It was these thoughts regarding the living, far more than any great poignancy of grief respecting the dead, which affected Harry Esmond whilst in prison after his trial:  but it may be imagined that he could take no comrade of misfortune into the confidence of his feelings, and they thought it was remorse and sorrow for his patron’s loss which affected the young man, in error of which opinion he chose to leave them.  As a companion he was so moody and silent that the two officers, his fellow-sufferers, left him to himself mostly, liked little very likely what they knew of him, consoled themselves with dice, cards, and the bottle, and whiled away their own captivity in their own way.  It seemed to Esmond as if he lived years in that prison:  and was changed and aged when he came out of it.  At certain periods of life we live years of emotion in a few weeks—­and look back on those times, as on great gaps between the old life and the new.  You do not know how much you suffer in those critical maladies of the heart, until the disease is over and you look back on it afterwards.  During the time, the suffering is at least sufferable.  The day passes in more or less of pain, and the night wears away somehow.  ’Tis only in after days that we see what the danger has been—­as a man out a-hunting or riding for his life looks at a leap, and wonders how he should have survived the taking of it.  O dark months of grief and rage! of wrong and cruel endurance!  He is old now who recalls you.  Long ago he has forgiven and blest the soft hand that wounded him:  but the mark is there, and the wound is cicatrized only—­no time, tears, caresses, or repentance, can obliterate the scar.  We are indocile to put up with grief, however.  Reficimus rates quassas:  we tempt the ocean again and again, and try upon new ventures.  Esmond thought of his early time as a novitiate, and of this past trial as an initiation before entering into life—­as our young Indians undergo tortures silently before they pass to the rank of warriors in the tribe.

The officers, meanwhile, who were not let into the secret of the grief which was gnawing at the side of their silent young friend, and being accustomed to such transactions, in which one comrade or another was daily paying the forfeit of the sword, did not, of course, bemoan themselves very inconsolably about the fate of their late companion in arms.  This one told stories of former adventures of love, or war, or pleasure, in which poor Frank Esmond had been engaged; t’other recollected how a constable had been bilked, or a tavern-bully beaten:  whilst my lord’s poor widow was sitting at his tomb worshipping him as an actual saint and spotless hero—­so the visitors said who had news of Lady Castlewood; and Westbury and Macartney had pretty nearly had all the town to come and see them.