II.

Darkly and wearily the days of my recovery went on.  After that first outburst of sorrow on the evening when I recognised my sister, and murmured her name as she sat by my side, there sank over all my faculties a dull, heavy trance of mental pain.

I dare not describe what remembrances of the guilty woman who had deceived and ruined me, now gnawed unceasingly and poisonously at my heart.  My bodily strength feebly revived; but my mental energies never showed a sign of recovering with them.  My father’s considerate forbearance, Clara’s sorrowful reserve in touching on the subject of my long illness, or of the wild words which had escaped me in my delirium, mutely and gently warned me that the time was come when I owed the tardy atonement of confession to the family that I had disgraced; and still, I had no courage to speak, no resolution to endure.  The great misery of the past, shut out from me the present and the future alike—­every active power of my mind seemed to be destroyed hopelessly and for ever.

There were moments—­most often at the early morning hours, while the heaviness of the night’s sleep still hung over me in my wakefulness—­when I could hardly realise the calamity which had overwhelmed me; when it seemed that I must have dreamt, during the night, of scenes of crime and woe and heavy trial which had never actually taken place.  What was the secret of the terrible influence which—­let her even be the vilest of the vile—­Mannion must have possessed over Margaret Sherwin, to induce her to sacrifice me to him?  Even the crime itself was not more hideous and more incredible than the mystery in which its evil motives, and the manner of its evil ripening, were still impenetrably veiled.

Mannion!  It was a strange result of the mental malady under which I suffered, that, though the thought of Mannion was now inextricably connected with every thought of Margaret, I never once asked myself, or had an idea of asking myself, for days together, after my convalescence, what had been the issue of our struggle, for him.  In the despair of first awakening to a perfect sense of the calamity which had been hurled on me from the hand of my wife—­in the misery of first clearly connecting together, after the wanderings of delirium, the Margaret to whom with my hand I had given all my heart, with the Margaret who had trampled on the gift and ruined the giver—­all minor thoughts and minor feelings, all motives of revengeful curiosity or of personal apprehension were suppressed.  And yet, the time was soon to arrive when that lost thought of inquiry into Mannion’s fate, was to become the one master-thought that possessed me—­the thought that gave back its vigilance to my intellect, and its manhood to my heart.

One evening I was sitting alone in my room.  My father had taken Clara out for a little air and exercise, and the servant had gone away at my own desire.  It was in this quiet and solitude, when the darkness was fast approaching, when the view from my window was at its loneliest, when my mind was growing listless and confused as the weary day wore out—­it was exactly at this time that the thought suddenly and mysteriously flashed across me:  Had Mannion been taken up from the stones on which I had hurled him, a living man or a dead?