“Molly! Molly! come here quick! Who's that standing there?” said he, as he pointed with his finger towards me.
“The heavens be about us! but it's Mr. Walter Carew himself,” said the woman, crossing herself.
This sudden recognition of my resemblance to my father so overcame me that though I struggled hard for speech, the words would not come; and I stood pale and gasping before them.
“For Heaven's sake, speak!” cried the man, in terror.
I heard no more; faint, agitated, and exhausted, I tottered towards the bank, and swooned away.
CHAPTER XLVIII. THE PERILS OF EVIL
The last few pages I mean to append to these notices of my life might be, perhaps, equally well derived from the public newspapers of the time. At a period when great events were occurring; when the conquering armies of France marched over the length and breadth of Europe,—the humble historian of these pages was able, for a brief space, to engage public attention, and become for a short season the notoriety of the hour. I will not presume so far as to say that the fame to which I attained was of that kind which flatters most, or that the reputation attaching to me was above reproach. Still, I had my partisans and adherents, nay, I believe I might even aver, my friends and well-wishers. He must, perchance, have had a fortunate existence who can say more.
Of what followed after the event detailed in my last chapter I can relate nothing, for I was seized with shivering and other signs of fever that same night, and for several weeks my life was despaired of. Even when the dangerous period passed over, my convalescence made but little progress. For me there were none of those aids which so powerfully assist the return to health. The sympathy of friends, the affections of family, the very hope of once more assuming one's place at hearth and board,—I had none of these. If the past was filled with trouble and suffering, the future was a bleak expanse that offered nothing to speculate on. My thoughts turned to the New World beyond the seas, to a region wherein nothing should recall a memory of the bygone, and where even I might at last forget the early years of my own life. There were not then, as now, the rapid means of intercourse between this country and America; as little, too, was there of that knowledge of the great continent of the west which now prevails. Men talked of it as a far-away land only emerging into civilization, and whose vast regions were still untrodden and unexplored. Dreamy visions of the existence men might carve out for themselves in such a scene formed the amusements of the long hours of my solitary sick bed. I fancied myself at times a lone settler on the bank of some nameless river, and at other moments as a member of some Indian tribe, following their fortunes to the chase and to the battle-field, and dreaming through life in the uneventful stillness of the forest.
In part from the effect of malady itself, in part from this dreamy state of mind, I sank into a state of impassive lethargy wherein nothing pleased or displeased me. Worse than actual despondency, a sense of indifference had settled down on all my feelings; and if I could have asked a boon, it would have been to have been left utterly alone. To reply when spoken to became irksome; even to listen was a painful exertion to me. Looking back now on this period, it seems to me that such intervals of apathetic repose are often inserted in the lives of men of more than ordinary activity, acting as sleep does in our habitual existence, and serving to rest and recruit faculties overcharged and overworked.