Besides, I have here in this little packet of letters the medicine for every m alady of the sick heart.They are Ada's letters; I read them to calm me whenever my misfortune seems to get the better of my endurance.I wanted that half hour to read them in to-night before you came, to make myself fit to see you, and I shall go through them again after you are gone; so, once more, don't be afraid about me.I know I shall succeed with your help, and Ada shall thank you as you deserve to be thanked when we get back to England.If you hear the fools at Naples talk about my being mad, don't trouble yourself to contradict them;the scandal is so contemptible that it must end by contradicting itself."I left him, promising to return early the next day.
When I got back to my hotel, I felt that any idea of sleeping after all that I had seen and heard was out of the question; so Ilit my pipe, and, sitting by the window--how it refreshed my mind just then to look at the calm moonlight!--tried to think what it would be best to do.In the first place, any appeal to doctors or to Alfred's friends in England was out of the question.I could not persuade myself that his intellect was sufficiently disordered to justify me, under existing circumstances, in disclosing the secret which he had intrusted to my keeping.In the second place, all attempts on my part to induce him to abandon the idea of searching out his uncle's remains would be utterly useless after what I had incautiously said to him.Having settled these two conclusions, the only really great difficulty which remained to perplex me was whether I was justified in aiding him to execute his extraordinary purpose.
Supposing that, with my help, he found Mr.Monkton's body, and took it back with him to England, was it right in me thus to lend myself to promoting the marriage which would most likely follow these events--a marriage which it might be the duty of every one to prevent at all hazards? This set me thinking about the extent of his madness, or to speak more mildly and more correctly, of his delusion.Sane he certainly was on all ordinary subjects;nay, in all the narrative parts of what he had said to me on this very evening he had spoken clearly and connectedly.As for the story of the apparition, other men, with intellects as clear as the intellects of their neighbors had fancied themselves pursued by a phantom, and had even written about it in a high strain of philosophical speculation.It was plain that the real hallucination in the case now before me lay in Monkton's conviction of the truth of the old prophecy, and in his idea that the fancied apparition was a supernatural warning to him to evade its denunciations; and it was equally clear that both delusions had been produced, in the first instance, by the lonely life he had led acting on a naturally excitable temperament, which was rendered further liable to moral disease by an hereditary taint of insanity.
Was this curable? Miss Elmslie, who knew him far better than Idid, seemed by her conduct to think so.Had I any reason or right to determine offhand that she was mistaken? Supposing I refused to go to the frontier with him, he would then most certainly depart by himself, to commit all sorts of errors, and perhaps to meet with all sorts of accidents; while I, an idle man, with my time entirely at my own disposal, was stopping at Naples, and leaving him to his fate after I had suggested the plan of his expedition, and had encouraged him to confide in me.In this way I kept turning the subject over and over again in my mind, being quite free, let me add, from looking at it in any other than a practical point of view.I firmly believed, as a derider of all ghost stories, that Alfred was deceiving himself in fancying that he had seen the apparition of his uncle before the news of Mr.
Monkton's death reached England, and I was on this account, therefore, uninfluenced by the slightest infection of my unhappy friend's delusions when I at last fairly decided to accompany him in his extraordinary search.Possibly my harum-scarum fondness for excitement at that time biased me a little in forming my resolution; but I must add, in common justice to myself, that Ialso acted from motives of real sympathy for Monkton, and from a sincere wish to allay, if I could, the anxiety of the poor girl who was still so faithfully waiting and hoping for him far away in England.
Certain arrangements preliminary to our departure, which I found myself obliged to make after a second interview with Alfred, betrayed the object of our journey to most of our Neapolitan friends.The astonishment of everybody was of course unbounded, and the nearly universal suspicion that I must be as mad in my way as Monkton himself showed itself pretty plainly in my presence.Some people actually tried to combat my resolution by telling me what a shameless profligate Stephen Monkton had been--as if I had a strong personal interest in hunting out his remains! Ridicule moved me as little as any arguments of this sort; my mind was made up, and I was as obstinate then as I am now.
In two days' time I had got everything ready, and had ordered the traveling carriage to the door some hours earlier than we had originally settled.We were jovially threatened with "a parting cheer" by all our English acquaintances, and I thought it desirable to avoid this on my friend's account; for he had been more excited, as it was, by the preparations for the journey than I at all liked.Accordingly, soon after sunrise, without a soul in the street to stare at us, we privately left Naples.
Nobody will wonder, I think, that I experienced some difficulty in realizing my own position, and shrank instinctively from looking forward a single day into the future, when I now found myself starting, in company with "Mad Monkton," to hunt for the body of a dead duelist all along the frontier line of the Roman States!
