The very thirst of my body
seemed to vanish in this fiery thirst of the soul for communication,
where all communication was unutterable, impossible, hopeless. Perhaps
the condemned spirits will feel thus at their final sentence, when they
know all that is to be suffered, and dare not disclose to each other
that horrible truth which is no longer a secret, but which the profound
silence of their despair would seem to make one. The secret of silence
is the only secret. Words are a blasphemy against that taciturn and
invisible God, whose presence enshrouds us in our last extremity. These
moments that appeared to me endless, were soon to cease. My companion
sprung up,--he uttered a cry of joy. I imagined him deranged,--he was
not. He exclaimed, “Light, light,--the light of heaven; we are near the
trap-door, I see the light through it.” Amid all the horrors of our
situation, he had kept his eye constantly turned upwards, for he knew
that, if we were near it, the smallest glimmering of light would be
visible in the intense darkness that enveloped us. He was right. I
started up,--I saw it too. With locked hands, with dropt and wordless
lips, with dilated and thirsting eyes, we gazed upwards. A thin line of
grey light appeared above our heads. It broadened, it grew brighter,--it
_was_ the light of heaven, and its breezes too came fluttering to us
through the chinks of the trap-door that opened into the garden.”




CHAPTER IX. “Though life and liberty seemed so near, our situation was still very
critical. The morning light that aided our escape, might open many an
eye to mark it. There was not a moment to be lost. My companion proposed
to ascend first, and I did not venture to oppose him. I was too much in
his power to resist; and in early youth superiority of depravity always
seems like a superiority of power. We reverence, with a prostituted
idolatry, those who have passed through the degrees of vice before us. This man was criminal, and crime gave him a kind of heroic immunity in
my eyes. Premature knowledge in life is always to be purchased by guilt. He knew more than I did,--he was my all in this desperate attempt. I
dreaded him as a demon, yet I invoked him as a god. “In the end I submitted to his proposal. I was very tall, but he was
much stronger than I. He rose on my shoulders, I trembled under his
weight, but he succeeded in raising the trap-door,--the full light of
day broke on us both. In a moment he dropt his hold of the door,--he
fell to the ground with a force that struck me down. He exclaimed, “The
workmen are there, they have come about the repairs, we are lost if we
are discovered. They are there, the garden is full of them already, they
will be there the whole day. That cursed lamp, it has undone us! Had it
but kept in for a few moments, we might have been in the garden, might
have crossed the wall, might have been at liberty, and now----” He fell
to the ground convulsed with rage and disappointment, as he spoke. To me
there was nothing so terrible in this intelligence. That we were
disappointed for a time was evident, but we had been relieved from the
most horrible of all fears, that of wandering in famine and darkness
till we perished,--we had found the way to the trap-door. I had
unfailing confidence in Juan’s patience and zeal. I was sure that if he
was watching for us on that night, he would watch for many a successive
night. Finally, I felt we had but twenty-four hours or less to wait, and
what was that to the eternity of hours that must otherwise be wasted in
a convent. I suggested all this to my companion as I closed the
trap-door; but I found in his complaints, imprecations, and tossing
restlessness of impatience and despair, the difference between man and
man in the hour of trial. He possessed active, and I passive fortitude. Give him something to do, and he would do it at the risk of limb, and
life, and soul,--he never murmured. Give me something to suffer, to
undergo, to submit, and I became at once the _hero of submission_. While
this man, with all his physical strength, and all his mental hardihood,
was tossing on the earth with the imbecillity of an infant, in a
paroxysm of unappeasable passion, I was his consoler, adviser, and
supporter. At last he suffered himself to hear reason; he agreed that we
must remain twenty-four hours more in the passage, on which he bestowed
a whole litany of curses. So we determined to stand in stillness and
darkness till night; but such is the restlessness of the human heart,
that this arrangement, which a few hours before we would have embraced
as the offer of a benignant angel for our emancipation, began to
display, as we were compelled to examine its aspect more closely,
certain features that were repulsive almost to hideousness. We were
exhausted nearly to death. Our physical exertions had been, for the last
few hours, almost incredible; in fact, I am convinced that nothing but
the consciousness that we were engaged in a struggle for life or death,
could have enabled us to support it, and now that the struggle was over,
we began to feel our weakness. Our mental sufferings had not been
less,--we had been excruciated body and soul alike. Could our mental
struggles have operated like our bodily ones, we would have been seen to
weep drops of blood, as we felt we were doing at every step of our
progress. Recollect too, Sir, the unnatural atmosphere we had breathed
so long, amid darkness and danger, and which now began to show its
anti-vital and pestilent effect, in producing alternately on our bodies
deluges of perspiration, succeeded by a chill that seemed to freeze the
very marrow. In this state of mental fever, and bodily exhaustion, we
had now to wait many hours, in darkness, without food, till Heaven
pleased to send us night. But how were those hours to be passed? The
preceding day had been one of strict abstinence,--we began already to
feel the gnawings of hunger, a hunger not to be appeased. We must fast
till the moment of liberation, and we must fast amid stone walls, and
damp seats on floors of stone, which diminished every moment the
strength necessary to contend with their impenetrable hardness,--their
withering chillness. “The last thought that occurred to me was,--with what a companion those
hours must be passed. With a being whom I abhorred from my very soul,
while I felt that his presence was at once an irrepealable curse, and an
invincible necessity. So we stood, shivering under the trap-door, not
daring to whisper our thoughts to each other, but feeling _that despair
of incommunication_ which is perhaps the severest curse that can be
inflicted on those who are compelled to be together, and compelled, by
the same necessity that imposes their ungenial union, not even to
communicate their fears to each other. We _hear_ the throb of each
others hearts, and yet dare not say, “My heart beats in unison with
yours.”

“As we stood thus, the light became suddenly eclipsed.