Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/260

 alliance with her daughter made him still more dear. Her eloquence was never tired of expatiating on his purity and rectitude. No wonder that she delighted in this theme, for he was her own work; his virtues were the creatures of her bounty.

"How hard to be endured was this sad reverse! She can be tranquil, but never more will she be happy. To promote her forgetfulness of him, I persuaded her to leave her country, which contained a thousand memorials of past calamity, and which was lapsing fast into civil broils. Clarice has accompanied us; and time may effect the happiness of others by her means, though she can never remove the melancholy of her mother.

"I have listened to your tale, not without compassion. What would you have me to do? To prolong his life would be merely to protract his misery.

"He can never be regarded with complacency by my wife; he can never be thought of without shuddering by Clarice. Common ills are not without a cure less than death; but here all remedies are vain. Consciousness itself is the malady, the pest, of which he only is cured who ceases to think."

I could not but assent to this mournful conclusion. Yet, though death was better to Clithero than life, could not some of his mistakes be rectified? Euphemia Lorimer, contrary to his belief, was still alive. He dreamed that she was dead, and a thousand evils were imagined to flow from that death: this death, and its progeny of ills, haunted his fancy, and added keenness to his remorse. Was it not our duty to rectify this error?

Sarsefield reluctantly assented to the truth of my arguments on this head: he consented to return, and afford the dying man the consolation of knowing that the being whom he adored as a benefactor and parent had not been deprived of existence, though bereft of peace, by his act.

During Sarsefield's absence, my mind was busy in revolving the incidents that had just occurred. I ruminated the last words of Clithero: there was somewhat in his narrative that was obscure and contradictory. He had left the manuscript which he so much and so justly prized,