Chapter 13
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Author : William Godwin

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CHAPTER XIII.

 
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 labor 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 endeavor by that means to discover his retreat. I knew of
no name by which he was to be recognized; 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 briers 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 endeavoring to preserve my line of
direction. After having been compelled four or five times to deviate from
the line, it is seldom that a traveler 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
labored indeed till daybreak without getting out of the labyrinth that
enclosed me. But the sun no sooner began to lend an imperfect light, than I
recognized 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 philosophizing 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 humor, 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 enclosed. 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 recognize 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 pretenses 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 color 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 fibers 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.


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     Chapter 13 -- Added : January 05, 2021

     Chapter 13 -- Updated : January 17, 2022

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