In the morning Melmoth sat up, gazed round, remembered every thing in a moment, though nothing distinctly, but felt the most intense anxiety to see the stranger saved from the shipwreck, who, he remembered the gouvernante had told him, (while her words seemed to falter on the threshold of his closing senses), was still alive, and an inmate in his house, but weak and ill from the bruises he had received, and the exhaustion and terror he had undergone. The opinions of the household on the subject of this stranger were various. The knowledge of his being a Catholic had conciliated their hearts, for the first act of his recovered reason was to request that a Catholic priest might be sent for, and the first use of his speech was to express his satisfaction that he was in a country where he might enjoy the benefits of the rites of his own church. So far all was well; but there was a mysterious haughtiness and reserve about him, that somewhat repelled the officious curiosity of his attendants. He spoke often to himself in a language they did not understand; they hoped relief from the priest on this point, but the priest, after listening long at the invalid’s door, pronounced the language in which he was soliloquizing _not to be Latin_, and, after a conversation of some hours with him, refused to tell what language the stranger spoke to himself in, and forbid all inquiry on the subject. This was bad enough; but, still worse, the stranger spoke English with ease and fluency, and therefore could have no right, as all the household argued, to torment them with those unknown sounds, that, sonorous and powerful as they were, seemed to their ears like an evocation of some invisible being. “He asks for what he wants in English,” said the harassed housekeeper, “and he can call for candle in English, and he can say he’ll go to bed in English; and why the devil can’t he do every thing in English?--He can say his prayers too in English to that picture he’s always pulling out of his breast and talking to, though it’s no saint, I am sure, he prays to, (from the glimpse I got of it), but more like the devil,--Christ save us!” All these strange rumours, and ten thousand more, were poured into Melmoth’s ears, fast and faster than he could receive them. “Is Father Fay in the house,” said he at last, understanding that the priest visited the stranger every day; “if he be, let me see him.” Father Fay attended him as soon as he quitted the stranger’s apartment.