The motoring days came back to me; happy, hopeful days in the open air. How long ago were they that I should be thus broken, that I should feel like a man grown old?
Slowly, and cold as the trail of a snake, a thought crawled into my mind.
I remembered a short story I had read once. It was by Gertrude Atherton, and at the time I had thought it the most harrowing story ever written. A woman had gone to sleep, young, beautiful, beloved. She had waked to find her hair grey, her hands old and veined. Twenty blank years of madness she had spent in a lunatic asylum, after being driven mad by a shock, waking to sanity at last only to find herself an old woman.
Had I been mad? Was I old now, with my wasted white hands?
Tingling with dread I touched my face. My chin was rough with a stubble of beard. I fancied there were hollows in my cheeks. Was my hair grey?
Somewhere there must be a mirror. I tried to struggle up and find it, that I might see my own image and know the worst; but a giddiness came over me, and I had to lie down again, or I knew that I should faint.
“I have Carmona to thank for this,” I said aloud, furiously. But then I asked myself, how did I know that there ever had been a Carmona, that there ever had been a girl called Monica Vale? Perhaps I had dreamed them both, in the time of madness.
There had been many dreams. Suddenly I remembered a man's voice saying: “Only keep him till after I'm married.” The voice had been Carmona's. I knew that now.
No, I had never been mad. A horrible trick had been played [pg 320]on me—in the gypsy's cave. I remembered that. Everything was blank since, except for the dreams. Perhaps some of them had been true. Perhaps, half-unconscious—(for somebody must have come out from behind that red curtain and struck me on the head)—I had been taken to him, that he might be sure it was the right man. Somebody had been ordered to keep me, until after—Again I sat up, with a groan. I must get out of this. I must save Monica from the man, and from her own mother. But—if it was already too late?
There was a sound in the room. From a door I could not see, someone had come in. A key had turned, and was being turned again. The dream of the Inquisition came back to my mind, for the man in the black capucha stood looking at me.