Rise up,--rise up, and beg for us thyself, or thou must starve!”--and,
as he spoke, he raised his arm against the helpless old man. At this
horrid sight, Ines shrieked aloud, and the children, rushing forward,
interposed. The wretched father, incensed to madness, dealt blows among
them, which were borne without a murmur; and then, the storm being
exhausted, he sat down and wept. (2) Fact,--it occurred in a French family not many years ago. “At this moment, to the astonishment and terror of all except Walberg,
the old man, who, since the night of his wife’s interment, had never
moved but from his chair to his bed, and that not without assistance,
rose suddenly from his seat, and, apparently in obedience to his son,
walked with a firm and steady pace towards the door. When he had reached
it, he paused, looked back on them with a fruitless effort at
recollection, and went out slowly;--and such was the terror felt by all
at this last ghastly look, which seemed like that of a corse moving on
to the place of its interment, that no one attempted to oppose his
passage, and several moments elapsed before Everhard had the
recollection to pursue him. “In the mean time, Ines had dismissed her children, and sitting as near
as she dared to the wretched father, attempted to address some soothing
expressions to him. Her voice, which was exquisitely sweet and soft,
seemed to produce a mechanical effect on him. He turned towards her at
first,--then leaning his head on his arm, he shed a few silent
tears,--then flinging it on his wife’s bosom, he wept aloud. Ines seized
this moment to impress on his heart the horror she felt from the outrage
he had committed, and adjured him to supplicate the mercy of God for a
crime, which, in her eyes, appeared scarce short of parricide. Walberg
wildly asked what she alluded to; and when, shuddering, she uttered the
words,--“Your father,--your poor old father!”--he smiled with an
expression of mysterious and supernatural confidence that froze her
blood, and, approaching her ear, softly whispered, “I have no father! He
is dead,--long dead! I buried him the night I dug my mother’s grave! Poor old man,” he added with a sigh, “it was the better for him,--he
would have lived only to weep, and perish perhaps with hunger. But I
will tell you, Ines,--and let it be a secret, I wondered what made our
provisions decrease so, till what was yesterday sufficient for four, is
not to-day sufficient for one. I watched, and at last I discovered--it
must be a secret--an old goblin, who daily visited this house. It came
in the likeness of an old man in rags, and with a long white beard, and
it devoured every thing on the table, while the children stood hungry
by! But I struck at--I cursed it,--I chased it in the name of the
All-powerful, and it is gone. Oh it was a fell devouring goblin!--but
it will haunt us no more, and we shall have enough. Enough,” said
the wretched man, involuntarily returning to his habitual
associations,--“enough for to-morrow!”

“Ines, overcome with horror at this obvious proof of insanity, neither
interrupted or opposed him; she attempted only to soothe him, internally
praying against the too probable disturbance of her own intellects. Walberg saw her look of distrust, and, with the quick jealousy of
partial insanity, said, “If you do not credit me in that, still less, I
suppose, will you in the account of that fearful visitation with which I
have latterly been familiar.”--“Oh, my beloved!” said Ines, who
recognized in these words the source of a fear that had latterly, from
some extraordinary circumstances in her husband’s conduct, taken
possession of her soul, and made the fear even of famine trifling in
comparison,--“I dread lest I understand you too well. The anguish of
want and of famine I could have borne,--aye, and seen you bear, but the
horrid words you have lately uttered, the horrid thoughts that escape
you in your sleep,--when I think on these, and guess at”---- “You need
not guess,” said Walberg, interrupting her, “I will tell you all.” And,
as he spoke, his countenance changed from its expression of wildness to
one of perfect sanity and calm confidence,--his features relaxed, his
eye became steady, and his tone firm.--“Every night since our late
distresses, I have wandered out in search of some relief, and
supplicated every passing stranger;--latterly, I have met every night
the enemy of man, who”---- “Oh cease, my love, to indulge these horrible
thoughts,--they are the results of your disturbed unhappy state of
mind.”--“Ines, listen to me. I see that figure as plainly as I see
yours,--I hear his voice as distinctly as you hear mine this moment. Want and misery are not naturally fertile in the production of
imagination,--they grasp at realities too closely. No man, who wants a
meal, conceives that a banquet is spread before him, and that the
tempter invites him to sit down and eat at his ease. No,--no, Ines, the
evil one, or some devoted agent of his in human form, besets me every
night,--and how I shall longer resist the snare, I know not.”--“And in
what form does he appear?” said Ines, hoping to turn the channel of his
gloomy thoughts, while she appeared to follow their direction. “In that
of a middle-aged man, of a serious and staid demeanour, and with nothing
remarkable in his aspect except the light of two burning eyes, whose
lustre is almost intolerable. He fixes them on me sometimes, and I feel
as if there was fascination in their glare. Every night he besets me,
and few like me could have resisted his seductions. He has offered, and
proved to me, that it is in his power to bestow all that human cupidity
could thirst for, on the condition that----I cannot utter! It is one so
full of horror and impiety, that, even to listen to it, is scarce less a
crime than to comply with it!”

“Ines, still incredulous, yet imagining that to soothe his delirium
was perhaps the best way to overcome it, demanded what that condition
was. Though they were alone, Walberg would communicate it only in a
whisper; and Ines, fortified as she was by reason hitherto undisturbed,
and a cool and steady temper, could not but recollect some vague
reports she had heard in her early youth, before she quitted Spain,
of a being permitted to wander through it, with power to tempt men
under the pressure of extreme calamity with similar offers, which had
been invariably rejected, even in the last extremities of despair
and dissolution. She was not superstitious,--but, her memory now
taking part with her husband’s representation of what had befallen
him, she shuddered at the possibility of his being exposed to similar
temptation; and she endeavoured to fortify his mind and conscience,
by arguments equally appropriate whether he was the victim of a
disturbed imagination, or the real object of this fearful persecution.