At last I had taken leave of the charitable brethren, and set out as a
pilgrim on that high road, which I was told was the proper route to the
great city. Notwithstanding that my health was now thoroughly
reinstated, yet I was conscious of a strange apathy of mind, which threw
a dark shade on every image, rendering the prospects before me grey,
withered, and cloudy. Without even any clear remembrance of my past
life, I was completely occupied by cares for the present moment. Towards
evening, I always looked out anxiously for some place, (generally a
convent or private house,) where I would be able to extort food and
shelter for the night. I rejoiced not a little, when I met with persons
sufficiently devout to fill my knap-sack and wine-bottle, in return for
which I mechanically repeated, according to monastic form, the customary
blessings. In short, I had sunk in spirit, as well as in outward
observances, into an ordinary, stupid, and depraved mendicant friar.
At last, after many adventures, no one of which deserves particular
commemoration, (for they were all of a similar character,) I came at
last to a great Capuchin Convent, which, surrounded only by houses
belonging to the establishment, and forming in itself a little town, is
situated not far from Rome. This convent, though within itself large and
populous, is, in other respects, lonely and insulated. The monks are by
their rule obliged to receive others of the same order, and I imagined
that I should live for some time with much comfort among them.
Accordingly I made up a story, such as I thought would sound favourably
in their ears. I pretended that the convent to which I belonged in
Germany had been recently broken up; that consequently I had been thrown
on the wide world, and wished to be received into some other monastery,
under the same laws.
With that hospitality and cheerfulness which are peculiar to the Italian
clergy, they, in the first place, entertained me sumptuously, and the
Prior formally said, that if no fulfilment of a sacred vow obliged me
to travel farther, I was welcome to remain there as long as I chose.
* * * * *
It was now the hour of vespers. The monks went to their appointed places
in the choir, and I walked into the church. I was deeply impressed by
the bold and magnificent architecture of the great aisle--but, alas! my
spirit could now no more be exalted by those raptures which in early
days attended me in the church of the Holy Lime-Tree, to which this bore
a marked and mysterious resemblance!
When I had completed my devotions at the high altar, I indulged myself
in walking through the different subsidiary aisles, contemplating the
paintings at various shrines, which, as usual, represented the
martyrdoms of the saints, to whom they were severally consecrated. At
last I was attracted by a small and retired chapel, where the altar was
exquisitely illuminated by the beams of the now setting sun, that
streamed in through the painted window.
I wished to examine the picture, and devoutly making the sign of the
cross, mounted up the marble steps. Oh, heaven! It was precisely the
same, the fatal altar-piece of my own convent--the martyrdom of St
Rosalia! Methought, however, the figure was yet more beautiful, more
exquisitely attractive and seducing. It was Aurelia, in her fullest
bloom of beauty, that I beheld; and my whole past life, which I had
begun to forget, with all its wanderings and crimes--the murder of
Euphemia, of Hermogen, and of Aurelia, revived on my recollection, as if
concentrated instantaneously into one horrible thought, that penetrated
my heart and brain, like a burning hot implement of torture.
I threw myself prostrate on the stone floor. I was convulsively shook
and torn by my inward conflicts, as if I had been laid on the rack of
the most cruel and relentless inquisition. Death would have been
welcome--but, alas! death would not come to my relief! Hereupon I began
to tear my garments, in the furious rage of despair. I howled in
hopeless anguish, so that my voice resounded through the vaulted aisles
of the church.
"I am cursed," cried I aloud--"I am cursed for ever. There is for me no
grace, no consolation more--neither in this world nor in the next. To
hell--to hell am I doomed! Sentence of eternal damnation has gone forth
against me--an accursed and abandoned sinner!"
My cries of course alarmed the whole community. People came, lifted me
up, and carried me from the altar of St Rosalia. The service was now
over, and the monks assembled in the chapel. At their head was the
Prior. He looked at me with an indescribable mildness and gravity of
expression, which reminded me of Leonardus. He then advanced and took me
by the hand, while to me it seemed as if some blessed saint, hovering in
the air, held up the miserable sinner above the fiery and bottomless
pool of destruction into which he was about to plunge.
