Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker Part 22

Having gained the foot of the staircase, I knocked, but my knocking was wholly disregarded. A light had appeared in an upper chamber. It was not, indeed, in one of those apartments which the family permanently occupied, but in that which, according to rural custom, was reserved for guests; but it indubitably betokened the presence of some being by whom my doubts might be solved. These doubts were too tormenting to allow of scruples and delay. I mounted the stairs.

At each chamber-door I knocked, but I knocked in vain. I tried to open, but found them to be locked. I at length reached the entrance of that in which a light had been discovered. Here it was certain that some one would be found; but here, as well as elsewhere, my knocking was unnoticed.

To enter this chamber was audacious, but no other expedient was afforded me to determine whether the house had any inhabitants. I therefore entered, though with caution and reluctance. No one was within, but there were sufficient traces of some person who had lately been here. On the table stood a travelling-escritoire, open, with pens and inkstand. A chair was placed before it, and a candle on the right hand. This apparatus was rarely seen in this country. Some traveller, it seemed, occupied this room, though the rest of the mansion was deserted. The pilgrim, as these appearances testified, was of no vulgar order, and belonged not to the cla.s.s of periodical and every-day guests.

It now occurred to me that the occupant of this apartment could not be far off, and that some danger and embarra.s.sment could not fail to accrue from being found, thus accoutred and garbed, in a place sacred to the study and repose of another. It was proper, therefore, to withdraw, and either to resume my journey, or wait for the stranger's return, whom perhaps some temporary engagement had called away, in the lower and public room. The former now appeared to be the best expedient, as the return of this unknown person was uncertain, as well as his power to communicate the information which I wanted.

Had paper, as well as the implements of writing, lain upon the desk, perhaps my lawless curiosity would not have scrupled to have pried into it. On the first glance nothing of that kind appeared; but now, as I turned towards the door, somewhat, lying beside the desk, on the side opposite the candle, caught my attention. The impulse was instantaneous and mechanical that made me leap to the spot and lay my hand upon it.

Till I felt it between my fingers, till I brought it near my eyes and read frequently the inscriptions that appeared upon it, I was doubtful whether my senses had deceived me.

Few, perhaps, among mankind, have undergone vicissitudes of peril and wonder equal to mine. The miracles of poetry, the transitions of enchantment, are beggarly and mean compared with those which I had experienced. Pa.s.sage into new forms, overleaping the bars of time and s.p.a.ce, reversal of the laws of inanimate and intelligent existence, had been mine to perform and to witness.

No event had been more fertile of sorrow and perplexity than the loss of thy brother's letters. They went by means invisible, and disappeared at a moment when foresight would have least predicted their disappearance.

They now placed themselves before me, in a manner equally abrupt, in a place and by means no less contrary to expectation. The papers which I now seized were those letters. The parchment cover, the string that tied and the wax that sealed them, appeared not to have been opened or violated.

The power that removed them, from my cabinet, and dropped them in this house,--a house which I rarely visited, which I had not entered during the last year, with whose inhabitants I maintained no cordial intercourse, and to whom my occupations and amus.e.m.e.nts, my joys and my sorrows, were unknown,--was no object even of conjecture. But they were not possessed by any of the family. Some stranger was here, by whom they had been stolen, or into whose possession they had, by some incomprehensible chance, fallen.

That stranger was near. He had left this apartment for a moment. He would speedily return. To go hence might possibly occasion me to miss him. Here, then, I would wait, till he should grant me an interview. The papers were mine, and were recovered. I would never part with them. But to know by whose force or by whose stratagems I had been bereaved of them thus long, was now the supreme pa.s.sion of my soul. I seated myself near a table and anxiously waited for an interview, on which I was irresistibly persuaded to believe that much of my happiness depended.

Meanwhile, I could not but connect this incident with the destruction of my family. The loss of these papers had excited transports of grief; and yet to have lost them thus was perhaps the sole expedient by which their final preservation could be rendered possible. Had they, remained in my cabinet, they could not have escaped the destiny which overtook the house and its furniture. Savages are not accustomed to leave their exterminating work unfinished. The house which they have plundered they are careful to level with the ground. This not only their revenge, but their caution, prescribes. Fire may originate by accident as well as by design, and the traces of pillage and murder are totally obliterated by the flames.

These thoughts were interrupted by the shutting of a door below, and by footsteps ascending the stairs. My heart throbbed at the sound. My seat became uneasy and I started on my feet. I even advanced half-way to the entrance of the room. My eyes were intensely fixed upon the door. My impatience would have made me guess at the person of this visitant by measuring his shadow, if his shadow were first seen; but this was precluded by the position of the light. It was only when the figure entered, and the whole person was seen, that my curiosity was gratified.

