The Devil's Elixir Part 10

The physician's remedies had been of great service to me; and as, by taking every day longer and longer walks, I had quite recovered my strength, I became convinced that I was able for the fatigues of a pedestrian journey, and resolved to leave a house, which, however suitable to the sick, was by no means a congenial abode for those who were in health.

The plan of going to Rome had been, without any volition of my own, brought so far into execution. I had always been advancing farther towards the place of my destination, and resolved, therefore, that I would now persevere in the same course.

CHAPTER XII.

At last I had taken leave of the charitable brethren, and set out as a pilgrim on that high road, which I was told was the proper route to the great city. Notwithstanding that my health was now thoroughly reinstated, yet I was conscious of a strange apathy of mind, which threw a dark shade on every image, rendering the prospects before me grey, withered, and cloudy. Without even any clear remembrance of my past life, I was completely occupied by cares for the present moment. Towards evening, I always looked out anxiously for some place, (generally a convent or private house,) where I would be able to extort food and shelter for the night. I rejoiced not a little, when I met with persons sufficiently devout to fill my knap-sack and wine-bottle, in return for which I mechanically repeated, according to monastic form, the customary blessings. In short, I had sunk in spirit, as well as in outward observances, into an ordinary, stupid, and depraved mendicant friar.

At last, after many adventures, no one of which deserves particular commemoration, (for they were all of a similar character,) I came at last to a great Capuchin Convent, which, surrounded only by houses belonging to the establishment, and forming in itself a little town, is situated not far from Rome. This convent, though within itself large and populous, is, in other respects, lonely and insulated. The monks are by their rule obliged to receive others of the same order, and I imagined that I should live for some time with much comfort among them.

Accordingly I made up a story, such as I thought would sound favourably in their ears. I pretended that the convent to which I belonged in Germany had been recently broken up; that consequently I had been thrown on the wide world, and wished to be received into some other monastery, under the same laws.

With that hospitality and cheerfulness which are peculiar to the Italian clergy, they, in the first place, entertained me sumptuously, and the Prior formally said, that if no fulfilment of a sacred vow obliged me to travel farther, I was welcome to remain there as long as I chose.

It was now the hour of vespers. The monks went to their appointed places in the choir, and I walked into the church. I was deeply impressed by the bold and magnificent architecture of the great aisle--but, alas! my spirit could now no more be exalted by those raptures which in early days attended me in the church of the Holy Lime-Tree, to which this bore a marked and mysterious resemblance!

When I had completed my devotions at the high altar, I indulged myself in walking through the different subsidiary aisles, contemplating the paintings at various shrines, which, as usual, represented the martyrdoms of the saints, to whom they were severally consecrated. At last I was attracted by a small and retired chapel, where the altar was exquisitely illuminated by the beams of the now setting sun, that streamed in through the painted window.

I wished to examine the picture, and devoutly making the sign of the cross, mounted up the marble steps. Oh, heaven! It was precisely the same, the fatal altar-piece of my own convent--the martyrdom of St Rosalia! Methought, however, the figure was yet more beautiful, more exquisitely attractive and seducing. It was Aurelia, in her fullest bloom of beauty, that I beheld; and my whole past life, which I had begun to forget, with all its wanderings and crimes--the murder of Euphemia, of Hermogen, and of Aurelia, revived on my recollection, as if concentrated instantaneously into one horrible thought, that penetrated my heart and brain, like a burning hot implement of torture.

I threw myself prostrate on the stone floor. I was convulsively shook and torn by my inward conflicts, as if I had been laid on the rack of the most cruel and relentless inquisition. Death would have been welcome--but, alas! death would not come to my relief! Hereupon I began to tear my garments, in the furious rage of despair. I howled in hopeless anguish, so that my voice resounded through the vaulted aisles of the church.

"I am cursed," cried I aloud--"I am cursed for ever. There is for me no grace, no consolation more--neither in this world nor in the next. To h.e.l.l--to h.e.l.l am I doomed! Sentence of eternal d.a.m.nation has gone forth against me--an accursed and abandoned sinner!"

My cries of course alarmed the whole community. People came, lifted me up, and carried me from the altar of St Rosalia. The service was now over, and the monks a.s.sembled in the chapel. At their head was the Prior. He looked at me with an indescribable mildness and gravity of expression, which reminded me of Leonardus. He then advanced and took me by the hand, while to me it seemed as if some blessed saint, hovering in the air, held up the miserable sinner above the fiery and bottomless pool of destruction into which he was about to plunge.

"You are ill and feverish, brother," said the Prior; "the fatigues of your long pilgrimage have been too great a trial of your strength, but we shall carry you safely into the sick ward of the convent, where you will be faithfully attended by our physician, and restored to health."

I could not make any articulate answer to this address. I knelt before him in abject misery, and even kissed the hem of his garment.

Deep-drawn sighs, which I could not repress, betrayed the frightful condition of my soul. The monks again lifted me up, and brought me into the refectorium, where they insisted on my accepting of some refreshments.

