There sat a spirit in the vault,
In shape, in hue, in lineaments, like life.
SOUTHEY’S THALABA.
“I am convinced, that, had the passage been as long and intricate as any
that ever an antiquarian pursued to discover the tomb of Cheops in the
Pyramids, I would have rushed on in the blindness of my desperation,
till famine or exhaustion had compelled me to pause. But I had no such
peril to encounter,--the floor of the passage was smooth, and the walls
were matted, and though I proceeded in darkness, I proceeded in safety;
and provided my progress removed me far enough from the pursuit or
discovery of the Inquisition, I scarcely cared how it might terminate.
“Amid this temporary magnanimity of despair, this state of mind which
unites the extremes of courage and pusillanimity, I saw a faint light.
Faint it was, but it was distinct,--I saw clearly it was light. Great
God! what a revulsion in my blood and heart, in all my physical and
mental feelings, did this sun of my world of darkness create! I venture
to say, that my speed in approaching it was in the proportion of one
hundred steps to one, compared to my crawling progress in the preceding
darkness. As I approached, I could discover that the light gleamed
through the broad crevices of a door, which, disjointed by subterranean
damps, gave me as full a view of the apartment within, as if it were
opened to me by the inmate. Through one of these crevices, before which
I knelt in a mixture of exhaustion and curiosity, I could reconnoitre
the whole of the interior.
“It was a large apartment, hung with dark-coloured baize within four
feet of the floor, and this intermediate part was thickly matted,
probably to intercept the subterranean damps. In the centre of the room
stood a table covered with black cloth; it supported an iron lamp of an
antique and singular form, by whose light I had been directed, and was
now enabled to descry furniture that appeared sufficiently
extraordinary. There were, amid maps and globes, several instruments, of
which my ignorance did not permit me then to know the use,--some, I have
since learned, were anatomical; there was an electrifying machine, and a
curious _model of a rack_ in ivory; there were few books, but several
scrolls of parchment, inscribed with large characters in red and
ochre-coloured ink; and around the room were placed _four_ skeletons,
not in cases, but in a kind of upright coffin, that gave their bony
emptiness a kind of ghastly and imperative prominence, as if they were
the real and rightful tenants of that singular apartment. Interspersed
between them were the stuffed figures of animals I knew not then the
names of,--an alligator,--some gigantic bones, which I took for those of
Sampson, but which turned out to be fragments of those of the
Mammoth,--and antlers, which in my terror I believed to be those of the
devil, but afterwards learned to be those of an Elk. Then I saw figures
smaller, but not less horrible,--human and brute abortions, in all their
states of anomalous and deformed construction, not preserved in spirits,
but standing in the ghastly nakedness of their white diminutive bones;
these I conceived to be the attendant imps of some infernal ceremony,
which the grand wizard, who now burst on my sight, was to preside over.
“At the end of the table sat an old man, wrapped in a long robe; his
head was covered with a black velvet cap, with a broad border of furs,
his spectacles were of such a size as almost to hide his face, and he
turned over some scrolls of parchment with an anxious and trembling
hand; then seizing a scull that lay on the table, and grasping it in
fingers hardly less bony, and not less yellow, seemed to apostrophize it
in the most earnest manner. All my personal fears were lost in the
thought of my being the involuntary witness of some infernal orgie. I
was still kneeling at the door, when my long suspended respiration burst
forth in a groan, which reached the figure seated at the table in a
moment. Habitual vigilance supplied all the defects of age on the part
of the listener. It was but the sensation of a moment to feel the door
thrown open, my arm seized by an arm powerful though withered by age,
and myself, as I thought, in the talons of a demon.
“The door was closed and bolted. An awful figure stood over me, (for I
had fallen on the floor), and thundered out, “Who art thou, and why art
thou here?” I knew not what to answer, and gazed with a fixed and
speechless look on the skeletons and the other furniture of this
terrible vault. “Hold,” said the voice, “if thou art indeed exhausted,
and needest refreshment, drink of this cup, and thou shalt be refreshed
as with wine; verily, it shall come into thy bowels as water, and as oil
into thy bones,”--and as he spoke he offered to me a cup with some
liquid in it. I repelled him and his drink, which I had not a doubt was
some magical drug, with horror unutterable; and losing all other fears
in the overwhelming one of becoming a slave of Satan, and a victim of
one of his agents, as I believed this extraordinary figure, I called on
the name of the Saviour and the saints, and, crossing myself at every
sentence, exclaimed, “No, tempter, keep your infernal potions for the
leprous lips of your imps, or swallow them yourself. I have but this
moment escaped from the hands of the Inquisition, and a million times
rather would I return and yield myself their victim, than consent to
become yours,--your tender-mercies are the only cruelties I dread. Even
in the prison of the holy office, where the faggots appeared to be lit
before my eyes, and the chain already fastened round my body to bind it
to the stake, I was sustained by a power that enabled me to embrace
objects so terrible to nature, sooner than escape them at the price of
my salvation. The choice was offered me, and I made my election,--and so
would I do were it to be offered a thousand times, though the last were
at the stake, and the fire already kindling.”
Here the Spaniard paused in some agitation. In the enthusiasm of his
narration, he had in some degree disclosed that secret which he had
declared was incommunicable, except in confessing to a priest. Melmoth,
who, from the narrative of Stanton, had been prepared to suspect
something of this, did not think prudent to press him for a farther
disclosure, and waited in silence till his emotion had subsided, without
remark or question. Monçada at length resumed his narrative.
