Chapter 8

I was carried to the next town: fever succeeded to convulsions and
faintings, & for some weeks my unhappy spirit hovered on the very
verge of death. But life was yet strong within me; I recovered: nor
did it a little aid my returning health that my recollections were at
first vague, and that I was too weak to feel any violent emotion. I
often said to myself, my father is dead. He loved me with a guilty
passion, and stung by remorse and despair he killed himself. Why is it
that I feel no horror? Are these circumstances not dreadful? Is it not
enough that I shall never more meet the eyes of my beloved father;
never more hear his voice; no caress, no look? All cold, and stiff,
and dead! Alas! I am quite callous: the night I was out in was fearful
and the cold rain that fell about my heart has acted like the waters
of the cavern of Antiparos[43] and has changed it to stone. I do not
weep or sigh; but I must reason with myself, and force myself to feel
sorrow and despair. This is not resignation that I feel, for I am dead
to all regret.

I communed in this manner with myself, but I was silent to all around
me. I hardly replied to the slightest question, and was uneasy when I
saw a human creature near me. I was surrounded by my female relations,
but they were all of them nearly strangers to me: I did not listen to
their consolations; and so little did they work their designed effect
that they seemed to me to be spoken in an unknown tongue. I found if
sorrow was dead within me, so was love and desire of sympathy. Yet
sorrow only slept to revive more fierce, but love never woke
again--its ghost, ever hovering over my father's grave, alone
survived--since his death all the world was to me a blank except where
woe had stampt its burning words telling me to smile no more--the
living were not fit companions for me, and I was ever meditating by
what means I might shake them all off, and never be heard of again.

My convalescence rapidly advanced, yet this was the thought that
haunted me, and I was for ever forming plans how I might hereafter
contrive to escape the tortures that were prepared for me when I
should mix in society, and to find that solitude which alone could
suit one whom an untold grief seperated from her fellow creatures.
Who can be more solitary even in a crowd than one whose history and
the never ending feelings and remembrances arising from it is [_sic_]
known to no living soul. There was too deep a horror in my tale for
confidence; I was on earth the sole depository of my own secret. I
might tell it to the winds and to the desart heaths but I must never
among my fellow creatures, either by word or look give allowance to
the smallest conjecture of the dread reality: I must shrink before the