He led her to a seat, and sat down by her, while Emily
continued to weep, and Valancourt to hold the hand, which she was
unconscious he had taken, till it was wet with the tears, which grief
for St. Aubert and sympathy for herself had called forth. “I feel,” said he at length, “I feel how insufficient all attempt at
consolation must be on this subject. I can only mourn with you, for I
cannot doubt the source of your tears. Would to God I were mistaken!”

Emily could still answer only by tears, till she rose, and begged they
might leave the melancholy spot, when Valancourt, though he saw her
feebleness, could not offer to detain her, but took her arm within his,
and led her from the fishing-house. They walked silently through the
woods, Valancourt anxious to know, yet fearing to ask any particulars
concerning St. Aubert; and Emily too much distressed to converse. After
some time, however, she acquired fortitude enough to speak of her
father, and to give a brief account of the manner of his death; during
which recital Valancourt’s countenance betrayed strong emotion, and,
when he heard that St. Aubert had died on the road, and that Emily had
been left among strangers, he pressed her hand between his, and
involuntarily exclaimed, “Why was I not there!” but in the next moment
recollected himself, for he immediately returned to the mention of her
father; till, perceiving that her spirits were exhausted, he gradually
changed the subject, and spoke of himself. Emily thus learned that,
after they had parted, he had wandered, for some time, along the shores
of the Mediterranean, and had then returned through Languedoc into
Gascony, which was his native province, and where he usually resided. When he had concluded his little narrative, he sunk into a silence,
which Emily was not disposed to interrupt, and it continued, till they
reached the gate of the château, when he stopped, as if he had known
this to be the limit of his walk. Here, saying, that it was his
intention to return to Estuvière on the following day, he asked her if
she would permit him to take leave of her in the morning; and Emily,
perceiving that she could not reject an ordinary civility, without
expressing by her refusal an expectation of something more, was
compelled to answer, that she should be at home. She passed a melancholy evening, during which the retrospect of all
that had happened, since she had seen Valancourt, would rise to her
imagination; and the scene of her father’s death appeared in tints as
fresh, as if it had passed on the preceding day. She remembered
particularly the earnest and solemn manner, in which he had required
her to destroy the manuscript papers, and, awakening from the lethargy,
in which sorrow had held her, she was shocked to think she had not yet
obeyed him, and determined, that another day should not reproach her
with the neglect. CHAPTER X

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. She hastily put the papers from her;
but the words, which had roused equally her curiosity and terror, she
could not dismiss from her thoughts. So powerfully had they affected
her, that she even could not resolve to destroy the papers immediately;
and the more she dwelt on the circumstance, the more it inflamed her
imagination. Urged by the most forcible, and apparently the most
necessary, curiosity to enquire farther, concerning the terrible and
mysterious subject, to which she had seen an allusion, she began to
lament her promise to destroy the papers. For a moment, she even
doubted, whether it could justly be obeyed, in contradiction to such
reasons as there appeared to be for further information. But the
delusion was momentary. “I have given a solemn promise,” said she, “to observe a solemn
injunction, and it is not my business to argue, but to obey.