The captain was looking very pale, John thought, but otherwise much as usual.  He stared at the old servant for some seconds after he told him all, but said nothing, not even good-night, and turned away.  Old John was crying; but he called after the captain to take care of the step at the gate:  and as he shut the hall-door his eye caught, by the light of his candle, a scribbling in red chalk, on the white door-post, and he stooped to read it, and muttered, ‘Them mischievous young blackguards!’ and began rubbing it with the cuff of his coat, his cheek still wet with tears.  For even our grief is volatile; or, rather, it is two tunes that are in our ears together, the requiem of the organ, and, with it, the faint hurdy-gurdy jig of our vulgar daily life; and now and then this latter uppermost.

It was not till he had got nearly across the bridge that Captain Devereux, as it were, waked up.  It was no good waking.  He broke forth into sheer fury.  It is not my business to note down the horrors of this impious frenzy.  It was near five o’clock when he came back to his lodgings; and then, not to rest.  To sit down, to rise again, to walk round the room and round, and stop on a sudden at the window, leaning his elbows on the sash, with hands clenched together, and teeth set; and so those demoniac hours of night and solitude wore slowly away, and the cold gray stole over the east, and Devereux drank a deep draught of his fiery Lethe, and cast himself down on his bed, and fell at once into a deep, exhausted lethargy.

When his servant came to his bed-side at seven o’clock, he was lying motionless, with flushed cheeks, and he could not rouse him.  Perhaps it was well, and saved him from brain-fever or madness.

But after such paroxysms comes often a reaction, a still, stony, awful despondency.  It is only the oscillation between active and passive despair.  Poor Leonora, after she had worked out her fit, tearing ’her raven hair,’ and reviling heaven, was visited in sadder and tenderer guise by the vision of the past; but with that phantom went down in fear and isolation to the grave.

This morning several of the neighbours went into Dublin, for the bills were to be presented against Charles Nutter for a murderous assault, with intent to kill, made upon the person of Barnabas Sturk, Esq., Doctor of Medicine, and Surgeon to the Royal Irish Artillery.  As the day wore on, the honest gossips of Chapelizod looked out anxiously for news.  And everybody who met any one else asked him—­’Any news about Nutter, eh?’—­and then they would stop to speculate—­and then one would wonder that Dr. Walsingham’s man, Clinton, had not yet returned—­and the other would look at his watch, and say ’twas one o’clock—­and then both agreed that Spaight, at all events, must soon come—­for he has appointed two o’clock for looking at that brood mare of Fagan’s.