Polidori, alarmed at the violence of this attack, extinguished the light.
And both were left in utter darkness. At this moment was heard the noise of
a carriage, which stopped at the street door. When the chamber became
darkened, Ferrand's agony ceased by degrees, and he said to Polidori, "Why
did you wait so long before you put out this lamp? Was it to make me endure
all the torments of the damned? Oh, what I have suffered! Oh, heaven! how I
have suffered!"
"Now do you suffer less?"
"I still experience a violent irritation, but it is nothing to what I felt
just now. I cling to life because the memory of Cecily is all my life."
"But this memory kills, exhausts, consumes you." The notary did not hear
his accomplice, who foresaw a new hallucination. In effect, Ferrand
resumed, with a burst of convulsive and sardonic laughter:
"To take Cecily from me! But they do not know that, by concentrating all
the power of one's faculties on a single object, the impracticable is
gained. Thus, directly, I am going to the chamber of Cecily, where I have
not dared to go since her departure. Oh, to see, to touch the vestments
which have belonged to her; the glass before which she dressed--it will be
to see herself! Yes; by fixing my eyes on this glass, soon shall I see
Cecily appear. It will not be an illusion--a mist; it will be she; I shall
find her there, as the sculptor finds the statue in the block of marble.
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