CHAPTER XLI.

BENUMBED, bedraggled, and bewildered, I
entered Feldkirch late at night, my wrists cut
with the cords, my clothes torn by frequent
falls, my limbs aching with bruises, and my wet
rags chafing my skin. No wonder was it that I
was at once consigned from the charge of a
gaoler to the care of a doctor, and ere the day
broke I was in a raging fever.

I would not if I could preserve any memory
of that grievous interval. Happily for me, no
clear traces remain on my mind—pangs of
suffering are so mingled with little details of
the locality, faces, words, ludicrous images of
a wandering intellect, long hours of silent
brooding, sound of church bells and such other
tokens as cross the lives of busy men in the
daily walk of life, all came and went within my
brain, and still I lay there in fever.

In my first return of consciousness I perceived
I was the sole occupant of a long arched
gallery, with a number of beds arranged along
each side of it. In their uniform simplicity,
and the severe air of the few articles of furniture,
my old experiences at once recalled the
hospital; not that I arrived at this conclusion
without much labour and a considerable mental
effort. It was a short journey, to be sure, but
I was walking with sprained ankles. It was,
however, a great joy and a great triumph to me
to accomplish even this much. It was the recognition
to myself that I was once more on the
road to health, and again to feel the sympathies
that make a brotherhood of this life of ours;
and so happy was I with the prospect, that
when I went to sleep at night my last thought
was of the pleasure that morning was sure to
bring me. And I was not disappointed; the
next day, and the next, and several more that
followed, were all passed in a calm and tranquil
enjoyment. Looking back upon this period, I
have often been disposed to imagine that when
we lie in the convalescence that follows some
severe illness, with no demands upon our bodily
strength, no call made upon our muscular energies,
the very activity of digestion not evoked,
as our nourishment is of the simplest and
lightest, our brain must of necessity exercise
its functions more freely, untrammelled by
passing cares or the worries incident to daily
life, and that at such times our intellect has
probably a more uncontested action than at any
other period of our existence. I do not want to
pursue my theory, or endeavour to sustain it,
my reader has here enough to induce him to
join his experience to my own, or reject the notion
altogether.

I lay thus, not impatiently, for above a fortnight.
I regained strength very slowly; the
least effort or exertion was sure to overcome
me. But I wished for none; and as I lay
there, gazing for whole days long at a great
coat of arms over the end of the gallery, where
a huge double-headed eagle seemed to me
screaming in the agony of strangulation, but yet
never to be choked outright, I revelled in many
a strange rambling as to the fate of the land of
which it was the emblem and the shield.
Doubtless some remnant of my passionate assault
on Austria lingered in my brain, and gave
this turn to its operations.

My nurse was one of that sisterhood whose
charities call down many a blessing on the
Church that organises their benevolence. She
was what is called a " graue Schwester;" and
of a truth she seemed the incarnation of greyness.
It was not her dress alone, but her face
and hands, her noiseless gait, her undemonstrative
stare, her half-husky whisper, and her monotonous
ways, had all a sort of pervading
greyness that enveloped her, just as a cloud
mist wraps a landscape. There was besides a
kind of fog-like indistinctness in her few and
muttered words that made a fitting atmosphere
of drowsy uniformity for the sick-room.

Her first care, on my recovery, was to supply
me with a number of little religious books— lives
of saints and martyrs, accounts of miracles, and
narratives of holy pilgrimages— and I devoured
them with all the zest of a devotee. They
seemed to supply the very excitement my mind
craved for, and the good soul little suspected
how much more she was ministering to a love
for the marvellous than to a spirit of piety. In
the Flowers of St. Francis, for instance, I found
an adventure seeker after my own heart. To be
sure, his search was after sinners in need of a
helping hand to rescue them, but as his contests
with Satan were described as stand-up encounters,
with very hard knocks on each side, they
were just as exciting combats to read of, as any
I had ever perused in stories of chivalry.

Mistaking my zest for these readings for
something far more praiseworthy, "the grey
sister" enjoined me very seriously to turn from
the evil advisers I had formerly consorted with,
and frequent the society of better-minded and
wiser men. Out of these counsels, dark and
dim at first, but gradually growing clearer, I
learned that I was regarded as a member of
some terrible secret society, banded together for
the direst and blackest of objects; the subversion
of thrones, overthrow of dynasties, and
assassination of sovereigns being all labours of
love to us. She had a full catalogue of my
colleagues, from Sand, who killed Kotzebue, to
Orsini, and seemed thoroughly persuaded that I
was a very advanced member of the order. It
was only after a long time, and with great
address on my part, that I obtained these
revelations from her, and she owned that nothing
but witnessing how the holy studies had influenced
me would ever have induced her to make
these avowals. As my convalescence progressed,
and I was able to sit up for an hour or so in the
day, she told me that I might very soon expect
a visit from the Staats Procurator, a kind of
district attorney-general, to examine me. So little
able was I to carry my mind back to the bygone
events of my life, that I heard this as a sort of
vague hope that the inquiry would strike out
some clue by which I could connect myself with
the past, for I was sorely puzzled to learn what
and who I had been before I came there. Was