The cellar he found himself in was fairly deep, but nothing out of the common. Stone bins pigeon-holed all one side of it; the other was the bare wall. Moving pallidly, Gilead examined all its bricked-up length. At the last moment he recollected the door, and thinking to return to it and investigate the lock, found the match burned low in his fingers. Only a second or two of life remained to it; he was standing by the ultimate bin, when he perceived a heap of sacking lying within it. He dragged the mass hurriedly out, and, casting it on the floor, observed a solitary bottle which it had concealed. He had but time to grasp this by the neck, when the match burned his fingers, and, with a gasping exclamation, he dropped it, and was in utter darkness once more. Feeling for the sacking, he let himself down upon it, hugging his find.
And now, in truth, he was committed to the ordeal, with only a bottle for his companion. He was a completely temperate man, and in any case he had no idea what the bottle contained; yet somehow the feel of its sleek sides was a solace to him. Unopened it seemed to cheer and inebriate, as the presence of a jovial comrade might, though fast asleep by one’s side in a haunted house. He patted it fondly, and closed his eyes.
The blackness weighed upon them, instantly and horribly. He opened them with a start, as if he had only emerged just in time from drowning waters. But they took no comfort from that sightless recovery. He strove to concentrate his thoughts on his interests, his ambition, even his gold. It was all useless. Light, he realized, or at least some dilution of darkness, was necessary to sane thought as it was to healthy growth. Without it all things stagnated and fed upon themselves. The coffers of his banks might be bursting with his hoards; they were impotent to buy him one moment of self-forgetfulness. All his omnipotence could not command him a right ray of reason.
“This will not do,” he thought. “It is childish and contemptible.” Lying on his side, he closed his lids again determinedly; and straight with the action, it seemed, there was shut into his mind a torturing demon. “The innocent man,” it kept whispering to him, “failed, for all his innocence, to keep his reason. No self-conscious probity can be proof for long against these supernormal conditions. A hardened conscience could resist them more effectually.”
He reviled the tempter, hated him, found himself suddenly listening to him, with his forehead all clammy and his hands shaking. To be goaded into strangling himself in this black and loathsome pit! The thought was monstrous, incredible—and it clung to him. He sat up in a gasping panic. He forced himself to repeat hundreds of lines and passages from memory. Presently he found that his tongue was running involuntarily into inanities and blasphemies, and he stopped.
“What on earth is the matter with me?” he reflected. For the moment a re-dawn of sanity glowed within him; his pulses slowed. “It is too utterly ridiculous!” he said aloud.
He rose to his feet, and, feeling by the wall, went up and down, up and down, hoping to tire himself in a normal way. But gradually he seemed to become conscious, every time he approached the door, of some evil invisible presence lurking outside. The vast emptiness of the house above occurred to him with a horror even greater than his cell inspired. “They are trooping down,” he thought awfully, “to listen at my door.”
Who the ‘they’ were only his excited imagination might say. Little by little, he contracted his area, until he was standing once more motionless by the heap of sacking.
“Solitary confinement in a dark cell is an unutterable wickedness—an unutterable wickedness,” he kept repeating to himself. Then, in a spasm of horror, he turned, and clawed blindly at the wall, like a trapped animal. He dared not go near the door again, or he would have concentrated all his strength on one frenzied effort to burst it open. But he had come to dread horribly the thought of evoking an uproar in that blind silence. As long as he was quiet they might keep outside.
Presently, his legs seeming to give under him, he sank down again upon his rough couch. An hour went by in such mental suffering as he had never before experienced or conceived. And then, suddenly, with a ghastly groan, he pulled himself together and sat up.