CHAPTER XLI. THE ACT OF ACCUSATION
Benumbed, bedraggled, and bewildered, I entered Feldkirch late at night, my wrists cut with the cords, my clothes torn by frequent falls, my limbs aching with bruises, and my wet rags chafing my skin. No wonder was it that I was at once consigned from the charge of a jailer to the care of a doctor, and ere the day broke I was in a raging fever.
I would not, if I could, preserve any memory of that grievous interval. Happily for me, no clear traces remain on my mind,—pangs of suffering are so mingled with little details of the locality, faces, words, ludicrous images of a wandering intellect, long hours of silent brooding, sound of church bells, and such other tokens as cross the lives of busy men in the daily walk of life, all came and went within my brain, and still I lay there in fever.
In my first return of consciousness, I perceived I was the sole occupant of a long arched gallery, with a number of beds arranged along each side of it. In their uniform simplicity, and the severe air of the few articles of furniture, my old experiences at once recalled the hospital; not that I arrived at this conclusion without much labor and a considerable mental effort. It was a short journey, to be sure, but I was walking with sprained ankles. It was, however, a great joy and a great triumph to me to accomplish even this much. It was the recognition to myself that I was once more on the road to health, and again to feel the sympathies that make a brotherhood of this life of ours; and so happy was I with the prospect, that when I went to sleep at night my last thought was of the pleasure that morning would bring me. And I was not disappointed; the next day, and the next, and several more that followed, were all passed in a calm and tranquil enjoyment Looking back upon this period, I have often been disposed to imagine that when we lie in the convalescence that follows some severe illness, with no demands upon our bodily strength, no call made upon our muscular energies, the very activity of digestion not evoked, as our nourishment is of the simplest and lightest, our brain must of necessity exercise its functions more freely, untrammelled by passing cares or the worries incident to daily life, and that at such times our intellect has probably a more uncontested action than at any other period of our existence. I do not want to pursue my theory, or endeavor to sustain it; my reader has here enough to induce him to join his experience to my own, or reject the notion altogether.
I lay thus, not impatiently, for above a fortnight. I regained strength very slowly; the least effort or exertion was sure to overcome me. But I wished for none; and as I lay there, gazing for whole days long at a great coat-of-arms over the end of the gallery, where a huge double-headed eagle seemed to me screaming in the agony of strangulation, but yet never to be choked outright, I revelled in many a strange rambling as to the fate of the land of which it was the emblem and the shield. Doubtless some remnant of my passionate assault on Austria lingered in my brain, and gave this turn to its operations.
My nurse was one of that sisterhood whose charities call down many a blessing on the Church that organizes their benevolences. She was what is called a graue Schwester; and of a truth she seemed the incarnation of grayness. It was not her dress alone, but her face and hands, her noiseless gait, her undemonstrative stare, her half-husky whisper, and her monotonous ways, had all a sort of pervading grayness that enveloped her, just as a cloud mist wraps a landscape. There was, besides, a kind of fog-like indistinctness in her few and muttered words that made a fitting atmosphere of drowsy uniformity for the sick-room.
Her first care, on my recovery, was to supply me with a number of little religious books,—lives of saints and martyrs, accounts of miracles, and narratives of holy pilgrimages,—and I devoured them with all the zest of a devotee. They seemed to supply the very excitement my mind craved for, and the good soul little suspected how much more she was ministering to a love for the marvellous than to a spirit of piety. In the “Flowers of St. Francis,” for instance, I found an adventure-seeker after my own heart To be sure, his search was after sinners in need of a helping hand to rescue them; but as his contests with Satan were described as stand-up encounters, with very hard knocks on each side, they were just as exciting combats to read of, as any I had ever perused in stories of chivalry.
Mistaking my zest for these readings for something far more praiseworthy, “the gray sister” enjoined me very seriously to turn from the evil advisers I had formerly consorted with, and frequent the society of better-minded and wiser men. Out of these counsels, dark and dim at first, but gradually growing clearer, I learned that I was regarded as a member of some terrible secret society, banded together for the direst and blackest of objects; the subversion of thrones, overthrow of dynasties, and assassination of sovereigns being all labors of love to us. She had a full catalogue of my colleagues, from Sand, who killed Kotzebue, to Orsini, and seemed thoroughly persuaded that I was a very advanced member of the order. It was only after a long time, and with great address on my part, that I obtained these revelations from her, and she owned that nothing but witnessing how the holy studies had influenced me would ever have induced her to make these avowals. As my convalescence progressed, and I was able to sit up for an hour or so in the day, she told me that I might very soon expect a visit from the Staats Procurator, a kind of district attorney-general, to examine me. So little able was I to carry my mind back to the bygone events of my life, that I heard this as a sort of vague hope that the inquiry would strike out some clew by which I could connect myself with the past, for I was sorely puzzled to learn what and who I had been before I came there. Was I a prosecutor or was I a prisoner? Never was a knotty point more patiently investigated, but, alas! most hopelessly. The intense interest of the inquiry, however, served totally to withdraw me from my previous readings, and “the gray sister” was shocked to see the mark in my book remain for days long unchanged. She took courage at length to address me on the subject, and even went so far as to ask if Satan himself had not taken occasional opportunity of her absence to come and sit beside my bed? I eagerly caught at the suggestion, and said it was as she suspected: that he never gave me a moment's peace, now torturing me with menaces, now asking for explanations, how this could be reconciled with that, and why such a thing should not have prevented such another?
Instead of expressing any astonishment at my confession, she appeared to regard it as one of the most ordinary incidents, and referred me to my books, and especially to St Francis, to see that these were usual and every-day snares in use. She went further, and in her zeal actually showed a sort of contempt for the Evil One in his intellectual capacity that startled me; showing how St Jude always got the better of him, and that he was a mere child when opposed by the craft of St. Anthony of Pavia.
“It is the truth,” said she, “always conquers him. Whenever, by any chance, he can catch you concealing or evading, trying to make out reasons that are inconsistent, or affecting intentions that you had not, then he is your master.”