CHAPTER XX
I SAT one evening in my laboratory; the sun had
set, and the moon was just rising from the sea; I had not
sufficient light for my employment, and I remained idle, in a
pause of consideration of whether I should leave my labour for
the night, or hasten its conclusion by an unremitting attention
to it. As I sat, a train of reflection occurred to me, which led
me to consider the effects of what I was now doing. Three years
before I was engaged in the same manner, and had created a fiend whose unparalleled
barbarity had desolated my heart, and filled it for ever with
the bitterest remorse. I
was now about to form another being, of whose dispositions I was
alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more
malignant than her mate, and delight, for its own sake, in murder
and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighbourhood of man,
and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and
she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning
animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her
creation. They might even hate each other; the creature who
already lived loathed his own deformity, and might he not
conceive a greater abhorrence for it when it came before his eyes
in the female form? She also might turn with disgust from him to
the superior beauty of man; she might quit him, and he be again
alone, exasperated by the fresh provocation of being deserted by
one of his own species.
Even if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the
new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the
dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be
propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of
the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had
I right, for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon
everlasting generations? I had before been moved by the sophisms
of the being I had created; I had been struck senseless by his
fiendish threats: but now, for the first time, the wickedness of
my promise burst upon me; I shuddered to think that future ages
might curse me as their pest, whose selfishness had not hesitated
to buy its own peace at the price, perhaps, of the existence of the
whole human race.
