[CHAPTER III.]
CONTAINING THE SUBSTANCE OF A SINGULAR DEBATE BETWIXT THE AUTHOR AND HIS BROTHER, WITH A PHILOSOPHIC DEFENCE OF THE AUTHOR'S CREDIBILITY.
And now, having arrived at the close of my adventurous career, I have but a few additions to make to my story before concluding it entirely.
I took an early opportunity to impart to my brother-in-law a faithful account of my adventures, as well as a resolution which I had already formed to commit them to writing, and publish them for the benefit of the world; for I was persuaded they contained a moral which might prove of service to many persons, who, like myself, had fallen into the error of supposing they were assigned to a harsher lot than their fellows.
This resolution Alderwood opposed with all his might, being concerned lest such an enterprise as writing a book should divert my mind from the labours of the farm, and, indeed, seduce me again into habits of idleness. Besides, he was afraid the strangeness of my adventures would cause them to be received with incredulity, whereby I might suffer in reputation, and be looked upon only as a dreamer and teller of falsehoods. His chief reasons, however, I doubt not, were the two first mentioned; for he was anxious I should now think of nothing but my farm. His dislike to my design was, in truth, so great, that, having exhausted all the arguments he could muster in the vain design to overcome it, he had resort to a new mode of opposition, an expedient highly ingenious, but not a little ridiculous. He endeavoured to shake my own faith in my story!—to convince me that I had imagined all I have related, and that, in a word, I had never encountered any adventures at all. I protest I am diverted to this day when I think of the mingled anxiety and address which he displayed on the occasion. He assured me, and that quite plumply, that during the whole two years (to speak strictly, it was only twenty months) of my wanderings, I had never once been off the forty-acre farm; that I had never been in any body besides my own; and that the whole source of the notion on my part lay in a hallucination of mind which had suddenly attacked me, filling me with ridiculous conceits of various transformations, such as never had happened, and never could happen, to any human being. And this absurd account he persisted in as long as he could with any decency, giving me repeated hints that my mother had died insane, and that it was not therefore strange I should have been a little odd once in my life. I showed him the place where I had been digging under the beech-tree (where, by-the-way, I was weak enough afterward to make Jim Jumble sink a pit twelve feet deep, to satisfy myself that Captain Kid's money really did not lie there); which place, however, he averred was as great a proof of the truth of his story as of mine: "For," said he, "none but a madman would dig for Captain Kid's money." I led him to the willow-bushes, and the old worm fence in the marsh, where I had found Squire Higginson's body; which he allowed I might have done, but protested that other persons had found it also; and that instead of going home alive in Squire Higginson's barouche, it had been carried to Philadelphia in a coffin; and as for Higginson's being clapped into prison for my murder, it was I, he said who had been confined on suspicion of having been concerned in his, until, as he said, it was found that I was out of my wits, and that Higginson had died of an apoplexy.
I then referred to a circumstance that had happened during my late sickness, as affording the fullest confirmation of my story. The circumstance was this. While still lying tormented with fever, but at a moment when my mind was sound and lucid, Jim Jumble put a newspaper into my hand, in which, by a singular coincidence, appeared an account of my late transformation in Virginia, with an allusion to the fate of Zachariah Longstraw, by which I learned, for the first time, what had become of his body after I left it. From the article, which, strangely, and yet naturally enough, was headed "Outrageous Humbug, and Fatal Consequence thereof," it seemed to be universally believed that Dr. Feuerteufel's mummy was no mummy at all, but a living man, as I myself had heard it called in the village, with whom he had leagued in a conspiracy to hoax and swindle the good people of the south out of their money; and that the imposture had been detected by Mr. Arthur Megrim, who, proceeding to force the glass box, was knocked down by the pretended dead man, and so unfortunately killed, the mummy and his accomplice, the doctor, making their escape in the confusion. The editor of the paper, after noticing a second account, by which it was asserted that the unfortunate Megrim, though overturned by the pretended mummy in his flight, had received no injury from him, but, on the contrary, had died of sheer fright and horror, being of a nervous, hypochondriacal turn, and acknowledging that this account was more probable, inveighed warmly against the villany and audacity of the swindlers; who, he said, were more legitimate objects on whom to wreak the vengeance of Lynchdom than the people of that district had found in Zachariah Longstraw, the philanthropist. And here the editor reminded his readers of the fate of that excellent and distinguished individual, who had died in the Lynchers' hands the preceding autumn, against the ringleaders of whom his nephew, Mr. Jonathan Truelove, had so vainly attempted to establish legal proceedings.
To this account, I say, I referred as containing an argument of my truth not to be resisted; but, unfortunately, the paper had by some means or other vanished, and Alderwood said my story went for nothing without it. That paper, I have always thought, he had himself got possession of and secreted. But had I even retained and shown it to him, I doubt whether it would have affected him in the least; for he was one of those skeptical men who believed a thing none the sooner for finding it in a newspaper.
In a word, there is no expressing the obstinacy of my brother in rejecting my story, nor the adroitness with which he met such proofs as I could give him of the truth of it. The last instance of it which I shall relate was his taking the part of the German doctor, Feuerteufel, who, he declared, had not only never made a mummy of me, but had not laid claim to me as his property, though he himself (that is, my brother-in-law) had been present at least a dozen times when the German doctor did so in my sick-chamber, from which Alderwood was so instrumental in expelling him. He even insisted that this man, having made a second and last visit to our village to hunt plants and reptiles, had been employed (and at his own instance too) to cure me of that very malady he so ridiculously would have me believe I had been afflicted with, and that it was to him, under Heaven, I owed my restoration to health. Nay, he even went the length of showing me what he called the doctor's bill; and, true enough, it was a bill, with a receipt in full upon it; but the amount being prodigiously great, I saw at once into the whole affair, which was nothing less than a masked contract betwixt my brother-in-law and the doctor, whereby the latter secretly covenanted, in consideration of the large sum received from the former, to persecute me no longer with his claims, and perhaps to leave the country altogether.