I woke to life and looked up. She was standing by my bed, holding a cup toward my lips, and at the foot Jason leaned, looking on.
“Have I been ill?” I said, in a voice so odd to me that I almost laughed.
“Yes, yes—a little; but you have come out of the black pit now into the forest.”
CHAPTER X.
JASON SPEAKS.
For some three weeks I had lain racked and shriveled in a nervous, delirious fever. It left me at last, the ghost of my old self, to face once more the problems of a ruined life. For many days these gave me no concern, or only in a fitful, indifferent manner. I was content to sip the dew of convalescence, to slumber and to cherish my exhaustion, and the others disturbed me but little. My recovery once assured, they left me generally to myself, scarce visiting me more often than was necessary for the administering of food or medicine. Sometimes one or other of them would come and sit by my bedside awhile and exchange with me a few desultory remarks; but this was seldom, and grew, with my strength more so, for the earth was brilliant with summer outside and naturally fuller of attractions than a sick-room.
Their neglect troubled me little at first; but by and by, when the first idle ecstasy of convalescence was beginning to deepen into a sense of responsibilities that I should soon have to gather up and adjust, it woke day by day an increasing uneasiness in my soul. As yet, it is true, the immediate past I could only call up before my mental vision as a blurred picture of certain events the significance of which was suggestive only. Gradually, however, detail by detail, the whole composition of it concentrated, on the blank sheet of my mind, and stood straight before me terribly uncompromising in its sternness of outline. Had I any reason to suppose, in short, that my share in Modred’s death was known to or guessed at by my father, Jason or Zyp? On that pivot turned the whole prospect of my future; for as to myself, were the secret to remain mine alone, I yet felt that I could make out life with a tolerable degree of resignation in the certain knowledge that Modred had forgiven me before he died, for a momentary mad impulse, the provocation to which had been so bitter—the reaction from which had been so immediate and so equally impulsive.
Of my father, I may say at once, I had little fear. His manner toward me when, as he did occasionally, he came and sat by me for a half-hour or so, was marked by a gentleness and affection I had never known him to exhibit before. Pathetic as it was, I could sometimes almost have wished it replaced by a sterner mood, a more dubious attitude; for my remorse at having so bereaved him became a barbed sting in presence of his new condescension to me that dated from the afternoon of my appeal to him, and was intensified by our common loss.
Of Zyp I hardly dared to think, or dared to do more than tremulously hover round the thought that Modred’s death had absolved me from my promise to him to avoid her. Still the thought was there and perhaps I only played with self-deception when I affected to fly from it out of a morbid loyalty to him that was gone. I could not live with and not long for her with all the passion I was capable of.
Therefore it was that I dreaded any possible disclosure of a suspicion on her part—dreaded it with a fever of the mind so fierce that it must truly have retarded my recovery indefinitely had not a counter-irritant occurred to me, in certain moods, in the form of a thought that perhaps, after all, my deed might not so affright one who, on her own showing, found a charm in the contemplation of evil.
But it was Jason I feared most. Something—I can hardly give it a name—had come to me within the last few weeks that seemed to be the preface to an awakening of the moral right on my part. In the unfolding of this new faculty I was startled and distressed to observe deformities in my brother where I had before seen nothing but manly beauty and a breezy recklessness that I delighted in. Beautiful bodily, I and all must still think him, though it had worried me lately to often observe an expression in his blue eyes that was only new to my new sense. This I can but describe, with despair of the melodramatic sound of it, as poisonous. The pupils were as full and purple as berries of the deadly nightshade.