"You are ill and feverish, brother," said the Prior; "the fatigues of
your long pilgrimage have been too great a trial of your strength, but
we shall carry you safely into the sick ward of the convent, where you
will be faithfully attended by our physician, and restored to health."
I could not make any articulate answer to this address. I knelt before
him in abject misery, and even kissed the hem of his garment.
Deep-drawn sighs, which I could not repress, betrayed the frightful
condition of my soul. The monks again lifted me up, and brought me into
the refectorium, where they insisted on my accepting of some
refreshments.
On a sign from the Prior, the brethren then retired, and I remained with
him alone.
"Brother," he began, "your conscience seems to be loaded with some heavy
sins; for nothing but repentance almost without hope, on account of some
extraordinary crime, could have given rise to such conduct as you have
this evening exhibited. Yet great and boundless are the mercy and
long-suffering of God; very powerful, too, is the intercession of the
saints. Therefore, take courage! You shall confess to me; and when this
duty is fulfilled, the consolations of the church shall not be wanting."
These words in themselves were not remarkable; but the tone and manner
of the Prior made on me such an impression, that at this moment
methought the mysterious pilgrim of the Holy Lime-Tree stood beside me,
and as if he were the only being on the wide earth to whom I was bound
to disclose the horrors of my life, and from whom I must allow nothing
to remain concealed. Still I was unable to speak. I could only prostrate
myself again upon the earth before the old man.
"I am now obliged," said he, "to return to the chapel. Should you
resolve to follow my counsel, you will find me there."
My determination was already fixed. As soon as I had, by a great effort,
recovered some degree of composure, I hastened after the Prior, and
found him waiting in the confessional. Acting according to the impulse
of the moment, I began to speak, for the first time since a very long
period, without the slightest attempt at disguise. On the contrary, I
confessed all the adventures of my life, from first to last, without
mitigating a single circumstance, which the severest censor could have
suggested against me!
Horrible was the penance which the Prior now imposed upon me! Forbid to
appear again in the church--shut out like an alien from the society of
the monks, I was henceforth confined to the charnel vaults of the
convent--miserably prolonging my life by a stinted portion of tasteless
roots and water, scourging myself with knotted ropes, and mangling my
flesh with various implements of martyrdom, which the ingenuity of
demoniacal malevolence had _first_ invented, lifting up my voice only in
bitter accusations against myself, or in the most passionate and abject
supplications for deliverance from that hell whose flames already seemed
to burn within me!
But when my blood streamed from an hundred wounds--when pain, in a
hundred scorpion stings, assailed me--and nature yielded at last, from
inability to continue the conflict, so that I fell asleep like an
exhausted child, even in despite of my torments--then the horrid imagery
of dreams molested me with a new and involuntary martyrdom.
Methought I saw Euphemia, who came floating towards me in all the
luxuriance of her beauty, and casting on me the most seductive glances.
But I cried out aloud, "What would'st thou from me, thou accursed sinful
woman? No! hell shall not triumph over the truly penitent!" Then
methought her form, before so wanton and luxurious, shook and shivered.
She threw aside her robes, and a horror, like that of annihilation,
seized upon me; for I saw that her body was dried up into a skeleton,
and through the ribs of the spectre I saw not worms, but numberless
serpents that twined and twisted within and without, thrusting out their
heads and forked burning tongues towards me.
"Away!--begone!" cried I, in delirium; "thy serpents are stinging my
already wounded flesh. They would fatten on my heart's-blood,--but
then--I should die--I should die--Death would release me from thy
vengeance!"
"My serpents," howled out the spectre, who now seemed like an infernal
fury,--"my serpents may nourish themselves from thy heart's-blood, but
herein consists not thy torment, oh wretched sinner! Thy pain is within
thine own bosom, and in vain hopest thou for release in death. Thy
torment is the thought of thine own crimes, and this thought is
eternal!"
