CHAPTER VIII
It was with indescribable sensations of mingled pain and satisfaction that life dawned again in my mind and body after the drowsy ending of the last chapter. To me the process was robbed of wonder—no idea crossed my mind but that I had slept an ordinary sleep; but to you, knowing the strange fate to which I am liable, will at once occur suspicion and expectation. Both these feelings will be gratified, yet I must tell my story, in my simple fashion, as it occurred.
This time, then, wakefulness came upon me in a prolonged gray and crimson vision; and for a long spell—now I think of it closely—probably for days, I was wrestling to unravel a strange web of light and gloom, in which all sorts of dreamy colors shone alternate in a misty blending upon the blank field of my mind. These colors were now and again swallowed up by an episode of deep obscurity, and the longer I studied them in an unwitting, listless way the more pronounced and definite they became, until at last they were no more a tinted haze of uncertain tone, but a checkered plan, silently passing over my shut eyelids at slow, measured intervals. Well, upon an afternoon—which, you will understand, I shall not readily forget—my eyes were suddenly opened, and, with a deep sigh, like one who wakes after a good night’s repose, existence came back upon me, and, all motionless and dull, but very consciously alive and observant, I was myself again.
My first clear knowledge on that strange occasion was of the strains of a merle singing somewhere near; and, as those seraphic notes thrilled into the dry, unused channels of my hearing, the melody went through me to my utmost fiber. Next I felt, as a strong tonic elixir, a draught of cool spring air, full of the taste of sunshine and rich with the scent of a grateful earth, blowing down upon me and dissipating, with its sweet breath, the last mists of my sleepfulness. While these soft ministrations of the good nurse Nature put my blood into circulation again, filling me with a gentle vegetable pleasure, my newly opened eyes were astounded at the richness and variety of their early discoverings.
To the inexperience of my long forgetfulness everything around was quaint and grotesque! Everything, too, was gray, and crimson, and green. As I stared and speculated, with the vapid artlessness of a baby novice, the new world into which I was thus born slowly took form and shape. It opened out into unknown depths, into aisles and corridors, into a wooden firmament overhead, checkered with clouds of timber-work and endless mazes (to my poor untutored mind) of groins and buttresses. Long gray walls—the same that had been the groundwork of my fancy—opened on either side, a great bare sweep of pavement was below them, and a hundred windows letting in the comely daylight above, but best of all was that long one by me which the crimson sun smote strongly upon its varied surface, and, gleaming through the gorgeous patchwork of a dozen parables in colored glasses, fell on the ground below in pools of many-colored brightness. As I, inertly, watched these shifting beams, I perceived in them the cause of those gay mosaics with which the outer light had amused my sleeping fancies!
All these things in time appeared distinct enough to me, and tempted a trial of whether my physical condition equaled the apparent soundness of my senses. I had hardly had leisure as yet to wonder how I had come into this strange position, or to remember—so strong were the demands of surrounding circumstances on my attention—the last remote pages of my adventures—remote, I now began to entertain a certain consciousness, they were—I was so fully taken up with the matter of the moment, that it never occurred to me to speculate beyond, but the pressing question was in what sort of a body were those sparks of sight and sense burning.
It was pretty clear I was in a church, and a greater one than I had ever entered before. My position, I could tell, spoke of funeral rites, or rather the stiff comfort of one of those marble effigies with which sculptors have from the earliest times decorated tombs. And yet I was not entombed, nor did I think I was marble, or even the plaster of more frugal monumenters. My eyes served little purpose in the deepening light, while as yet I had not moved a muscle. As I thought and speculated, the dreadful fancy came across me that, if I were not stone, possibly I was the other extreme—a thin tissue of dry dust held together by the leniency of long silence and repose, and perhaps—dreadful consideration!—the sensations of life and pleasure now felt were threading those thin wasted tissues, as I have seen the red sparks reluctantly wander in the black folds of a charred scroll, and finally drop out one by one for pure lack of fuel. Was I such a scroll? The idea was not to be borne, and, pitting my will against the stiffness of I knew not what interval, I slowly lifted my right arm and held it forth at length.
My chief sentiment at the moment was wonderment at the limb thus held out in the dim cathedral twilight, my next was a glow of triumph at this achievement, and then, as something of the stress of my will was taken off and the arm flew back with a jerk to its exact place by my side, a flood of pain rushed into it, and with the pain came slowly at first, but quickly deepening and broadening, a remembrance of my previous sleeps and those other awakenings of mine attended by just such thrills.
I will not weary you with repetitions or recount the throes that I endured in attaining flexibility. I have, by Heaven’s mercy, a determination within me of which no one is fit to speak but he who knows the extent and number of its conquests. A dozen times, so keen were these griefs, I was tempted to relinquish the struggle, and as many times I triumphed, the unquenched fire of my mind but burning the brighter for each opposition.
At last, when the painted shadows had crept up the opposite wall inch by inch and lost themselves in the upper colonnades, and the gloom around me had deepened into blackness, I was victorious, and weak, and faint, and tingling; but, respirited and supple, I lay back and slept like a child.