"A spirit . . .
. . . . . .
The undulating and silent well,
And rippling rivulet, and evening gloom,
Now deepening the dark shades, for speech assuming,
Held commune with him; as if he and it
Were all that was."
SHELLEY'S Alastor.
I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies
the return of consciousness. As I lay and looked through the eastern
window of my room, a faint streak of peach-colour, dividing a cloud that
just rose above the low swell of the horizon, announced the approach of
the sun. As my thoughts, which a deep and apparently dreamless sleep had
dissolved, began again to assume crystalline forms, the strange events
of the foregoing night presented themselves anew to my wondering
consciousness. The day before had been my one-and-twentieth birthday.
Among other ceremonies investing me with my legal rights, the keys of an
old secretary, in which my father had kept his private papers, had been
delivered up to me. As soon as I was left alone, I ordered lights in the
chamber where the secretary stood, the first lights that had been there
for many a year; for, since my father's death, the room had been left
undisturbed.
But, as if the darkness had been too long an inmate to
be easily expelled, and had dyed with blackness the walls to which,
bat-like, it had clung, these tapers served but ill to light up the
gloomy hangings, and seemed to throw yet darker shadows into the hollows
of the deep-wrought cornice. All the further portions of the room lay
shrouded in a mystery whose deepest folds were gathered around the dark
oak cabinet which I now approached with a strange mingling of reverence
and curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I was about to turn up to
the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its fossil
remains charred by passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to
learn how my father, whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven
his web of story; how he had found the world, and how the world had left
him. Perhaps I was to find only the records of lands and moneys, how
gotten and how secured; coming down from strange men, and through
troublous times, to me, who knew little or nothing of them all. To solve
my speculations, and to dispel the awe which was fast gathering around
me as if the dead were drawing near, I approached the secretary; and
having found the key that fitted the upper portion, I opened it with
some difficulty, drew near it a heavy high-backed chair, and sat down
before a multitude of little drawers and slides and pigeon-holes. But
the door of a little cupboard in the centre especially attracted my
interest, as if there lay the secret of this long-hidden world. Its key
I found.