Now, for the first time, I was at leisure to attend to the state of my strength and my health. My confinement in the inquisition, and the treatment I had experienced, had before rendered me feeble, and almost helpless; but these appeared to be circumstances scarcely worthy of attention, in the situation in which I was then placed. The impulse I felt, in the midst of the confusion in the grand street of Valladolid, produced in me an energy and power of exertion which nothing but the actual experience of the fact could have persuaded me was possible. This energy, once begun, appeared to have the faculty of prolonging itself; and I did not relapse into imbecility, till the occasion seemed to be exhausted which called for my exertion. I examined myself by a mirror with which Mordecai furnished me: I found my hair as white as snow, and my face ploughed with a thousand furrows. I was now fifty-four, an age which, with moderate exercise and a vigorous constitution, often appears like the prime of human existence; but whoever had looked upon me in my present condition, would not have hesitated to affirm that I had reached the eightieth year of my age. I examined with dispassionate remark the state of my intellect: I was persuaded that it had subsided into childishness. My mind had been as much cribbed and immured as my body. I was the mere shadow of a man, of no more power and worth than that which a magic lantern produces upon a wall. These are thy works, Superstition!—this the genuine and proper operation of what is called Christianity! Let the reader judge of what I had passed through and known within those cursed walls by the effects; I have already refused, I continue to refuse, to tell what I suffered, and how those effects were produced. Enough of compassion, enough of complaint: I will confine myself, as far as I am able, to simple history.
Being recovered, as far as the cordials and attention of Mordecai were capable of recovering me, I desired for the remainder of the night to be alone, except that I was still resolved to retain the little Jewess as the pledge of my safety. I was greatly obliged to my host for the punctuality he had already displayed: he had found considerable difficulty in procuring the articles of which I stood in need, owing partly to the lateness of the hour, and partly to the presence of the king, and the general hurry and confusion which had been produced by the solemn entry of the inquisition. His efforts too to recover me from the languor and lethargy into which I had sunk, had a character of generosity; and perhaps I ought now to have trusted him without a hostage. But my heart was too earnestly bent upon accomplishing its present object, to afford harbour to the punctilios of delicacy. The same earnestness caused me to insist upon Mordecai’s repairing the injury which the hinges of the door had sustained; and I was careful to satisfy myself that every thing was restored to a state of perfect security.
I was now once again alone. The little girl, who had been unusually disturbed, and roused at an unseasonable hour, sunk into a profound sleep. I heard the noise which Mordecai made in undressing himself, and composing his limbs upon a mattrass, which he had dragged for the present occasion into the front room, and spread before the hearth. I soon found by the hardness of his breathing that he also was asleep. I unfolded the papers he had brought me; they consisted of various medical ingredients I had directed him to procure; there were also two or three vials, containing syrups and essences. I had near me a pair of scales with which to weigh my ingredients; a vessel of water; the chafing-dish of my host, in which the fire was nearly extinguished; and a small taper, with some charcoal to relight the fire, in case of necessity. While I was occupied in surveying these articles and arranging my materials, a sort of torpor came suddenly over me, so as to allow me no time for resistance. I sunk upon the bed. I remained thus for about half an hour, seemingly without the power of collecting my thoughts. At length I started, felt alarmed, and applied my utmost force of mind to rouse my exertions. While I drove, or attempted to drive, my animal spirits from limb to limb, and from part to part, as if to enquire into the general condition of my frame, I became convinced that I was dying. Let not the reader be surprised at this: twelve years’ imprisonment, in a narrow and unwholesome cell, may well account for so sudden a catastrophe. Strange and paradoxical as it may seem, I believe it will be found in the experiment that the calm and security which succeed to great internal injuries are more dangerous than the pangs and hardships that went before. I was now thoroughly alarmed: I applied myself, with all vigilance and expedition to the compounding my materials. The fire was gone out; the taper was glimmering in the socket: to swallow the julep when I had prepared it, seemed to be the last effort of which my organs and muscles were capable. It was the elixir of immortality, exactly made up according to the prescription of the stranger.
