; and,
by comparing circumstances, found that I was at a great distance from
my own habitation. There was no direct path by which for me to return.
I had proceeded to the right and the left, backward and forward,
sometimes by more open paths, and sometimes forcing my way through
briars and brushwood, as caprice, or the hope of effecting the object
of my search, happened to guide me. It was therefore no easy matter
to guess how I was to return, or even, now that the lowering clouds
had covered the horizon with one uniform tint, in which direction lay
the cottage or the lake. While I stood contemplating what was to
be done, I heard the howling of the wolves at a distance; and their
howl had that particular melancholy and discomfiting sound which is
well known to precede a coming storm. There was no time to be lost,
and accordingly I set out. I was less anxious to be at home on my own
account, than for the sake of quieting the alarms of my family, to whom
I had already occasioned too great a portion of uneasiness.
I had not proceeded far before the rain descended in torrents,
intermingled with peals of thunder and sheets of lightning. The
thunder, interrupted, as it were, from time to time, with the noise
of the wild beasts that inhabited the wood, deafened me, while the
excessive and instantaneous brilliancy of the lightning occasioned me
an intolerable aching in the organ of sight. It rained incessantly
for two hours, and I found myself drenched and fatigued with the
wet. During this time my progress was small; and I was ever and
anon intercepted by the underwood, and could not without repeated
experiments discover the means of proceeding. At length the rain
subsided, and seemed to give place to a gloomy and motionless calm.
Soon after, I discovered a light at a distance, and advanced towards
it. As I approached, I perceived that it proceeded from a set of
banditti, to the amount of fourteen or fifteen persons, sitting round
a fire in the mouth of a cavern. I was glad to turn my steps another
way, and was for some time afraid that the noise I made in occasionally
forcing my way through the bushes would alarm them, and cost me my
life. I however fortunately escaped their notice. This was in a part of
the wood remote from the path I ought to have taken, and near the road
to Lindau.
The day began to dawn before I reached my own habitation. The
conjecture I had made, when I was unawares upon the point of falling
into the hands of the banditti, that the road of Lindau was on
the other side of their retreat, was of some service to me as an
indication where to find the cottage and the lake. This road skirted
the wood on the side nearly opposite to that by which I entered it.
The difficulties however I had to encounter were inconceivably great,
in endeavouring to preserve my line of direction. After having been
compelled four or five times to deviate from the line, it is seldom
that a traveller will find himself right in his conjecture as to the
direction he is pursuing, unless he has some sensible object as a sort
of pole-star by which to govern his route. It happened in this instance
that I was more fortunate than I was entitled to expect. I laboured
indeed till daybreak without getting out of the labyrinth that inclosed
me. But the sun no sooner began to lend an imperfect light, than I
recognised certain objects which upon some former occasions I had
observed, and perceived that my journey was nearly at an end. I entered
my cottage, and found Marguerite alone awake and expecting me.
She had been somewhat uneasy on account of my absence, both from the
extreme tempestuousness of the night, and in consequence of the painful
sensations the events of the preceding morning had introduced,--events
with which it was almost unavoidable for her to imagine that my absence
was in some way connected. The period of my insanity in Switzerland
might indeed have accustomed her to the irregularity of my motions,
but a term of more than six years which had intervened, had produced
in her expectations and habits of a different sort. I related to this
admirable woman the adventures of the night and the fruitlessness
of the search in which I had been engaged; and this openness of
communication, unresembling the nature of the intercourse which had
lately existed between us, relieved in some degree my burthened heart,
and cheered the drooping spirits of Marguerite. She dropped some
consolatory and sadly pleasing tears; and her manner seemed to say,
though she would not suffer her tongue to give the idea words, How
sweet are cordiality and confidence! Oh! do not let our situation,
which has deprived us of many other comforts, ever again be robbed of
this comfort, which is alone worth all the rest! Though she necessarily
felt the presence of the stranger as an evil, the bane of our domestic
peace, yet it was impossible for her not to compassionate his fate, and
suffer some distress from his strange and abrupt disappearance.
