"Then you will marry Mr. Gregory?"
"I do not know—either that or die, I suppose—whichever God pleases. I am weary of being a prisoner—weary of you, of every thing about me. All that I cared for is lost to me, and I might as well surrender, I suppose; not at discretion, however!"
She turned from me silently, and sought her couch again; but I felt instinctively that she slept no more; and so we lay, silently watching one another, until morning. I dared not renew my efforts to escape, at all events, in the night-time, when I knew the house was locked, and watched without, as well as within—for this was the old habit of the square.
One—two—three—four o'clock came, and passed, and were reported by the deep-tongued clock in the room beneath me, before I slept, and then I dreamed a vision so vivid, that I wakened from it excited—exhausted—as though its frightful figments had been stern realities.
I thought that the noble dog Ossian came to me again and laid the double-footed key upon my lap, as he had done at Beauseincourt—staining my white dress with blood, not mud, this time, and that Colonel La Vigne struck it furiously to the floor, and handed me instead the wooden one I had carved, with the words of the proverb:
"The opportunity lost is like the arrow sped: it comes no more. Your wooden key will fail you next time, as it has failed you this, and you will be baffled—baffled—as you tried to baffle me! Miriam, unseen I pursue you!"
Then he laughed horribly, and faded in the gray dawn, to which I awoke, covered with cold dew, and trembling in every limb. Had he been there, indeed, in spiritual presence? Was it his hand that had left that band about my brow—that surging in my brain—that weight upon my heart? O God! had I indeed become the sport of fiends? At last I wept, and in my tears found sullen comfort. The image so often caviled at as false in Hamlet came to me then as the readiest interpretation of what I suffered, and thus proved its own fidelity and truth. "A sea of sorrow" did indeed seem to roll above me, against which I felt the vanity of "taking arms."
My destruction was decreed, and I had nothing to do but suffer and submit!
All the persecution I had sustained since my father's death, at the hands of Evelyn and Basil Bainrothe—all my wrongs, beginning at the heart-betrayal of Claude, and ending with the immurement I was suffering now at the hands of his father—all my strange life at Beauseincourt, with its episode of horror, its one reality of perfect happiness too fair to last, its singular revelations, its warm and deep attachments, my fearful and nightmare-like experience on the burning ship, the level raft, with the green wares curling above it, the rescue, the snare into which I had inevitably fallen, the Inquisition-walls closing around me—all were there in one vivid and overwhelming mental summary!
I think if ever madness came near me in my life, it came that night, so crushing, so terrific was this weight which, Sysiphus-like, memory was rolling to the summit of the present moment, to fall back again by the power of its own weight to the valley below—the valley of despair—- and destroy all that it encountered or found beneath it. Yet, by the time the sun was up, my eyes were sealed again in slumber.