He who stood before me was the parent and fosterer of my mind, the companion and instructor of my youth, from whom I had been parted for years, from whom I believed myself to be forever separated,--Sa.r.s.efield himself!

Chapter XXIV.

My deportment, at an interview so much desired and so wholly unforeseen, was that of a maniac. The petrifying influence of surprise yielded to the impetuosities of pa.s.sion. I held him in my arms; I wept upon his bosom; I sobbed with emotion which, had it not found pa.s.sage at my eyes, would have burst my heart-strings. Thus I, who had escaped the deaths that had previously a.s.sailed me in so many forms, should have been reserved to solemnize a scene like this by--_dying for joy_!

The sterner pa.s.sions and habitual austerities of my companion exempted him from pouring out this testimony of his feelings. His feelings were, indeed, more allied to astonishment and incredulity than mine had been.

My person was not instantly recognised. He shrunk from my embrace as if I were an apparition or impostor. He quickly disengaged himself from my arms, and, withdrawing a few paces, gazed upon me as on one whom he had never before seen.

These repulses were ascribed to the loss of his affection. I was not mindful of the hideous guise in which I stood before him, and by which he might justly be misled to imagine me a ruffian or a lunatic. My tears flowed now on a new account, and I articulated, in a broken and faint voice, "My master! my friend! Have you forgotten, have you ceased to love me?"

The sound of my voice made him start and exclaim, "Am I alive? am I awake? Speak again, I beseech you, and convince me that I am not dreaming or delirious."

"Can you need any proof," I answered, "that it is Edgar Huntly, your pupil, your child, that speaks to you?"

He now withdrew his eyes from me and fixed them on the floor. After a pause he resumed, in emphatic accents:--"Well, I have lived to this age in unbelief. To credit or trust in miraculous agency was foreign to my nature, but now I am no longer skeptical. Call me to any bar, and exact from me an oath that you have twice been dead and twice recalled to life; that you move about invisibly, and change your place by the force, not of muscles, but of thought, and I will give it.

"How came you hither? Did you penetrate the wall? Did you rise through the floor?

"Yet surely 'tis an error. You could not be he whom twenty witnesses affirmed to have beheld a lifeless and mangled corpse upon the ground, whom my own eyes saw in that condition.

"In seeking the spot once more to provide you a grave, you had vanished.

Again I met you. You plunged into a rapid stream, from a height from which it was impossible to fall and to live; yet, as if to set the limits of nature at defiance, to sport with human penetration, you rose upon the surface; you floated; you swam; thirty bullets were aimed at your head, by marksmen celebrated for the exactness of their sight. I myself was of the number, and I never missed what I desired to hit.

"My predictions were confirmed by the event. You ceased to struggle; you sunk to rise no more; and yet, after these acc.u.mulated deaths, you light upon this floor, so far distant from the scene of your catastrophe, over s.p.a.ces only to be pa.s.sed, in so short a time as has since elapsed, by those who have wings.

"My eyes, my ears, bear testimony to your existence now, as they formerly convinced me of your death. What am I to think? what proofs am I to credit?" There he stopped.

Every accent of this speech added to the confusion of my thoughts. The allusions that my friend had made were not unintelligible. I gained a glimpse of the complicated errors by which we had been mutually deceived. I had fainted on the area before Deb's hut. I was found by Sa.r.s.efield in this condition, and imagined to be dead.

The man whom I had seen upon the promontory was not an Indian. He belonged to a numerous band of pursuers, whom my hostile and precipitate deportment caused to suspect me for an enemy. They that fired from the steep were friends. The interposition that screened me from so many bullets was indeed miraculous. No wonder that my voluntary sinking, in order to elude their shots, was mistaken for death, and that, having accomplished the destruction of this foe, they resumed their pursuit of others. But how was Sa.r.s.efield apprized that it was I who plunged into the river? No subsequent event was possible to impart to him the incredible truth.

A pause of mutual silence ensued. At length Sa.r.s.efield renewed his expressions of amazement at this interview, and besought me to explain why I had disappeared by night from my uncle's house, and by what series of unheard-of events this interview was brought about. Was it indeed Huntly whom he examined and mourned over at the threshold of Deb's hut.

Whom he had sought in every thicket and cave in the ample circuit of Norwalk and Chetasco? Whom he had seen perish in the current of the Delaware?

Instead of noticing his questions, my soul was harrowed with anxiety respecting the fate of my uncle and sisters. Sa.r.s.efield could communicate the tidings which would decide on my future lot and set my portion in happiness or misery. Yet I had not breath to speak my inquiries. Hope tottered, and I felt as if a single word would be sufficient for its utter subversion. At length I articulated the name of my uncle.