“While I was speaking, the old man viewed me with a look of calm
surprise, that made me ashamed of my fears, even before I had ceased to
utter them. “What!” said he at length, fixing apparently on some
expressions that struck him, “art thou escaped from the arm that dealeth
its blow in darkness, even the arm of the Inquisition? Art thou that
Nazarene youth who sought refuge in the house of our brother Solomon,
the son of Hilkiah, who is called Fernan Nunez by the idolaters in this
land of his captivity? Verily I trusted thou shouldst this night have
eat of my bread, and drank of my cup, and been unto me as a scribe, for
our brother Solomon testified concerning thee, saying, His pen is even
as the pen of a ready writer.”
“I gazed at him in astonishment. Some vague recollections of Solomon’s
being about to disclose some safe and secret retreat wandered over my
mind; and, while trembling at the singular apartment in which we were
seated, and the employment in which he seemed engaged, I yet felt a hope
hover about my heart, which his knowledge of my situation appeared to
justify. “Sit down,” said he, observing with compassion that I was
sinking alike under the exhaustion of fatigue and the distraction of
terror; “sit down, and eat a morsel of bread, and drink a cup of wine,
and comfort thine heart, for thou seemest to be as one who hath escaped
from the snare of the fowler, and from the dart of the hunter.” I obeyed
him involuntarily. I needed the refreshment he offered, and was about to
partake of it, when an irresistible feeling of repugnance and horror
overcame me; and, as I thrust away the food he offered me, I pointed to
the objects around me as the cause of my reluctance. He looked round for
a moment, as doubting whether objects so familiar to him, could be
repulsive to a stranger, and then shaking his head, “Thou art a fool,”
said he, “but thou art a Nazarene, and I pity thee; verily, those who
had the teaching of thy youth, not only have shut the book of knowledge
to thee, but have forgot to open it for themselves. Were not thy
masters, the Jesuits, masters also of the healing art, and art thou not
acquainted with the sight of its ordinary implements? Eat, I pray thee,
and be satisfied that none of these will hurt thee. Yonder dead bones
cannot weigh out or withhold thy food; nor can they bind thy joints, or
strain them with iron, or rend them with steel, as would the living arms
that were stretched forth to seize thee as their prey. And, as the Lord
of hosts liveth, their prey wouldst thou have been, and a prey unto
their iron and steel, were it not for the shelter of the roof of
Adonijah to-night.”
“I took some of the food he offered me, crossing myself at every
mouthful, and drank the wine, which the feverish thirst of terror and
anxiety made me swallow like water, but not without an internal prayer
that it might not be converted into some deleterious and diabolical
poison. The Jew Adonijah observed me with increasing compassion and
contempt.--“What,” said he, “appals thee? Were I possessed of the powers
the superstition of thy sect ascribes to me, might I not make thee a
banquet for fiends, instead of offering thee food? Might I not bring
from the caverns of the earth the voices of those that “peep and
mutter,” instead of speaking unto thee with the voice of man? Thou art
in my power, yet have I no power or will to hurt thee. And dost thou,
who art escaped from the dungeons of the Inquisition, look as one that
feareth on the things that thou seest around thee, the furniture of the
cell of a secluded leach? Within this apartment I have passed the term
of sixty years, and dost thou shudder to visit it for a moment? These be
the skeletons of bodies, but in the den thou hast escaped from were the
skeletons of perished souls. Here are relics of the wrecks or the
caprices of nature, but thou art come from where the cruelty of man,
permanent and persevering, unrelenting and unmitigated, hath never
failed to leave the proofs of its power in abortive intellects, crippled
frames, distorted creeds, and ossified hearts. Moreover, there are
around thee parchments and charts scrawled as it were with the blood of
man, but, were it even so, could a thousand such volumes cause such
terror to the human eye, as a page of the history of thy prison, written
as it is in blood, drawn, not from the frozen veins of the dead, but
from the bursting hearts of the living. Eat, Nazarene, there is no
poison in thy food,--drink, there is no drug in thy cup. Darest thou
promise thyself that in the prison of the Inquisition, or even in the
cells of the Jesuits? Eat and drink without fear in the vault, even in
the vault of Adonijah the Jew. If thou daredst to have done so in the
dwellings of the Nazarenes, I had never beheld thee here. Hast thou
fed?” he added, and I bowed. “Hast thou drank of the cup I gave thee?”
my torturing thirst returned, and I gave him back the cup. He smiled,
but the smile of age,--the smile of lips over which more than an hundred
years have passed, has an expression more repulsive and hideous than can
be deemed; it is never the smile of pleasure,--it is a _frown of the
mouth_, and I shrunk before its grim wrinkles, as the Jew Adonijah
added, “If thou hast eat and drank, it is time for thee to rest. Come to
thy bed, it may be harder than they have given thee in thy prison, but
behold it shall be safer. Come and rest thee there, it may be that the
adversary and the enemy shall not there find thee out.”
“I followed him through passages so devious and intricate, that,
bewildered as I was with the events of the night, they forced on my
memory the well-known fact, that in Madrid the Jews have subterranean
passages to each other’s habitations, which have hitherto baffled all
the industry of the Inquisition. I slept that night, or rather day, (for
the sun had risen), on a pallet laid on the floor of a room, small,
lofty, and matted half-way up the walls. One narrow and grated window
admitted the light of the sun, that arose after that eventful night; and
amid the sweet sound of bells, and the still sweeter of human life,
awake and in motion around me, I sunk into a slumber that was unbroken
even by a dream, till the day was closing; or, in the language of
Adonijah, “till the shadows of the evening were upon the face of all the
earth.”