Even Shedlock was not abandoned. Nature, bursting the trammels he had imposed upon her, unfolded herself to his eye in her native perfectness; conscience sought to arouse him to the truth; but now, when a last hope was extended to him, he wished to believe it false; and what should have prostrated him in adoration, overwhelmed him with horror.
The awful adventure of the morning had unnerved him, and, in the superstitious spirit already ascribed to him, he thought that the apparition of his wife, which he believed it to have revealed, was a warning that his own end was approaching. How could he die?--he, whose whole life, as far as his memory could carry him back, had been one course of guilt? Yet why could he not die, if to die, as he persuaded himself he believed, were to end--to dissolve into the elements, and be no more? There was a doubt--a craven doubt,--and that withheld him.
When Abigail and her two helpmates proceeded to his deceased wife’s chamber, and he was thus, as he believed, protected from a repetition of his recent ghostly adventure, he ventured to return to his dormitory. A bible was lying on his toilet-table, and, on his entry, was the first object that, in his survey of the chamber, seemed to interest him. It was open, and, after musing a moment, something whispered him, in pursuance of the thoughts he had been following, that it was a book of lies, and he determined to shut it up. He approached it with that view; but, as he caught up the cover, his eye involuntarily turned on the open page, and there read these words--“Thou fool! this night thy soul shall be required of thee!”
Shedlock drew back appalled. In the mood he was in, the passage appeared to him like “the handwriting on the wall;” and yet, by a singular and unaccountable infatuation, he rejected the authority of the volume by which it was furnished. He tried to ponder on other things, but, the more he sought to divert his thoughts, the more did the one terrible fear of death, which had taken possession of his heart, grow and twine round them, and taint each individual reflection with its harrowing horror.
He became even more unnerved on the approach of night. Afraid to remain alone, he directed Zedekiah, in a tone that admitted of no question, to make up another bed in his chamber, and there watch him during the night. His injunction was fulfilled, but the precaution suggested by his fears, and from which he had hoped to have derived a degree of assurance, had no effect on his mind, and, however he might strive to compose it, it still would offer no thought but the one racking anticipation of approaching death.