On a sign from the Prior, the brethren then retired, and I remained with him alone.

"Brother," he began, "your conscience seems to be loaded with some heavy sins; for nothing but repentance almost without hope, on account of some extraordinary crime, could have given rise to such conduct as you have this evening exhibited. Yet great and boundless are the mercy and long-suffering of G.o.d; very powerful, too, is the intercession of the saints. Therefore, take courage! You shall confess to me; and when this duty is fulfilled, the consolations of the church shall not be wanting."

These words in themselves were not remarkable; but the tone and manner of the Prior made on me such an impression, that at this moment methought the mysterious pilgrim of the Holy Lime-Tree stood beside me, and as if he were the only being on the wide earth to whom I was bound to disclose the horrors of my life, and from whom I must allow nothing to remain concealed. Still I was unable to speak. I could only prostrate myself again upon the earth before the old man.

"I am now obliged," said he, "to return to the chapel. Should you resolve to follow my counsel, you will find me there."

My determination was already fixed. As soon as I had, by a great effort, recovered some degree of composure, I hastened after the Prior, and found him waiting in the confessional. Acting according to the impulse of the moment, I began to speak, for the first time since a very long period, without the slightest attempt at disguise. On the contrary, I confessed all the adventures of my life, from first to last, without mitigating a single circ.u.mstance, which the severest censor could have suggested against me!

Horrible was the penance which the Prior now imposed upon me! Forbid to appear again in the church--shut out like an alien from the society of the monks, I was henceforth confined to the charnel vaults of the convent--miserably prolonging my life by a stinted portion of tasteless roots and water, scourging myself with knotted ropes, and mangling my flesh with various implements of martyrdom, which the ingenuity of demoniacal malevolence had _first_ invented, lifting up my voice only in bitter accusations against myself, or in the most pa.s.sionate and abject supplications for deliverance from that h.e.l.l whose flames already seemed to burn within me!

But when my blood streamed from an hundred wounds--when pain, in a hundred scorpion stings, a.s.sailed me--and nature yielded at last, from inability to continue the conflict, so that I fell asleep like an exhausted child, even in despite of my torments--then the horrid imagery of dreams molested me with a new and involuntary martyrdom.

Methought I saw Euphemia, who came floating towards me in all the luxuriance of her beauty, and casting on me the most seductive glances.

But I cried out aloud, "What would'st thou from me, thou accursed sinful woman? No! h.e.l.l shall not triumph over the truly penitent!" Then methought her form, before so wanton and luxurious, shook and s.h.i.+vered.

She threw aside her robes, and a horror, like that of annihilation, seized upon me; for I saw that her body was dried up into a skeleton, and through the ribs of the spectre I saw not worms, but numberless serpents that twined and twisted within and without, thrusting out their heads and forked burning tongues towards me.

"Away!--begone!" cried I, in delirium; "thy serpents are stinging my already wounded flesh. They would fatten on my heart's-blood,--but then--I should die--I should die--Death would release me from thy vengeance!"

"My serpents," howled out the spectre, who now seemed like an infernal fury,--"my serpents may nourish themselves from thy heart's-blood, but herein consists not thy torment, oh wretched sinner! Thy pain is within thine own bosom, and in vain hopest thou for release in death. Thy torment is the thought of thine own crimes, and this thought is eternal!"

Hereafter the figure of Hermogen, streaming with blood, rose up out of the dusky void, and Euphemia fled before him. He, too, staid not; but rushed past, with an hideous groan, and pointing to a wound in his throat, which had the form of the cross.

I now wished to pray; but my senses were lost and overcome in the confusion that ensued. At first the whole air was animated, and filled with rustling and flapping of wings, and gibbering of unearthly voices.

Then mortals, whom I had before known in the world, appeared metamorphosed into the most insane caricatures. Heads, with well-known features, came crawling about me on scarecrow legs, which grew out of their own ears. Strange winged monsters, too, which I knew not, and could not name, came floating through the air. Among these were ravens, and other birds, with human faces. But at last, these gave place to the Bishop's choir-master, at Konigswald, with his sister. The latter wheeled herself about in a wild and furious _walz_, to which her brother supplied the music; but he kept all the while strumming on his own breast, which had become a violin.

Belcampo, whom I recognised, although he wore a hateful lizard's head, and sat upon a disgusting winged serpent, came driving up towards me. He wanted to comb my beard with a red-hot iron comb; but could not succeed in his attempt. The tumult always became wilder and wilder. More strange and indescribable were the figures, from the smallest beetle, dancing on large human feet, up to the long drawn-out horse skeleton, with blazing eyes, and with his own hide made into a pillion, upon which sat a rider, with a gleaming owl's head. A gigantic bottomless beaker served for his coat of mail, and an inverted funnel was his helmet.

"h.e.l.l," cried a voice, "is in a mood of mirth, and triumphs!" Hereupon I heard myself laugh aloud; but the exertion of laughter tore my breast; my pain became more scorching, and my wounds bled more fiercely.

