The physician, who had attended her, recommended it
to the superior to indulge her in this whim, as the only means of
soothing her distempered fancy; and she was suffered to walk in the
lonely hours of night, attended by the servant, who had accompanied her
from Italy; but, as the indulgence transgressed against the rules of
the convent, it was kept as secret as possible; and thus the mysterious
music of Laurentini had combined with other circumstances, to produce a
report, that not only the château, but its neighbourhood, was haunted. Soon after her entrance into this holy community, and before she had
shown any symptoms of insanity there, she made a will, in which, after
bequeathing a considerable legacy to the convent, she divided the
remainder of her personal property, which her jewels made very
valuable, between the wife of Mons. Bonnac, who was an Italian lady and
her relation, and the nearest surviving relative of the late
Marchioness de Villeroi. As Emily St. Aubert was not only the nearest,
but the sole relative, this legacy descended to her, and thus explained
to her the whole mystery of her father’s conduct. The resemblance between Emily and her unfortunate aunt had frequently
been observed by Laurentini, and had occasioned the singular behaviour,
which had formerly alarmed her; but it was in the nun’s dying hour,
when her conscience gave her perpetually the idea of the Marchioness,
that she became more sensible, than ever, of this likeness, and, in her
frenzy, deemed it no resemblance of the person she had injured, but the
original herself. The bold assertion, that had followed, on the
recovery of her senses, that Emily was the daughter of the Marchioness
de Villeroi, arose from a suspicion that she was so; for, knowing that
her rival, when she married the Marquis, was attached to another lover,
she had scarcely scrupled to believe, that her honour had been
sacrificed, like her own, to an unresisted passion. Of a crime, however, to which Emily had suspected, from her frenzied
confession of murder, that she had been instrumental in the castle of
Udolpho, Laurentini was innocent; and she had herself been deceived,
concerning the spectacle, that formerly occasioned her so much terror,
and had since compelled her, for a while, to attribute the horrors of
the nun to a consciousness of a murder, committed in that castle. It may be remembered, that, in a chamber of Udolpho, hung a black veil,
whose singular situation had excited Emily’s curiosity, and which
afterwards disclosed an object, that had overwhelmed her with horror;
for, on lifting it, there appeared, instead of the picture she had
expected, within a recess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly
paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of
the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle, was, that the
face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were
visible on the features and hands. On such an object, it will be
readily believed, that no person could endure to look twice. Emily, it
may be recollected, had, after the first glance, let the veil drop, and
her terror had prevented her from ever after provoking a renewal of
such suffering, as she had then experienced. Had she dared to look
again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she
would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but
formed of wax. The history of it is somewhat extraordinary, though not
without example in the records of that fierce severity, which monkish
superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind. A member of the house
of Udolpho, having committed some offence against the prerogative of
the church, had been condemned to the penance of contemplating, during
certain hours of the day, a waxen image, made to resemble a human body
in the state, to which it is reduced after death. This penance, serving
as a memento of the condition at which he must himself arrive, had been
designed to reprove the pride of the Marquis of Udolpho, which had
formerly so much exasperated that of the Romish church; and he had not
only superstitiously observed this penance himself, which, he had
believed, was to obtain a pardon for all his sins, but had made it a
condition in his will, that his descendants should preserve the image,
on pain of forfeiting to the church a certain part of his domain, that
they also might profit by the humiliating moral it conveyed. The
figure, therefore, had been suffered to retain its station in the wall
of the chamber, but his descendants excused themselves from observing
the penance, to which he had been enjoined. This image was so horribly natural, that it is not surprising Emily
should have mistaken it for the object it resembled, nor, since she had
heard such an extraordinary account, concerning the disappearing of the
late lady of the castle, and had such experience of the character of
Montoni, that she should have believed this to be the murdered body of
the lady Laurentini, and that he had been the contriver of her death. The situation, in which she had discovered it, occasioned her, at
first, much surprise and perplexity; but the vigilance, with which the
doors of the chamber, where it was deposited, were afterwards secured,
had compelled her to believe, that Montoni, not daring to confide the
secret of her death to any person, had suffered her remains to decay in
this obscure chamber. The ceremony of the veil, however, and the
circumstance of the doors having been left open, even for a moment, had
occasioned her much wonder and some doubts; but these were not
sufficient to overcome her suspicion of Montoni; and it was the dread
of his terrible vengeance, that had sealed her lips in silence,
concerning what she had seen in the west chamber. Emily, in discovering the Marchioness de Villeroi to have been the
sister of Mons. St. Aubert, was variously affected; but, amidst the
sorrow, which she suffered for her untimely death, she was released
from an anxious and painful conjecture, occasioned by the rash
assertion of Signora Laurentini, concerning her birth and the honour of
her parents. Her faith in St. Aubert’s principles would scarcely allow
her to suspect that he had acted dishonourably; and she felt such
reluctance to believe herself the daughter of any other, than her, whom
she had always considered and loved as a mother, that she would hardly
admit such a circumstance to be possible; yet the likeness, which it
had frequently been affirmed she bore to the late Marchioness, the
former behaviour of Dorothée the old housekeeper, the assertion of
Laurentini, and the mysterious attachment, which St. Aubert had
discovered, awakened doubts, as to his connection with the Marchioness,
which her reason could neither vanquish, nor confirm.