The single word sufficiently imparted my fears, and these fears needed no verbal confirmation. At that dear name my companion's features were overspread by sorrow.

"Your uncle," said he, "is dead."

"Dead? Merciful Heaven! And my sisters too! Both?"

"Your sisters are alive and well."

"Nay," resumed I, in faltering accents, "jest not with my feelings. Be not cruel in your pity. Tell me the truth."

"I have said the truth. They are well, at Mr. Inglefield's."

My wishes were eager to a.s.sent to the truth of these tidings. The better part of me was, then, safe: but how did they escape the fate that overtook my uncle? How did they evade the destroying hatchet and the midnight conflagration? These doubts were imparted in a tumultuous and obscure manner to my friend. He no sooner fully comprehended them, than he looked at me with some inquietude and surprise.

"Huntly," said he, "are you mad? What has filled you with these hideous prepossessions? Much havoc has indeed been committed in Chetasco and the wilderness, and a log hut has been burnt, by design or by accident, in Solesbury; but that is all. Your house has not been a.s.sailed by either firebrand or tomahawk. Every thing is safe and in its ancient order. The master indeed is gone, but the old man fell a victim to his own temerity and hardihood. It is thirty years since he retired with three wounds from the field of Braddock; but time in no degree abated his adventurous and military spirit. On the first alarm, he summoned his neighbours, and led them in pursuit of the invaders. Alas! he was the first to attack them, and the only one who fell in the contest."

These words were uttered in a manner that left me no room to doubt of their truth. My uncle had already been lamented, and the discovery of the nature of his death, so contrary to my forebodings, and of the safety of my girls, made the state of my mind partake more of exultation and joy than of grief or regret.

But how was I deceived? Had not my fusil been found in the hands of an enemy? Whence could he have plundered it but from my own chamber? It hung against the wall of a closet, from which no stranger could have taken it except by violence. My perplexities and doubts were not at an end, but those which const.i.tuted my chief torment were removed. I listened to my friend's entreaties to tell him the cause of my elopement, and the incidents that terminated in the present interview.

I began with relating my return to consciousness in the bottom of the pit; my efforts to free myself from this abhorred prison; the acts of horror to which I was impelled by famine, and their excruciating consequences; my gaining the outlet of the cavern, the desperate expedient by which I removed the impediment to my escape, and the deliverance of the captive girl; the contest I maintained before Deb's hut; my subsequent wanderings; the banquet which hospitality afforded me; my journey to the river-bank; my meditations on the means of reaching the road; my motives for hazarding my life by plunging into the stream; and my subsequent perils and fears till I reached the threshold of this habitation.

"Thus," continued I, "I have complied with your request. I have told all that I myself know. What were the incidents between my sinking to rest at my uncle's and my awaking in the chambers of the hill; by what means and by whose contrivance, preternatural or human, this transition was effected, I am unable to explain; I cannot even guess.

"What has eluded my sagacity may not be beyond the reach of another.

Your own reflections on my tale, or some facts that have fallen under your notice, may enable you to furnish a solution. But, meanwhile, how am I to account for your appearance on this spot? This meeting was unexpected and abrupt to you, but it has not been less so to me. Of all mankind, Sa.r.s.efield was the furthest from my thoughts when I saw these tokens of a traveller and a stranger.

"You were imperfectly acquainted with my wanderings. You saw me on the ground before Deb's hut. You saw me plunge into the river. You endeavoured to destroy me while swimming; and you knew, before my narrative was heard, that Huntly was the object of your enmity. What was the motive of your search in the desert, and how were you apprized of my condition? These things are not less wonderful that any of those which I have already related."

During my tale the features of Sa.r.s.efield betokened the deepest attention. His eye strayed not a moment from my face. All my perils and forebodings were fresh in my remembrance: they had scarcely gone by; their skirts, so to speak, were still visible. No wonder that my eloquence was vivid and pathetic; that I portrayed the past as if it were the present scene; and that not my tongue only, but every muscle and limb, spoke.

When I had finished my relation, Sa.r.s.efield sank into thoughtfulness.

From this, after a time, he recovered, and said, "Your tale, Huntly, is true; yet, did I not see you before me, were I not acquainted with the artlessness and rect.i.tude of your character, and, above all, had not my own experience, during the last three days, confirmed every incident, I should question its truth. You have amply gratified my curiosity, and deserve that your own should be gratified as fully. Listen to me.

"Much has happened since we parted, which shall not be now mentioned. I promised to inform you of my welfare by letter, and did not fail to write; but whether my letters were received, or any were written by you in return, or if written were ever transmitted, I cannot tell: none were ever received.