Chapter 13

The patient [Endnote: 1] had a favorable night, and awoke with a much
clearer head, though still considerably feverish and in a state of
great exhaustion from loss of blood, which kept down the fever. The
events of the preceding day shimmered as it were and shifted illusively
in his recollection; nor could he yet account for the situation in
which he found himself, the antique chamber, the old man of mediæval
garb, nor even for the wound which seemed to have been the occasion of
bringing him thither. One moment, so far as he remembered, he had been
straying along a solitary footpath, through rich shrubbery, with the
antlered deer peeping at him, listening to the lark and the cuckoo; the
next, he lay helpless in this oak-panelled chamber, surrounded with
objects that appealed to some fantastic shadow of recollection, which
could have had no reality. [Endnote: 2.]

To say the truth, the traveller perhaps wilfully kept hold of this
strange illusiveness, and kept his thoughts from too harshly analyzing
his situation, and solving the riddle in which he found himself
involved. In his present weakness, his mind sympathizing with the
sinking down of his physical powers, it was delightful to let all go;
to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever
region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common
plane of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had
taken possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no
longer responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as
long as they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He,
meanwhile, would willingly accept the idea that some spell had
transported him out of an epoch in which he had led a brief, troubled
existence of battle, mental strife, success, failure, all equally
feverish and unsatisfactory, into some past century, where the business
was to rest,--to drag on dreamy days, looking at things through half-
shut eyes; into a limbo where things were put away, shows of what had
once been, now somehow fainted, and still maintaining a sort of half-
existence, a serious mockery; a state likely enough to exist just a
little apart from the actual world, if we only know how to find our way
into it. Scenes and events that had once stained themselves, in deep
colors, on the curtain that Time hangs around us, to shut us in from
eternity, cannot be quite effaced by the succeeding phantasmagoria, and
sometimes, by a palimpsest, show more strongly than they. [Endnote: 3.]

In the course of the morning, however, he was a little too feelingly
made sensible of realities by the visit of a surgeon, who proceeded to
examine the wound in his shoulder, removing the bandages which he
himself