The Mysteries of Udolpho

Can such things be,

And overcome us like a summer's cloud,

Without our special wonder?

MACBETH

On the next morning, Emily ordered a fire to be lighted in the stove

of the chamber, where St. Aubert used to sleep; and, as soon as she had

breakfasted, went thither to burn the papers. Having fastened the

door to prevent interruption, she opened the closet where they were

concealed, as she entered which, she felt an emotion of unusual awe,

and stood for some moments surveying it, trembling, and almost afraid to

remove the board. There was a great chair in one corner of the closet,

and, opposite to it, stood the table, at which she had seen her father

sit, on the evening that preceded his departure, looking over, with so

much emotion, what she believed to be these very papers.

The solitary life, which Emily had led of late, and the melancholy

subjects, on which she had suffered her thoughts to dwell, had rendered

her at times sensible to the 'thick-coming fancies' of a mind greatly

enervated. It was lamentable, that her excellent understanding should

have yielded, even for a moment, to the reveries of superstition, or

rather to those starts of imagination, which deceive the senses into

what can be called nothing less than momentary madness. Instances of

this temporary failure of mind had more than once occurred since her

return home; particularly when, wandering through this lonely mansion in

the evening twilight, she had been alarmed by appearances, which would

have been unseen in her more cheerful days. To this infirm state of her

nerves may be attributed what she imagined, when, her eyes glancing

a second time on the arm-chair, which stood in an obscure part of the

closet, the countenance of her dead father appeared there. Emily stood

fixed for a moment to the floor, after which she left the closet.

Her spirits, however, soon returned; she reproached herself with the

weakness of thus suffering interruption in an act of serious importance,

and again opened the door. By the directions which St. Aubert had given

her, she readily found the board he had described in an opposite corner

of the closet, near the window; she distinguished also the line he

had mentioned, and, pressing it as he had bade her, it slid down, and

disclosed the bundle of papers, together with some scattered ones, and

the purse of louis. With a trembling hand she removed them, replaced the

board, paused a moment, and was rising from the floor, when, on looking

up, there appeared to her alarmed fancy the same countenance in the

chair. The illusion, another instance of the unhappy effect which

solitude and grief had gradually produced upon her mind, subdued her

spirits; she rushed forward into the chamber, and sunk almost senseless

into a chair. Returning reason soon overcame the dreadful, but pitiable

attack of imagination, and she turned to the papers, though still with

so little recollection, that her eyes involuntarily settled on the

writing of some loose sheets, which lay open; and she was unconscious,

that she was transgressing her father's strict injunction, till a

sentence of dreadful import awakened her attention and her memory

together.