Up and down. The candle had long guttered and fallen upon itself; his only ray of comfort from the outer world came in a stretched thread of lamp-shine under the door. Dark night had crept upon him, with the screak and thunder of slamming oak and iron, and an increased emotion, rather than a sense, of muffled deep confinement; and still the respite delayed, and must now delay, he was sick to think, until the morrow.
For, at last the voices of introspection, that all day he had striven, yet feared, to interpret, were become soul-audible sounds in the tenseness of black silence; and at last his brain was clearing, throwing truth, like a precipitate, into his heart.
How in two days had the flood of destiny burst, obliterating all his ancient landmarks! He was carried down like a dead thing. Should he drift, then?—or, if not, where strand and crawl ashore, a fragment of human wreck? “I clutch and stop myself,” he thought; “scramble out; lie half blind upon a little island of rest. The flood still washes my feet; but I will not yield to it. Then slowly it subsides; the old beautiful landmarks reveal themselves—soiled and stained, perhaps; but, they are dear to me, and I would not have my retrospect without them.”
He paced wildly to and fro again.
“I have been in the flood. What madness has it wrought in me!”
“Pamela!” he whispered aloud in great emotion—“Pamela!”
Yet his soul—though he believed it steadfast to its allegiance through all the numbing thunder of the race on which it had been borne—was rent by conflicting devils; for must not his sympathies at least extend to one who nursed a hopeless passion?
“Oh!” he groaned in his heart, “if, upon my release, I could only find her gone, on her own initiative, out of my life!”
“And so to leave you a heritage of everlasting remorse,” the fiends would cry.
One moment he would be the brutal tyrant, another the slave to his own nature of kindness. He was, indeed, in a pitiable state of indetermination. And always, marking off the crawling hours, that sense of inner foreboding pattered loud or soft like the ticking of a death-watch.