CHAPTER XXXVIII

Verdict of the jury ‘mad, my lord’

Trevelyan was left alone at Turin when Mr Glascock went on to Florence with his fair American friends.  It was imperatively necessary that he should remain at Turin, though he had no business there of any kind whatever, and did not know a single person in the city.  And of all towns in Italy Turin has perhaps less of attraction to offer to the solitary visitor than any other.  It is new and parallelogrammatic as an American town is very cold in cold weather, very hot in hot weather, and now that it has been robbed of its life as a capital is as dull and uninteresting as though it were German or English.  There is the Armoury, and the river Po, and a good hotel.  But what are these things to a man who is forced to live alone in a place for four days, or perhaps a week?  Trevelyan was bound to remain at Turin till he should hear from Bozzle.  No one but Bozzle knew his address; and he could do nothing till Bozzle should have communicated to him tidings of what was being done at St. Diddulph’s.

There is perhaps no great social question so imperfectly understood among us at the present day as that which refers to the line which divides sanity from insanity.  That this man is sane and that other unfortunately mad we do know well enough; and we know also that one man may be subject to various hallucinations—­may fancy himself to be a teapot, or what not—­and yet be in such a condition of mind as to call for no intervention either on behalf of his friends, or of the law; while another may be in possession of intellectual faculties capable of lucid exertion for the highest purposes, and yet be so mad that bodily restraint upon him is indispensable.  We know that the sane man is responsible for what he does, and that the insane man is irresponsible; but we do not know, we only guess wildly, at the state of mind of those who now and again act like madmen, though no court or council of experts has declared them to be mad.  The bias of the public mind is to press heavily on such men till the law attempts to touch them, as though they were thoroughly responsible; and then, when the law interferes, to screen them as though they were altogether irresponsible.  The same juryman who would find a man mad who has murdered a young woman, would in private life express a desire that the same young man should be hung, crucified, or skinned alive, if he had moodily and without reason broken faith to the young woman in lieu of killing her.  Now Trevelyan was, in truth, mad on the subject of his wife’s alleged infidelity.  He had abandoned everything that he valued in the world, and had made himself wretched in every affair of life, because he could not submit to acknowledge to himself the possibility of error on his own part.  For that, in truth, was the condition of his mind.  He had never hitherto believed that she had been false