Whether from the potency of the medicine, or the effect of imagination, I felt revived the moment I had swallowed it. I placed myself deliberately in Mordecai’s bed, and drew over me the bed-clothes. I fell asleep almost instantly. I believe my first sleep was perfectly sound and insensible; but in no long time I was visited with the pleasantest dreams imaginable. Nothing was distinct; nothing was attended with the consciousness of my former identity; but every thing was gay, cheerful, invigorating, and delicious. I wandered amidst verdant lawns, and flower-enamelled gardens. I was saluted with the singing of a thousand birds, and the murmuring of a thousand fountains. Kids, fawns, and lambs frisked and gamboled before me. At a distance, through an opening in the trees, I discerned nymphs and their swains dancing a variety of antic measures. I advanced towards them; they approached towards me. Fifes, oboes, recorders, and instruments of a hundred names, commenced a cheerful and melodious concert. Myself and the dancers now were met; they placed me in the midst of them. They began a choral song; the motion of their limbs conformed to their numbers. I was the theme of the general chaunt; they ascribed to me the beauty of Apollo, the strength of Hercules, the invention of Mercury, and the youth of Bacchus.
My sleep was not long; in a few hours I awakened. With difficulty I recognised the objects about me, and recollected where I had been. It seemed to me that my heart had never beat so vigorously, nor my spirits flowed so gay. I was all elasticity and life; I could scarcely hold myself quiet; I felt impelled to bound and leap like a kid upon the mountains. I perceived that my little Jewess was still asleep; she had been unusually fatigued the night before. I know not whether Mordecai’s hour of rising were come; if it were, he was careful not to disturb his guest. I put on the garments he had prepared; I gazed upon the mirror he had left in my apartment. I can recollect no sensation in the course of my life, so unexpected and surprising as what I felt at that moment. The evening before, I had seen my hair white, and my face ploughed with furrows; I looked fourscore. What I beheld now was totally different, yet altogether familiar; it was myself, myself as I had appeared on the day of my marriage with Marguerite de Damville; the eyes, the mouth, the hair, the complexion, every circumstance, point by point, the same. I leaped a gulf of thirty-two years. I waked from a dream, troublesome and distressful beyond all description; but it vanished, like the shades of night upon the burst of a glorious morning in July, and left not a trace behind. I knew not how to take away my eyes from the mirror before me.
I soon began to consider that, if it were astonishing to me that, through all the regions of my countenance, I could discover no trace of what I had been the night before, it would be still more astonishing to my host. This sort of sensation I had not the smallest ambition to produce: one of the advantages of the metamorphosis I had sustained, consisted in its tendency, in the eyes of all that saw me, to cut off every species of connection between my present and my former self. It fortunately happened that the room in which I slept, being constructed upon the model of many others in Spain, had a stair at the further end, with a trap-door in the ceiling, for the purpose of enabling the inhabitant to ascend on the roof in the cool of the day. The roofs were flat, and so constructed, that there was little difficulty in passing along them from house to house, from one end of the street to the other. I availed myself of the opportunity, and took leave of the residence of my land host in a way perfectly unceremonious, determined however speedily to transmit to him the reward I had promised. It may easily be believed that Mordecai was not less rejoiced at the absence of a guest whom the vigilance of the inquisition rendered an uncommonly dangerous one, than I was to quit his habitation. I closed the trap after me, and clambered from roof to roof to a considerable distance. At length I encountered the occasion of an open window, and fortunately descended, unseen by any human being, into the street. Having with difficulty succeeded, on this occasion of public solemnity, in engaging an apartment in one of the hotels of Valladolid, I sent into it, as soon as I was able, a chest, containing every necessary of apparel, and particularly a suit of clothes. I then changed my dress, and threw the clothes which Mordecai had provided into the chest I had purchased. As long as they continued safely locked up, and the key in my possession, no faculty possessed by any human creature could detect my identity, and expose me afresh to my former jailors. The only peril under which I had before laboured, was from Mordecai, who, if he had seen me in the garments he had procured, might have recognised them; and, though a peril from this source came barely within the limits of possibility, it was easily avoided, and I therefore chose to avoid it.