After the conversation which had so eminently served as a relief to
our minds, Marguerite left me to repose myself from the extraordinary
fatigue I had undergone. But my mind was too much disturbed to suffer
me to sink into the arms of forgetfulness. I felt something tragical in
the sad destiny of my unfortunate guest. It was but too probable that,
in his peculiarly weak state of body, and with his declining health,
the being thus exposed for a day and a night to the effects of hunger,
of the inclemency of the air, and the tempestuousness of the elements,
would put a close to his existence. I was determined soon to recommence
my search. But how could I be sure that I should be more fortunate
to-day, than the day before? If I found him, it was most likely I
should find him either dead or dying. The degree of intercourse that
had taken place between us had made him occupy a considerable space
in my thoughts. The prospects he had opened to me, the conduct he had
induced me to adopt, the painful effects and dissatisfaction of mind
which had been produced by that conduct as it respected my family, all
combined to give me an interest in his fate. I had seen his talents; I
had felt his ascendancy; I had experienced that sort of conflict, which
appearances of guilt on the one hand, and asseverations of innocence
on the other, are calculated to produce in the thoughts and emotions
of a bystander. He was no common man; the expectations and conjectures
he excited were of no ordinary sort; and I felt that an army might be
destroyed, and a spacious plain covered with the wounded and the dying,
without producing greater commotion in my soul.
In the anxious and disturbed state of mind in which I was, the thoughts
flow with extraordinary rapidity. It will be found attended with a
strange, and, previously to the experiment, incredible mixture of
reasoning and passion, of philosophising and fury. I was accordingly
conscious at this moment of the truth of the stranger’s assertion,
that in me he had a protector, not a friend. Friendship is an object
of a peculiar sort; the smallest reserve is deadly to it. I may indeed
feel the emotions of a friend towards a man who in part conceals from
me the thoughts of his heart; but then I must be unconscious of this
concealment. The instant I perceive this limitation of confidence, he
drops into the class of ordinary men: a divorce is effected between us:
our hearts, which grew together, suffer amputation; the arteries are
closed; the blood is no longer mutually transfused and confounded. I
shall be conscious of all his qualities, for I stand in the place of
an impartial umpire. I consider him as a machine capable of so much
utility to myself, and so much utility to other men. But I do not
regard him as the brother of my soul: I do not feel that my life is
bound up in his: I do not feel as if, were he to die, the whole world
would be at an end to me, and that my happiness would be buried with
him for ever in the darkness of the grave. I am not conscious of those
emotions which are the most exquisite and indescribable the human mind
can experience; and which, being communicated by a sort of electrical
stroke to him who is their object, constitute the solace of all his
cares, the alleviator of all his calamities, the only nectar and truest
balm of human life. For me, he stands alone in the world, having
companions and associates, the connections, as it were, of mercantile
selfishness, or casual jollity and good humour, but no friend. It was
thus that I thought of the stranger. He obtained from me the compassion
due to a human being, and the respect extorted by his qualities, but
nothing calculated radically to disturb the equilibrium of the mind. I
looked forward to his death with unruffled thoughts and an unmoistened
eye. There was one thing indeed that shook me more deeply; the thought
of losing the promised reward, and of having exposed myself to the evil
of an unquiet and dissatisfied mind in vain.
I rested but a few hours before I set out again upon the search,
to which the interposition of the darkness of the preceding night
had put an abrupt close. I had the precaution to take with me a
slight provision of food and cordials, believing that, if I found
the stranger, he would at least be in the greatest need of something
reviving and restorative. Charles earnestly intreated to assist me in
the search, but upon this I put a peremptory prohibition. It would have
been in direct contradiction to what the stranger had most solemnly
required of me.
I had already spent several hours in anxiously tracing the wood in
every direction; and the period of noon was past, when, approaching
an obscure and almost impenetrable thicket, my ear was caught by a
low and melancholy sound, which at first I knew not to what I was to
ascribe. It however arrested my attention, and caused me to assume an
attitude of listening. After the lapse of little more than a minute,
the same sound was repeated. I now distinctly perceived that it was
the groan of some creature in a very feeble and exhausted state, and
immediately suspected that it was the stranger. I went almost round the
thicket before I could discern an entrance, and, though I looked with
the utmost care, could perceive nothing that the thicket inclosed. The
groan was repeated a third time. The long intervals between the groans
gave a peculiar melancholy to the effect, and each seemed so much lower
than the groan before, that nothing but the ear of anxious attention
would have caught it; at the same time that the tone conveyed an idea
of stupified, yet vital, anguish. At length I perceived the legs and
something of the garb of a man. It was the stranger! He appeared to
have crept into the thicket upon his hands and knees. When I forced
my way to him, he seemed in the very act of expiring. He was lying on
his face, and I raised him a little. His eyes were fixed; his mouth
was open; his lips and tongue were parched and dry. I infused a few
drops of a cordial into his mouth. For a moment it appeared to produce
no sensation, but presently my patient uttered a deep and long-drawn
sigh. I repeated my application. As a principal cause of the condition
in which I found him was inanition, the stimulant I administered
produced a powerful effect. He moved his hands, shuddered, turned his
eyes languidly upon me, and, having appeared to recognise me, shut
them hastily again. I moved him slowly and softly into a freer air,
and bathed his temples with one of the liquids I had about me. By this
time he looked up, and then suddenly round him with a wild and hurried
air. He spoke not however; he was speechless. In about a quarter of
an hour he relapsed into convulsions, in which it seemed probable he
would expire. They lasted a considerable time, and he then sunk into
a state of insensibility. I thought he was dead. Thus circumstanced,
it was some relief to my humanity to have found him yet alive, and to
have received his parting breath. But in a moment his secret and his
promises recurred to me with inexpressible anguish, and I inwardly
reproached him for having deferred his communication so long, as now
to preclude its ever being made. I cannot describe the keenness, the
burning and intolerable bitterness, of my sensation. Keen it may well
be supposed to have been, from its having so instantaneously and
forcibly recurred at a time when other objects seemed to press upon my
senses. No one who has not felt what it is to fall in a moment from
hope, or, as I should rather say, from assured possession of what his
soul most loved and desired, into black and interminable despair, can
imagine what was then the state of my mind. The body of my patient
slided from my nerveless arms; I lifted up the eyes of rage and
phrensy, as if to curse the Author of my being; and then fell helpless
and immoveable by the side of the stranger.
