"I have seen no reason for the apprehension; but her scream, was it not bodily pain?"
"I could wish that it had been mere bodily pain; but it was not. You have not heard Isabella's history," she continued, in a low, whispering tone. "She has experienced what might have turned the brain of any one. I discovered something extraordinary in her about six months ago. One evening, when the candles were shaded for the relief of her eyes, and I and Maria were sitting by her, she stopped suddenly in the midst of our conversation, and sat gazing intensely at something between her and the wall; pointing out her finger, her mouth open, and scarcely drawing her breath. I was terror-struck; for the idea immediately rushed into my mind, that it was a symptom of insanity; but I had no time for thought—a scream burst from her, and she fell at my feet in a faint. When she recovered, she told us that she had seen, in the shaded light of the candle, which assumed the blue tinge of the moonlight, the figure of a dead body sitting upright in the waters, with the sailcloth in which he was committed to the deep wrapped around him, and his pale face directed towards her. At the recollection of the vision, she shuddered, would not recur to the subject again, but betrayed otherwise no wandering of the fancy. Several times since, the same object has presented itself to her; and, what is extraordinary, it is always when the candle is shaded; yet she exhibits the same judgment, and I could never detect the slightest indication of a defect in the workings of her mind. I sent for you to treat her eyes, and left it to you to see if you could discover any symptoms of a diseased mind."
"Was the object she thus supposes present to her, ever exposed in reality to the true waking sense?" said I, suspecting a case of monomania.
"Did she not tell you?" rejoined she. "Come."
And leading me again into her daughter's darkened apartment, she whispered something in her ear, retired, and left us together.
"Your mother informs, me, madam," said I, "that you have seen what exists not; and I am anxious, from professional reasons, to know from yourself whether I am to attribute it to the creative powers of an active fancy, or to an affection of the visual organs, that I have read more of than I have witnessed."
She started, and I saw I had touched a tender part—probably that connected with her own suspicions that her mother and sister deemed her insane.
"It was for this purpose, then, that you have been called to see me?" she replied, hastily. "It is well; I shall be tested by one who at least is not prejudiced. My mother and sister think that I am deranged. I need not tell you that I consider myself sane, although I confess that this illusion of the sense, to which I am subjected, makes me sometimes suspicious of myself. Will you listen to my story?"
I replied that I would; and thus she began:—
Experience, sir, is a world merely to those who live in it—it exists not—its laws cannot be communicated to the heart of youth; the transfusion of the blood of the aged into the veins of the young to produce wisdom, is not more vain than the displacing of the hopes of the young mind by the cold maxims of what man has felt, trembled to feel, and wished he could have anticipated, that he might have been prepared for it. Such has ever been, such is, such will ever be, the history of the sons and daughters of Adam. What but the changes into which I—still comparatively a young woman—have passed—not, it would almost seem, mutations of the same principle, but rather new states of existence—could have wrung from a heart, where hope should still have lighted her lamp, and illuminated my paths, these sentiments of a dearly purchased experience? When I and George Cunningham, my schoolfellow, my first and last lover, and subsequently my husband, passed those brilliant days of youth's sunshine among the green holms and shaggy dells of ——; following the same pursuits—conning the same lessons—indulging in the same dreams of future happiness, and training each other's hearts into a community of feeling and sentiment, till we seemed one being, actuated by the same living principle: in how happy a state of ignorance of those changes that awaited me in the world, did I exist? I would fall into the hackneyed strain of artificial fiction writing, were I to portray the pleasures of a companionship and love that had its beginning in the very first impulses of feeling; with a view to set off by contrast the subsequent events that awaited us, when our happiness should have been realized.