Hereafter the figure of Hermogen, streaming with blood, rose up out of
the dusky void, and Euphemia fled before him. He, too, staid not; but
rushed past, with an hideous groan, and pointing to a wound in his
throat, which had the form of the cross.
I now wished to pray; but my senses were lost and overcome in the
confusion that ensued. At first the whole air was animated, and filled
with rustling and flapping of wings, and gibbering of unearthly voices.
Then mortals, whom I had before known in the world, appeared
metamorphosed into the most insane caricatures. Heads, with well-known
features, came crawling about me on scarecrow legs, which grew out of
their own ears. Strange winged monsters, too, which I knew not, and
could not name, came floating through the air. Among these were ravens,
and other birds, with human faces. But at last, these gave place to the
Bishop's choir-master, at Koenigswald, with his sister. The latter
wheeled herself about in a wild and furious _walz_, to which her brother
supplied the music; but he kept all the while strumming on his own
breast, which had become a violin.
Belcampo, whom I recognised, although he wore a hateful lizard's head,
and sat upon a disgusting winged serpent, came driving up towards me. He
wanted to comb my beard with a red-hot iron comb; but could not succeed
in his attempt. The tumult always became wilder and wilder. More strange
and indescribable were the figures, from the smallest beetle, dancing on
large human feet, up to the long drawn-out horse skeleton, with blazing
eyes, and with his own hide made into a pillion, upon which sat a rider,
with a gleaming owl's head. A gigantic bottomless beaker served for his
coat of mail, and an inverted funnel was his helmet.
"Hell," cried a voice, "is in a mood of mirth, and triumphs!" Hereupon I
heard myself laugh aloud; but the exertion of laughter tore my breast;
my pain became more scorching, and my wounds bled more fiercely.
At last the rabble rout vanished, and there came forward the glorious
form of a woman more beauteous than the fairest of the boasted
Circassians on earth! She walked up towards me.--"Oh, heaven, it is
Aurelia!"--"I live," said she; "I live, and I am now for ever thine!"
Then the raging fires of sinful passion once more arose within me. I
flew to Aurelia, seized and embraced her with fervour. All weakness and
exhaustion were utterly forgotten; but instead of her light and
sylph-like form, methought I felt the weight and the torture of burning
lead or iron laid on my breast. My visage and eyes, too, were scratched
and wounded as if with rough bristles, like a wool-dresser's comb; and
Satan roared aloud, with thrilling laughter--"Now, _now_ art thou wholly
mine!"
With a shriek of terror I awoke, and anon my blood flowed anew in
streams, from the strokes of the knotted whip, with which, in hopeless
agony, I chastised myself. For the crime of that interview with Aurelia,
though but in a dream, demanded double penance, and I was resolved to
run the risk even of committing indirect suicide, rather than omit one
iota of the prescribed inflictions.
* * * * *
At last, the period appointed by the Prior for my seclusion in the
vaults was over, and, by his express command, I was obliged to remove
from thence, in order to finish the remainder of my penance in the
convent, although my cell was yet to be separated from all the other
brethren; for, by such gradations, I was at last to arrive at his
permission to return to the church, and to the society of the monks.
But with the latter gradations of penance I was not myself satisfied. I
was enjoined only solitude and a daily use of the knotted rope; but I
stedfastly refused every better sort of food which was now offered to
me; and when at last allowed to enter the church, I lay for whole days
on the cold marble floor, before the shrine of St Rosalia, and chastised
myself in my cell in the most cruel and immoderate degree. By these
outward sufferings, I thought that I should overcome the more fearful
pains by which I was inwardly tormented, but in vain! Those phantoms,
the off-spring of my own perturbed imagination, always returned, and I
believed myself given up a helpless prey to Satan, who thus, for his own
special divertisement, assailed me, and enticed me to commit those sins
in _thought_, which in _deed_ were no longer in my power.
