It might not have been so,--I know not how it was. I remember
his lighting me up a narrow stair, and my asking him, was he lighting me
_down_ the steps of the dungeons of the Inquisition?--his throwing open
a door, and my asking him, was it the door of the torture-room?--his
attempting to undress me, and my exclaiming, “Do not bind me too
tight,--I know I must suffer, but be merciful;”--his throwing me on the
bed, while I shrieked, “Well, you have bound me on the rack,
then?--strain it hard, that I may forget myself the sooner; but let your
surgeon not be near to watch my pulse,--let it cease to throb, and let
me cease to suffer.” I remember no more for many days, though I have
struggled to do so, and caught from time to time glimpses of thoughts
better lost. Oh, Sir, there are some _criminals of the imagination_,
whom if we could plunge into the _oubliettes_ of its magnificent but
lightly-based fabric, its lord would reign more happy. * * * * * * *

“Many days elapsed, indeed, before the Jew began to feel his immunity
somewhat dearly purchased, by the additional maintenance of a
troublesome, and, I fear, a deranged inmate. He took the first
opportunity that the recovery of my intellect offered, of hinting this
to me, and inquired mildly what I purposed to do, and where I meant to
go. This question for the first time opened to my view that range of
hopeless and interminable desolation that lay before me,--the
Inquisition had laid waste the whole track of life, as with fire and
sword. I had not a spot to stand on, a meal to earn, a hand to grasp, a
voice to greet, a roof to crouch under, in the whole realm of Spain. “You are not to learn, Sir, that the power of the Inquisition, like that
of death, separates you, by its single touch, from all mortal relations. From the moment its grasp has seized you, all human hands unlock their
hold of yours,--you have no longer father, mother, sister, or child. The
most devoted and affectionate of all those relatives, who, in the
natural intercourse of human life, would have laid their hands under
your feet to procure you a smoother passage over its roughnesses, would
be the first to grasp the faggot that was to reduce you to ashes, if the
Inquisition were to demand the sacrifice. I knew all this; and I felt,
besides, that, had I never been a prisoner in the Inquisition, I was an
isolated being, rejected by father and mother,--the involuntary murderer
of my brother, the only being on earth who loved me, or whom I could
love or profit by,--that being who seemed to flash across my brief
_human_ existence, to illuminate and to blast. The bolt had perished
with the victim. In Spain it was impossible for me to live without
detection, unless I plunged myself into an imprisonment as profound and
hopeless as that of the Inquisition. And, if a miracle were wrought to
convey me out of Spain, ignorant as I was of the language, the habits,
and the modes of obtaining subsistence, in that or any other country,
how could I support myself even for a day. Absolute famine stared me in
the face, and a sense of degradation accompanying my consciousness of my
own utter and desolate helplessness, was the keenest shaft in the
quiver, whose contents were lodged in my heart. My consequence was
actually lessened in my own eyes, by ceasing to become the victim of
persecution, by which I had suffered so long. _While people think it
worth their while to torment us, we are never without some dignity,
though painful and imaginary._ Even in the Inquisition I belonged to
somebody,--I was watched and guarded;--now, I was the outcast of the
whole earth, and I wept with equal bitterness and depression at the
hopeless vastness of the desert I had to traverse. “The Jew, not at all disturbed by these feelings, went daily out for
intelligence, and returned one evening in such raptures, that I could
easily discover he had ascertained his own safety at least, if not mine. He informed me that the current report in Madrid was, that I had
perished in the fall of the burning ruins on the night of the fire. He
added, that this report had received additional currency and strength
from the fact, that the bodies of those who had perished by the fall of
the arch, were, when discovered, so defaced by fire, and so crushed by
the massive fragments, as to be utterly undistinguishable;--their
remains had been collected, however, and mine were supposed to be among
the number. A mass had been performed for them, and _their cinders,
occupying but a single coffin_(3), were interred in the vaults of the
Dominican church, while some of the first families of Spain, in the
deepest mourning, and their faces veiled, testified their grief in
silence for those whom they would have shuddered to acknowledge their
mortal relationship to, had they been still living. Certainly a lump of
cinders was no longer an object even of religious hostility. My mother,
he added, was among the number of mourners, but with a veil so long and
thick, and attendance so few, that it would have been impossible to have
known the Duchess di Monçada, but for the whisper that her appearance
there had been enjoined for penance. He added, what gave me more perfect
satisfaction, that the holy office was very glad to accredit the story
of my death; they wished me to be believed dead, and what the
Inquisition wishes to be believed, is rarely denied belief in Madrid. This signing my certificate of death, was to me the best security for
life. In the communicativeness of his joy, which had expanded his heart,
if not his hospitality, the Jew, as I swallowed my bread and water, (for
my stomach still loathed all animal food), informed me that there was a
procession to take place that evening, the most solemn and superb ever
witnessed in Madrid. The holy office was to appear in all the pomp and
plenitude of its glory, accompanied by the standards of St Dominic and
the cross, while all the ecclesiastical orders in Madrid were to attend
with their appropriate insignia, invested by a strong military guard,
(which, for some reason or other, was judged necessary or proper), and,
attended by the whole populace of Madrid, was to proceed to the
principal church to humiliate themselves for the recent calamity they
had undergone, and implore the saints to be more personally active in
the event of a future conflagration. (3) This extraordinary fact occurred after the dreadful fire which
  consumed sixteen persons in one house, in Stephen’s Green, Dublin,
  1816. The writer of this heard the screams of sufferers whom it was
  impossible to save, for an hour and a half. “The evening came on--the Jew left me; and, under an impression at once
unaccountable and irresistible, I ascended to the highest apartment in
his house, and, with a beating heart, listened for the toll of the bells
that was to announce the commencement of the ceremony. I had not long to
wait.