and yet had that system of solicitation, that dreadful and direct appeal to my compassion, that placing of my feeble girlhood in the seat of the arbiter of my aged uncle’s hope or despair, been long persisted in, my resistance might have been worn out—­who can tell?—­and I self-sacrificed!  Just as criminals in Germany are teased, and watched, and cross-examined, year after year, incessantly, into a sort of madness; and worn out with the suspense, the iteration, the self-restraint, and insupportable fatigue, they at last cut all short, accuse themselves, and go infinitely relieved to the scaffold—­you may guess, then, for me, nervous, self-diffident, and alone, how intense was the comfort of knowing that Dudley was actually married, and the harrowing importunity which had just commenced for ever silenced.

That night I saw my uncle.  I pitied him, though I feared him.  I was longing to tell him how anxious I was to help him, if only he could point out the way.  It was in substance what I had already said, but now strongly urged.  He brightened; he sat up perpendicularly in his chair with a countenance, not weak or fatuous now, but resolute and searching, and which contracted into dark thought or calculation as I talked.

I dare say I spoke confusedly enough.  I was always nervous in his presence; there was, I fancy, something mesmeric in the odd sort of influence which, without effort, he exercised over my imagination.

Sometimes this grew into a dismal panic, and Uncle Silas—­polished, mild—­seemed unaccountably horrible to me.  Then it was no longer an accidental fascination of electro-biology.  It was something more.  His nature was incomprehensible by me.  He was without the nobleness, without the freshness, without the softness, without the frivolities of such human nature as I had experienced, either within myself or in other persons.  I instinctively felt that appeals to sympathies or feelings could no more affect him than a marble monument.  He seemed to accommodate his conversation to the moral structure of others, just as spirits are said to assume the shape of mortals.  There were the sensualities of the gourmet for his body, and there ended his human nature, as it seemed to me.  Through that semi-transparent structure I thought I could now and then discern the light or the glare of his inner life.  But I understood it not.

He never scoffed at what was good or noble—­his hardest critic could not nail him to one such sentence; and yet, it seemed somehow to me that his unknown nature was a systematic blasphemy against it all.  If fiend he was, he was yet something higher than the garrulous, and withal feeble, demon of Goethe.  He assumed the limbs and features of our mortal nature.  He shrouded his own, and was a profoundly reticent Mephistopheles.  Gentle he had been to me—­kindly he had nearly always spoken; but it seemed like the mild talk of one of those goblins of the desert, whom Asiatic superstition tells of, who appear in friendly shapes to stragglers from the caravan, beckon to them from afar, call them by their names, and lead them where they are found no more.  Was, then, all his kindness but a phosphoric radiance covering something colder and more awful than the grave?