The severe penance imposed upon me, and the unheard-of perseverance with
which it was fulfilled, excited in the highest degree the attention of
the monks. They contemplated me with a kind of reverential awe, and many
times I heard whisperings among them--"He is indeed a saint!" This
expression was to me unspeakably distressing, for it reminded me vividly
of that moment in the Capuchin Convent of Koenigswald, when, in my
outrageous delirium, I had called out to the spectral painter, "I am the
blessed St Anthony!"
The very last and concluding stage of the penance imposed by the Prior,
had now passed away, yet I had never desisted from self-martyrdom.
Nature seemed unable to bear up any longer against the violence which I
inflicted. My eyes were dim and sunk in their sockets. My bleeding frame
was become a mere skeleton, so that, when for hours I had lain on the
marble floor, I was not able to raise myself till the monks came to
assist me.
At last, the Prior one day sent for me to his consulting-room.
"Brother," said he, "do you now feel, after the severe penance you have
undergone, your mind soothed and lightened? Have the consolations of
Heaven been poured upon you?"
In the hollow tone of despair, I answered him, "No!"
"Brother," he resumed, "when, after your confession of horrid crimes, I
inflicted on you that severe penance, I satisfied the laws of the
church, which demand that a malefactor whom the arm of justice has not
reached, but who voluntarily confesses his evil actions, should also,
by his outward conduct, prove the _reality_ of his repentance. Yet I
believe, (and the best authorities are on my side,) that the most
excruciating torments which the penitent can inflict on himself, do not,
as soon as he himself grounds any confidence on these exercises,
diminish, by one fraction, the amount of his guilt. To no human
intellect is it given to explain how the omniscient and eternal Ruler
measures and weighs the deeds of mankind; but lost for ever must that
mortal be, who deludes himself with expectations of taking Heaven by
storm, through the force of penitential infliction.
"Moreover, the individual who believes that, by the fulfilment of such
duties, the crimes of which he has been convicted are, of necessity,
blotted out and atoned, proves, by this very belief, that his inward
repentance has neither been true nor complete. But as for you, dear
brother Medardus, you have yet experienced no consolation, and _this_,
in my opinion, proves the truth of your conversion. Give up now, I
command you, all chastisements--allow yourself better food, and no
longer avoid the society of your brethren.
"Learn, besides, that your extraordinary life, with all its complicated
involvements, is better known to me than it is even to yourself. A
fatality from which you could not escape, gave to the devil a certain
influence over you; and, while you committed crimes which to your own
nature were abhorrent, you were only his tool, or implement.
"Dream not, however, that you are on this account less sinful in the
eyes of Heaven, or of the church, for on you was bestowed ample power,
if you had had the resolution to exert it, to conquer in a spirited
battle the fiend who beset you. In what mortal heart has not this
influence of our arch-enemy raged like a tempest, resisting every
impulse of good? But without this conflict, virtue could have no
existence--For in what doth virtue consist, but in the triumph (after a
hard-fought battle) of good over evil?
"But, as one source of consolation, I can inform you, that you have
accused yourself of a crime wherein you have been guilty in intention,
but not in effect. Aurelia yet lives. In your madness you probably
wounded yourself, and it was your own blood that streamed over your
hands. Aurelia still lives;--this fact I have amply ascertained."
Hereupon I fell on my knees, with my hands uplifted in fervent prayer,
and burst into tears.
"Know farther," said the Prior, "that the strange old painter, of whom,
in your confession, you spoke so much, has, as long as I can remember,
been an occasional visitor at our convent, and probably may, before
long, again appear among us. Long ago he gave me a parchment book to
take charge of, in which are numerous drawings, but more especially a
kind of chronicle, to which, as often as he came hither, he always added
a few lines or pages. He has not left me under any injunctions not to
shew this book to any one whom its contents may interest, and, of
course, I shall not hesitate to intrust it with you. Indeed, this now
becomes my indispensable duty, and hence you will learn the wonderful
entanglements of your own destiny, which at one time led you as if into
a higher world of visions and miracles, and, at another, into the most
ordinary and most depraved scenes of what is called the world.