At last the rabble rout vanished, and there came forward the glorious form of a woman more beauteous than the fairest of the boasted Circa.s.sians on earth! She walked up towards me.--"Oh, heaven, it is Aurelia!"--"I live," said she; "I live, and I am now for ever thine!"

Then the raging fires of sinful pa.s.sion once more arose within me. I flew to Aurelia, seized and embraced her with fervour. All weakness and exhaustion were utterly forgotten; but instead of her light and sylph-like form, methought I felt the weight and the torture of burning lead or iron laid on my breast. My visage and eyes, too, were scratched and wounded as if with rough bristles, like a wool-dresser's comb; and Satan roared aloud, with thrilling laughter--"Now, _now_ art thou wholly mine!"

With a shriek of terror I awoke, and anon my blood flowed anew in streams, from the strokes of the knotted whip, with which, in hopeless agony, I chastised myself. For the crime of that interview with Aurelia, though but in a dream, demanded double penance, and I was resolved to run the risk even of committing indirect suicide, rather than omit one iota of the prescribed inflictions.

At last, the period appointed by the Prior for my seclusion in the vaults was over, and, by his express command, I was obliged to remove from thence, in order to finish the remainder of my penance in the convent, although my cell was yet to be separated from all the other brethren; for, by such gradations, I was at last to arrive at his permission to return to the church, and to the society of the monks.

But with the latter gradations of penance I was not myself satisfied. I was enjoined only solitude and a daily use of the knotted rope; but I stedfastly refused every better sort of food which was now offered to me; and when at last allowed to enter the church, I lay for whole days on the cold marble floor, before the shrine of St Rosalia, and chastised myself in my cell in the most cruel and immoderate degree. By these outward sufferings, I thought that I should overcome the more fearful pains by which I was inwardly tormented, but in vain! Those phantoms, the off-spring of my own perturbed imagination, always returned, and I believed myself given up a helpless prey to Satan, who thus, for his own special divertis.e.m.e.nt, a.s.sailed me, and enticed me to commit those sins in _thought_, which in _deed_ were no longer in my power.

The severe penance imposed upon me, and the unheard-of perseverance with which it was fulfilled, excited in the highest degree the attention of the monks. They contemplated me with a kind of reverential awe, and many times I heard whisperings among them--"He is indeed a saint!" This expression was to me unspeakably distressing, for it reminded me vividly of that moment in the Capuchin Convent of Konigswald, when, in my outrageous delirium, I had called out to the spectral painter, "I am the blessed St Anthony!"

The very last and concluding stage of the penance imposed by the Prior, had now pa.s.sed away, yet I had never desisted from self-martyrdom.

Nature seemed unable to bear up any longer against the violence which I inflicted. My eyes were dim and sunk in their sockets. My bleeding frame was become a mere skeleton, so that, when for hours I had lain on the marble floor, I was not able to raise myself till the monks came to a.s.sist me.

At last, the Prior one day sent for me to his consulting-room.

"Brother," said he, "do you now feel, after the severe penance you have undergone, your mind soothed and lightened? Have the consolations of Heaven been poured upon you?"

In the hollow tone of despair, I answered him, "No!"

"Brother," he resumed, "when, after your confession of horrid crimes, I inflicted on you that severe penance, I satisfied the laws of the church, which demand that a malefactor whom the arm of justice has not reached, but who voluntarily confesses his evil actions, should also, by his outward conduct, prove the _reality_ of his repentance. Yet I believe, (and the best authorities are on my side,) that the most excruciating torments which the penitent can inflict on himself, do not, as soon as he himself grounds any confidence on these exercises, diminish, by one fraction, the amount of his guilt. To no human intellect is it given to explain how the omniscient and eternal Ruler measures and weighs the deeds of mankind; but lost for ever must that mortal be, who deludes himself with expectations of taking Heaven by storm, through the force of penitential infliction.

"Moreover, the individual who believes that, by the fulfilment of such duties, the crimes of which he has been convicted are, of necessity, blotted out and atoned, proves, by this very belief, that his inward repentance has neither been true nor complete. But as for you, dear brother Medardus, you have yet experienced no consolation, and _this_, in my opinion, proves the truth of your conversion. Give up now, I command you, all chastis.e.m.e.nts--allow yourself better food, and no longer avoid the society of your brethren.

"Learn, besides, that your extraordinary life, with all its complicated involvements, is better known to me than it is even to yourself. A fatality from which you could not escape, gave to the devil a certain influence over you; and, while you committed crimes which to your own nature were abhorrent, you were only his tool, or implement.

"Dream not, however, that you are on this account less sinful in the eyes of Heaven, or of the church, for on you was bestowed ample power, if you had had the resolution to exert it, to conquer in a spirited battle the fiend who beset you. In what mortal heart has not this influence of our arch-enemy raged like a tempest, resisting every impulse of good? But without this conflict, virtue could have no existence--For in what doth virtue consist, but in the triumph (after a hard-fought battle) of good over evil?