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Page 66
The season of the assizes approached. I had already been three months
in prison, and although I was still weak and in continual danger of a
relapse, I was obliged to travel nearly a hundred miles to the country
town where the court was held. Mr. Kirwin charged himself with every
care of collecting witnesses and arranging my defence. I was spared
the disgrace of appearing publicly as a criminal, as the case was not
brought before the court that decides on life and death. The grand
jury rejected the bill, on its being proved that I was on the Orkney
Islands at the hour the body of my friend was found; and a fortnight
after my removal I was liberated from prison.
My father was enraptured on finding me freed from the vexations of a
criminal charge, that I was again allowed to breathe the fresh
atmosphere and permitted to return to my native country. I did not
participate in these feelings, for to me the walls of a dungeon or a
palace were alike hateful. The cup of life was poisoned forever, and
although the sun shone upon me, as upon the happy and gay of heart, I
saw around me nothing but a dense and frightful darkness, penetrated by
no light but the glimmer of two eyes that glared upon me. Sometimes
they were the expressive eyes of Henry, languishing in death, the dark
orbs nearly covered by the lids and the long black lashes that fringed
them; sometimes it was the watery, clouded eyes of the monster, as I
first saw them in my chamber at Ingolstadt.
My father tried to awaken in me the feelings of affection. He talked
of Geneva, which I should soon visit, of Elizabeth and Ernest; but
these words only drew deep groans from me. Sometimes, indeed, I felt a
wish for happiness and thought with melancholy delight of my beloved
cousin or longed, with a devouring maladie du pays, to see once more
the blue lake and rapid Rhone, that had been so dear to me in early
childhood; but my general state of feeling was a torpor in which a
prison was as welcome a residence as the divinest scene in nature; and
these fits were seldom interrupted but by paroxysms of anguish and
despair. At these moments I often endeavoured to put an end to the
existence I loathed, and it required unceasing attendance and vigilance
to restrain me from committing some dreadful act of violence.
Yet one duty remained to me, the recollection of which finally
triumphed over my selfish despair. It was necessary that I should
return without delay to Geneva, there to watch over the lives of those
I so fondly loved and to lie in wait for the murderer, that if any
chance led me to the place of his concealment, or if he dared again to
blast me by his presence, I might, with unfailing aim, put an end to
the existence of the monstrous image which I had endued with the
mockery of a soul still more monstrous. My father still desired to
delay our departure, fearful that I could not sustain the fatigues of a
journey, for I was a shattered wreck--the shadow of a human being. My
strength was gone. I was a mere skeleton, and fever night and day
preyed upon my wasted frame. Still, as I urged our leaving Ireland
with such inquietude and impatience, my father thought it best to
yield. We took our passage on board a vessel bound for Havre-de-Grace
and sailed with a fair wind from the Irish shores. It was midnight. I
lay on the deck looking at the stars and listening to the dashing of
the waves. I hailed the darkness that shut Ireland from my sight, and
my pulse beat with a feverish joy when I reflected that I should soon
see Geneva. The past appeared to me in the light of a frightful dream;
yet the vessel in which I was, the wind that blew me from the detested
shore of Ireland, and the sea which surrounded me told me too forcibly
that I was deceived by no vision and that Clerval, my friend and
dearest companion, had fallen a victim to me and the monster of my
creation. I repassed, in my memory, my whole life--my quiet happiness
while residing with my family in Geneva, the death of my mother, and my
departure for Ingolstadt. I remembered, shuddering, the mad enthusiasm
that hurried me on to the creation of my hideous enemy, and I called to
mind the night in which he first lived. I was unable to pursue the
train of thought; a thousand feelings pressed upon me, and I wept
bitterly. Ever since my recovery from the fever I had been in the
custom of taking every night a small quantity of laudanum, for it was
by means of this drug only that I was enabled to gain the rest
necessary for the preservation of life. Oppressed by the recollection
of my various misfortunes, I now swallowed double my usual quantity and
soon slept profoundly. But sleep did not afford me respite from
thought and misery; my dreams presented a thousand objects that scared
me. Towards morning I was possessed by a kind of nightmare; I felt the
fiend's grasp in my neck and could not free myself from it; groans and
cries rang in my ears. My father, who was watching over me, perceiving
my restlessness, awoke me; the dashing waves were around, the cloudy
sky above, the fiend was not here: a sense of security, a feeling that
a truce was established between the present hour and the irresistible,
disastrous future imparted to me a kind of calm forgetfulness, of which
the human mind is by its structure peculiarly susceptible.
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