Can such things be,
And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder?
MACBETH
On the next morning, Emily ordered a fire to be lighted in the stove
of the chamber, where St. Aubert used to sleep; and, as soon as she had
breakfasted, went thither to burn the papers. Having fastened the
door to prevent interruption, she opened the closet where they were
concealed, as she entered which, she felt an emotion of unusual awe,
and stood for some moments surveying it, trembling, and almost afraid to
remove the board. There was a great chair in one corner of the closet,
and, opposite to it, stood the table, at which she had seen her father
sit, on the evening that preceded his departure, looking over, with so
much emotion, what she believed to be these very papers.
The solitary life, which Emily had led of late, and the melancholy
subjects, on which she had suffered her thoughts to dwell, had rendered
her at times sensible to the 'thick-coming fancies' of a mind greatly
enervated. It was lamentable, that her excellent understanding should
have yielded, even for a moment, to the reveries of superstition, or
rather to those starts of imagination, which deceive the senses into
what can be called nothing less than momentary madness. Instances of
this temporary failure of mind had more than once occurred since her
return home; particularly when, wandering through this lonely mansion in
the evening twilight, she had been alarmed by appearances, which would
have been unseen in her more cheerful days. To this infirm state of her
nerves may be attributed what she imagined, when, her eyes glancing
a second time on the arm-chair, which stood in an obscure part of the
closet, the countenance of her dead father appeared there. Emily stood
fixed for a moment to the floor, after which she left the closet.
Her spirits, however, soon returned; she reproached herself with the
weakness of thus suffering interruption in an act of serious importance,
and again opened the door. By the directions which St. Aubert had given
her, she readily found the board he had described in an opposite corner
of the closet, near the window; she distinguished also the line he
had mentioned, and, pressing it as he had bade her, it slid down, and
disclosed the bundle of papers, together with some scattered ones, and
the purse of louis. With a trembling hand she removed them, replaced the
board, paused a moment, and was rising from the floor, when, on looking
up, there appeared to her alarmed fancy the same countenance in the
chair. The illusion, another instance of the unhappy effect which
solitude and grief had gradually produced upon her mind, subdued her
spirits; she rushed forward into the chamber, and sunk almost senseless
into a chair. Returning reason soon overcame the dreadful, but pitiable
attack of imagination, and she turned to the papers, though still with
so little recollection, that her eyes involuntarily settled on the
writing of some loose sheets, which lay open; and she was unconscious,
that she was transgressing her father's strict injunction, till a
sentence of dreadful import awakened her attention and her memory
together.