I felt him move; I heard him sigh. I lifted up my head, and perceived
stronger marks of life and sense about him than had yet displayed
themselves. I threw my arms about him; I pressed him to my heart. The
emphatical gesture I used seemed to have a sort of magnetical force
to rouse his dying powers. With a little assistance from me he sat
upright. My assiduity produced wonders: it fortunately happened that
this thicket was but a half a mile from my habitation, and indeed was
one of the spots which I had searched without success the day before.
About the hour of sunset, partly by leading, and partly by supporting
him, I restored my guest to his former apartment.
He remained speechless, or nearly so. He vented his sensations in
sighs, in inward and inarticulate sounds; and even when he arrived
at the power of making himself understood by words, it was only by
monosyllables and half sentences that he conveyed to me his meaning.
I now gave up my time almost entirely to an assiduous attendance on
the stranger. Every day I expected to be his last; every day was more
or less interspersed with symptoms that seemed to menace his instant
dissolution. During all this time I remained in the anxious suspense
of contending hope and fear. Was it probable that he would ever
recover strength enough to confer on me the legacy he had announced?
The particulars of his secret I knew not; but, judging from what I
had heard of the pretences and pursuits of alchemy, it was natural to
suppose that he had a process to communicate, which would require on
his part considerable accuracy of recollection, as well as the power of
delivering himself in a methodical and orderly discourse.
I was fortunate enough however to perceive, after a tormenting and
tedious crisis, that he appeared to be in a progress of convalescence,
and that his strength both of body and mind were recruited daily. After
the lapse of a fortnight from the adventure of the wood, he one evening
addressed me in the following manner:--
“St. Leon, I have been to blame. I have put you to a sufficient
trial; I have received from you every assistance and kindness that my
situation demanded; I have imposed on you much trouble and anxiety; I
have excited your expectations by announcing to you in part what it
was in my power to bestow; and I have finally risked the defrauding
your hopes and your humanity of their just reward. Do me the justice
however to remember, that I had no presentiment of the event which has
so inauspiciously come between you and your hopes. Fool that I was, I
imagined I had suffered enough, and that, as I had obtained a longer
respite from external persecution than I almost ever experienced,
I should be permitted to spend the short remainder of my days
uninterrupted! I now however look back upon this last assault with
complacency. It has cut off something from the last remnant of a life
to the close of which I look forward with inexpressible longing; at
the same time that I am still in prospect of obtaining the final wish
of my heart--the stealing out of the world unperceived, and thus in
some measure eluding the last malice of my enemies. After my death I
have but one injunction to leave with you--the injunction of Hercules
to Philoctetes--that no inducement may move you to betray to mortal
man the place in which you shall have deposited my ashes. Bury them
in a spot which I will describe to you: it is not far, and is only
recommended to me by its almost inaccessible situation: and that once
done, speak of me and, if possible, think of me no more. Never on any
account mention me or allude to me; never describe me, or relate the
manner of our meeting, or the adventure which has at length brought on
the desired close of my existence.
