From the appearance of the building before me I supposed it to be a convent, which conjecture was strengthened by the approach of a priest proceeding towards it. As I had ever found the holy fathers to be social and communicative, I accosted him, and began to make inquiries about the large prison-looking abode before us. He informed me that it was not a convent, but an asylum for insanity, containing inmates from many different parts of Spain; and proffered his services to procure me admission, in case I felt any curiosity to visit its cells. Although the exhibitions of a madhouse are of the most painful description, I felt a strong desire to behold them, even as we feel a fatal impulse to leap from the precipice into the gulf from which the flesh shrinks and recoils. I therefore accepted the offer of my conductor, and proceeded along with him to the asylum, whose massy portals opened at his call, and closed after us with a hoarse and sullen sound. Upon entering the drear abode, my ears were assailed with strange and discordant sounds, blend ing in wild chorus. The voice of laughter, "where laughter is not mirth," the groans of despair and shouts of unearthly glee, echoed by the clanking of chains and the sound of the keeper's lash, rung through that hell of human agony, whose dwellers, like the benighted blind, dwelt in darkness at noonday. There might be seen every species of mental aberration,-madness with its "phantom crown" and fettered hands,—and melancholy,-deep, religious, and hopeless melancholy, struck into despair by the terrors of a world to come, deeming itself already in the place of lost souls, and sitting mute in the blackness of darkness. But who may unveil the visions that beset the maniac's cell,perchance more wild and incongruous than the horrors that haunt our most fevered dreams! The sights around me soon became so intolerable that I was about to leave the place, when all at once there arose from a neighbouring cell a strain of music, at first low and faint, as a sigh struggling into sound, or such as breaks upon our dreams. I never heard its like before, and never shall again. If sorrow could mingle with the songs of the blest, I might have deemed it the anthem of a departed spirit; but no, it was a strain of earth, the breathings of a woman's voice and of a broken heart, which longed to be at rest. I could not intrude upon such sacred sorrow; but when at last the strain died away into silence, I entered the cell, and in its dim light beheld a young female of exquisite symmetry sitting in an attitude of deep dejection, with her brow resting upon her hands. She raised her head at my approach, and in a maze of horror, as if I had beheld a visitant unveiled from the world of spirits, my gaze grew fixed and frozen upon the face of Francesca Zamora! As soon as the mist had passed from my brain, and the stupor from my heart, I inquired of the keeper what he knew respecting her; but the only information he could give amounted to this, that she had been brought to the neighbouring village by some shepherds, who had found her wandering among the wild recesses of the mountains, half-famished with hunger; and as she could give no account of herself whatever, and was evidently labouring under mental derangement, she had been received into the asylum, where she had since remained in the state in which I then beheld her. I drew near and addressed her by name, and tried, by every means I could devise, to awaken some slumbering recollection, and to strike some chord of her heart; but all in vain. With a cold vacant gaze she regarded me for a moment, and then bowed down her head as before, and sunk into a profound silence. I could endure the sight no longer, and quitted the mournful scene. Upon arriving at Lisbon I lost no time in transmitting an account of what I had seen to the friends of Francesca, and to Edwards. But the tale of sorrow never met his ear, for ere my letter had arrived at the British camp he was far beyond the reach of bad news,he had fallen in battle! |