"It has been said that miracles have now wholly vanished from the earth;
but this is a doctrine which I, for one, am by no means inclined to
accede to. Miracles, if by that name we understand only that which we
by no means can explain or account for, certainly have continued among
us, though it is true, that by the observance of a few fixed and limited
rules, our philosophers seem (in their own conceit at least) to give
laws to nature; yet, nevertheless, there are phenomena every now and
then recurring, which put all their boasted wisdom to shame, and which,
in our obstinate stupidity, because they are not explainable, we
therefore reject, as unworthy of belief.
"In this manner we deny, among other things, the possibility of a
spiritual apparition, inasmuch as it is impossible for an incorporeal
figure to be mirrored on the surface of the human eye, which is
corporeal, the absurd fallacy and sophism of which reasoning is obvious.
To tell the truth, I look upon this ancient painter as one of those
extraordinary apparitions, which put to the blush all ordinary rules and
theories. I am doubtful even if his corporeal figure is such as we can
properly call real. This much is certain, that no one here ever
discovered in him the ordinary functions of life. He would neither eat,
drink, nor sleep; nor did I ever observe him either writing or drawing,
though it was obvious, notwithstanding, that in the book, in which he
only appeared to read, there were always more leaves written or painted
on when he went away, than there had been before.
"I should observe, also, that all which the book contains, appeared to
me to be mere _griffon-age_, or fantastic sketches of an insane artist,
until you came to our convent. Then, for the first time, its pages came
to be legible and intelligible, after you, dear brother Medardus, had
confessed to me.
"I dare not give utterance more particularly to my own suppositions, or
apprehensions, regarding the real character of this old painter, and his
relationship to you. You will yourself guess at the truth, or, more
probably, it will develope itself in the clearest light before you, when
you have attentively perused this book. Go then, take every proper
method and precaution to restore your bodily, as well as mental
energies, and, in a few days, if you feel yourself recovered, as I hope
will be the case, you shall receive from me the mysterious volume,
which, meanwhile, I retain, as you have not strength at present for the
task of deciphering it."
Henceforward, I was of course under the necessity of acting according to
the injunctions of the Prior. I ate with the brethren at their public
table, and omitted all chastisements, confining myself to fervent and
prolonged prayer at the altars of the saints. Although my heart
continued to bleed inwardly, and my mind was still much disturbed, yet
at last those horrible phantoms and diabolical temptations by which I
had been persecuted, came to an end. Often, when tired to death, I
passed sleepless nights on my hard couch, there was around me a waving
as if of seraphs' wings; and I beheld the lovely form of the living
Aurelia, who, with her eyes full of tears and celestial compassion, bent
down over me. She stretched out her hand, as if protectingly, and
diffusing blessings over my head. Then my eye-lids sank down, and a mild
refreshing slumber poured new strength into my veins.
When the Prior observed that my mind and frame had once more regained
some degree of healthy excitement, he again sent for me in private, and
gave me the painter's parchment book, admonishing me to read it with
attention in my own cell.
I opened the volume, and the first of its contents which struck my eye
were drawings for those paintings which still exist in the Church of the
Holy Lime-Tree, and which had, from earliest youth, possessed so
mysterious an influence over my whole life. Formerly, the possession of
this book would have agitated me almost to madness, from the degree of
anxiety which it would have excited. Now, however, after the discipline
which I had undergone, I was perfectly calm. Besides, there was scarcely
any degree of mystery left which I had not by anticipation already
developed. That which the painter had here, in a small scarcely-legible
hand, set down, intermixed with sketches both in black lead and in
colours, was but a distinct and clear delineation of my own dreams and
apprehensions, brought out indeed with a degree of precision and
accuracy of which I could not have been capable.