“Believe me, in the feeble and helpless condition in which I have spent
the last fortnight, your wishes and expectations have been uppermost
in my mind, and there is nothing I have felt with so much compunction
as the danger of leaving them unsatisfied. To you perhaps I at present
appear to be rapidly recovering, I feel the dart of death in my vitals;
I know I shall not live four days. It is necessary therefore that I
should finish without delay all that remains for me to finish. I will
devote this night to the arranging my thoughts and putting in order
what I have to communicate, that no mistake or omission may have part
in a transaction so important. Come to me to-morrow morning; I will be
prepared for you.”
As soon as I heard this discourse, and provided the stranger with every
thing he could want during the night, I withdrew. My heart was big
with expectation; my thoughts all night were wild and tumultuous. When
the hour of assignation arrived, I hastened along the garden to the
summer-house, conscious that upon that hour depended all the colour of
my future life. Since the stranger had been in his present dangerous
condition, the door was not bolted; it was only locked: the key was
in my possession, and remained night and day attached to my person. I
opened the door; I panted and was breathless.
I immediately saw that the stranger had undergone some great alteration
for the worse. He had suffered a sort of paralytic affection. He lifted
up his face as I entered; it was paler than I had ever seen it. He
shook his head mournfully, and intimated by signs the disappointment
which this morning must witness. He was speechless. “Fate! fate!”
exclaimed I in an agony of despair, “am I to be for ever baffled? Is
the prize so much longed for and so ardently expected at last to escape
me?”--It is not to be imagined how much these successive, endless
disappointments increased my impatience, and magnified in my eyes the
donation I sought.
The whole of this and the following day the stranger remained
speechless. The third day, in the morning, he murmured many sounds,
but in a manner so excessively inarticulate, that I was not able to
understand one word in six that he said. I recollected his prediction
that he should die on the fourth day. The fever of my soul was at its
height. Mortal sinews and fibres could sustain no more. If the stranger
had died thus, it is most probable that I should have thrown myself in
anguish and rage upon his corpse, and have expired in the same hour.
In the evening of the third day I visited him again. He had thrown his
robe around him, and was sitting on the side of his couch. The evening
sun shot his last beams over the window-shutters. There were about
eight inches between the shutter and the top of the window; and some
branches of vines, with their grapes already ripe, broke the uniformity
of the light. The side of the couch faced the west, and the beams
played upon the old man’s countenance. I had never seen it so serene.
The light, already softened by the decline of day, gave it a peculiar
animation: and a smile that seemed to betoken renovation and the youth
of angels sat upon it. He beckoned me to approach. I placed myself
beside him on the couch; he took my hand in his, and leaned his face
towards me.
“I shall never witness the light of the setting sun again!” were the
first words he uttered. I immediately perceived that he spoke more
collectedly, and with better articulation than at any time since the
paralytic stroke. Still however it was no easy matter to develop his
words. But I wound up every faculty of my frame to catch them; and,
assisted as I was by the habit of listening to his speech for many
weeks, which during the whole of that time had never been distinct, I
was successful enough to make out his entire discourse.
It continued, though with various interruptions, for more than half an
hour. He explained with wonderful accuracy the whole of his secrets,
and the process with which they were connected. My soul was roused to
the utmost stretch of attention and astonishment. His secrets, as I
have already announced in the commencement of this history, consisted
of two principal particulars; the art of multiplying gold, and the
power of living for ever. The detail of these secrets I omit; into
that I am forbidden to enter. My design in writing this narrative, I
have said, is not to teach the art of which I am in possession, but to
describe the adventures it produced to me.
The more I listened, the more my astonishment grew. I looked at the
old man before me; I observed the wretchedness of his appearance, the
meanness of his attire, his apparent old age, his extreme feebleness,
the characters of approaching death that were written on his
countenance. After what I had just heard, I surveyed these things with
a sensation of novelty, as if I had never remarked them in him before.
I said to myself, Is this the man that possesses mines of wealth
inexhaustible, and the capacity of living for ever?
Observing that he had finished his discourse, I addressed to him these
words, by a sort of uncontrollable impulse, and with all the vehemence
of unsated and insuppressible curiosity.
“Tell me, I adjure you by the living God, what use have you made of
these extraordinary gifts? and with what events has that use been
attended?”
As I spoke thus, the countenance of the old man underwent a surprising
change. Its serenity vanished; his eyes rolled with an expression of
agony; and he answered me thus:--
“Be silent, St. Leon! How often must I tell you that no single
incident of my story shall ever be repeated! Have I no claim upon your
forbearance? Can you be barbarous and inhuman enough to disturb my last
scene with these bitter recollections?”--I was silent.
This is all that is material that passed at our interview.
The stranger died the next day, and was buried according to his
instructions.