第35章 Volume 1(35)

And he stood up and stretched out his hand before him;and when he stood up,all that was there,great and small,bowed down with a sighing sound,and a dread came on my heart,and he looked at me,and Icould not speak.I felt I was his own,to do what he liked with,for I knew at once who he was;and he said,"If you promise to return,you may depart for a season;"and the voice he spoke with was terrible and mournful,and the echoes of it went rolling and swelling down the endless cave,and mixing with the trembling of the fire overhead;so that when he sat down there was a sound after him,all through the place,like the roaring of a furnace,and I said,with all the strength I had,"Ipromise to come back--in God's name let me go!"'And with that I lost the sight and the hearing of all that was there,and when my senses came to me again,Iwas sitting in the bed with the blood all over me,and you and the rest praying around the room.'

Here he paused and wiped away the chill drops of horror which hung upon his forehead.

I remained silent for some moments.

The vision which he had just described struck my imagination not a little,for this was long before Vathek and the 'Hall of Eblis'had delighted the world;and the deion which he gave had,as I received it,all the attractions of novelty beside the impressiveness which always belongs to the narration of an EYE-WITNESS,whether in the body or in the spirit,of the scenes which he describes.There was something,too,in the stern horror with which the man related these things,and in the incongruity of his deion,with the vulgarly received notions of the great place of punishment,and of its presiding spirit,which struck my mind with awe,almost with fear.At length he said,with an expression of horrible,imploring earnestness,which I shall never forget--'Well,sir,is there any hope;is there any chance at all?or,is my soul pledged and promised away for ever?is it gone out of my power?must I go back to the place?'

In answering him,I had no easy task to perform;for however clear might be my internal conviction of the groundlessness of his tears,and however strong my scepticism respecting the reality of what he had described,I nevertheless felt that his impression to the contrary,and his humility and terror resulting from it,might be made available as no mean engines in the work of his conversion from prodigacy,and of his restoration to decent habits,and to religious feeling.

I therefore told him that he was to regard his dream rather in the light of a warning than in that of a prophecy;that our salvation depended not upon the word or deed of a moment,but upon the habits of a life;that,in fine,if he at once discarded his idle companions and evil habits,and firmly adhered to a sober,industrious,and religious course of life,the powers of darkness might claim his soul in vain,for that there were higher and firmer pledges than human tongue could utter,which promised salvation to him who should repent and lead a new life.

I left him much comforted,and with a promise to return upon the next day.Idid so,and found him much more cheerful and without any remains of the dogged sullenness which I suppose had arisen from his despair.His promises of amendment were given in that tone of deliberate earnestness,which belongs to deep and solemn determination;and it was with no small delight that I observed,after repeated visits,that his good resolutions,so far from failing,did but gather strength by time;and when I saw that man shake off the idle and debauched companions,whose society had for years formed alike his amusement and his ruin,and revive his long discarded habits of industry and sobriety,I said within myself,there is something more in all this than the operation of an idle dream.

One day,sometime after his perfect restoration to health,I was surprised on ascending the stairs,for the purpose of visiting this man,to find him busily employed in nailing down some planks upon the landing-place,through which,at the commencement of his mysterious vision,it seemed to him that he had sunk.Iperceived at once that he was strengthening the floor with a view to securing himself against such a catastrophe,and could scarcely forbear a smile as I bid 'God bless his work.'