I passed the whole of this day in a species of enjoyment, which, as it has no parallel in the ordinary transactions of mankind, so are there no terms in the received languages of the world that are adequate to the description of it. It has often been a subject of melancholy and complaint among mortals, that, while the whole vegetable system contains in it a principle of perpetual renewal, man alone,—the ornament and lord of the universe, man,—knows no return to youth. When the sun declines in the west, the flowers droop, and fold up their frail and delicate leaves; but soon the eyelids of the morn are again opened, and again they rejoice in his invigorating beams. Upon the approach of winter, the beech, the ash, and the monarch-oak, scatter their withered foliage over the plains; but spring reappears, and nakedness is no longer their reproach, and they clothe themselves anew in their leafy honours. With what a melancholy sensation does the old man survey his decaying limbs! To me, he cries, there is no second morning, and no returning spring. My head, pressed down with years, shall never again erect itself in conscious manhood. These hoary locks shall no more be adorned with the auburn of glossy youth. My weather-beaten trunk shall at no time clothe itself with a smoother rind. A recruited marrow shall never fill these bones, nor a more vigorous sap circulate through my unstrung limbs. I recollect what I was in the prime of manhood, with vain regrets; the memory answers no other end than to torment and upbraid me.
The useless wish of the old man, the object of his hopeless sigh, was mine. Common and every-day blessings have little value in the eye of their possessor. The young man squanders the endowments of youth, and knows not to prize them. If the young man had once been old, if the old man could again be young, then, and then only, they would justly estimate their wealth. The springy limb, the bounding frame, the vigour that sets fatigue at defiance, and revels in pleasures unexhausted, would then by the near and conscious comparison, of feebleness and lassitude, the drooping limb, the aching head, and the frame decayed in all its senses, be well understood. Such was my situation. Yesterday I was fourscore; to-day I was twenty. Yesterday I was a prisoner, crippled in every articulation; to-day I was a citizen of the world, capable of all its delights. To-morrow I was destined to have been dragged to the stake with ignominy, and to suffer intolerable anguish amidst the shouts and huzzas of an unfeeling populace; to-morrow I was at liberty to employ as I pleased, to choose the theatre upon which it should be spent, and the gratifications that should be crowded into it. What was most material, my mind was grown young with my body. Weary of eternal struggle, I had lately resigned the contest, and sunk under the ill-fortune that relentlessly pursued me. Now I felt within me a superfluity of vigour; I panted for something to contend with, and something to conquer. My senses unfolded themselves to all the curiosity of remark; my thoughts seemed capable of industry unwearied, and investigation the most constant and invincible. Ambition revived in my bosom; I longed for new engagements and new relations; I desired to perform something, that I might myself regard with complacence, and that I might see the world start at and applaud.
I determined, for reasons that I shall presently have occasion to unfold, that my first visit should be to my daughters at my paternal estate of St. Leon. I proposed to spend two or three days in preparations for this journey. By mere accident, by a most censurable heedlessness, I became in some degree a spectator of the auto da fé in which I was destined to have been a victim. Unawares I had become entangled in the crowd, and could with difficulty escape, or even prevent my being carried nearer the centre of the scene. I saw the galleries and accommodations that had been erected for the spectators: I saw the windows and roofs of the houses crowded with beholders. The shrieks of the sufferers I could not hear; they were drowned in the infernal exultations of the multitude. But what was worst of all, I discerned some of the condemned, fixed as they were upon small boards, near the top of stakes about four yards high, and therefore greatly above the heads of the assembly, while the flames, abundantly fed with faggots and dry fuel, climbed aloft, and seemed eager to embrace their victims. As I have already said, there were thirty of these death-devoted frames; and, if my eye did not count them all, my fancy well supplied what sense was unable to discover. The impression I felt at that moment was horrible beyond all conception. I exerted my new-found strength, and pushed out of the press with irresistible vigour. If at that instant I could have felt exultation, even in the consciousness of my own safety, I should regard myself as the most execrable of monsters.