Another sharp, terrible yell from Jacques Ferrand resounded throughout the chamber.
"Executioner! put out the lamp! Its burning splendor penetrates through my hands; they are transparent! I see the blood! it circulates in my veins! I did well to close my eyelids! this fiery lava would have entered! Oh, what torture! It is as if my eyes were pierced with red-hot needles! Help! help!" cried he, struggling in his bed, a prey to horrible convulsions.
Polidori, alarmed at the violence of this attack, extinguished the light.
And both were left in utter darkness. At this moment was heard the noise of a carriage, which stopped at the street door. When the chamber became darkened, Ferrand's agony ceased by degrees, and he said to Polidori, "Why did you wait so long before you put out this lamp? Was it to make me endure all the torments of the damned? Oh, what I have suffered! Oh, heaven! how I have suffered!"
"Now do you suffer less?"
"I still experience a violent irritation, but it is nothing to what I felt just now. I cling to life because the memory of Cecily is all my life."
"But this memory kills, exhausts, consumes you." The notary did not hear his accomplice, who foresaw a new hallucination. In effect, Ferrand resumed, with a burst of convulsive and sardonic laughter:
"To take Cecily from me! But they do not know that, by concentrating all the power of one's faculties on a single object, the impracticable is gained. Thus, directly, I am going to the chamber of Cecily, where I have not dared to go since her departure. Oh, to see, to touch the vestments which have belonged to her; the glass before which she dressed—it will be to see herself! Yes; by fixing my eyes on this glass, soon shall I see Cecily appear. It will not be an illusion—a mist; it will be she; I shall find her there, as the sculptor finds the statue in the block of marble."
"Where are you going to?" said Polidori, hearing Jacques Ferrand getting up from his bed, for the most profound obscurity still reigned in the apartment.
"I go to find Cecily."