Soon Christopher paid the penalty of returning reason. He suffered all the poignant agony a great heart can endure.
So this was his reward for his great act of self-denial in leaving his beloved wife. He had lost his patient; he had lost the income from that patient; his wife was worse off than before, and had doubtless suffered the anguish of a loving heart bereaved. His mind, which now seemed more vigorous than ever, after its long rest, placed her before his very eyes, pale, and worn with grief, in her widow's cap.
At the picture, he cried like the rain. He could give her joy, by writing; but he could not prevent her from suffering a whole year of misery.
Turning this over in connection with their poverty, his evil genius whispered, “By this time she has received the six thousand pounds for your death. SHE would never think of that; but her father has: and there is her comfort assured, in spite of the caitiffs who left her husband to drown like a dog.
“I know my Rosa,” he thought. “She has swooned—ah, my poor darling—she has raved—she has wept,” he wept himself at the thought—“she has mourned every indiscreet act, as if it was a crime. But she HAS done all this. Her good and loving but shallow nature is now at rest from the agonies of bereavement, and nought remains but sad and tender regrets. She can better endure that than poverty: cursed poverty, which has brought her and me to this, and is the only real evil in the world, but bodily pain.”
Then came a struggle, that lasted a whole week, and knitted his brows, and took the color from his cheek; but it ended in the triumph of love and hate, over conscience and common sense. His Rosa should not be poor; and he would cheat some of those contemptible creatures called men, who had done him nothing but injustice, and at last had sacrificed his life like a rat's.
When the struggle was over, and the fatal resolution taken, then he became calmer, less solitary, and more sociable.
Phoebe, who was secretly watching him with a woman's eye, observed this change in him, and, with benevolent intentions, invited him one day to ride round the farm with her. He consented readily. She showed him the fields devoted to maize and wheat, and then the sheepfolds. Tim's sheep were apparently deserted; but he was discovered swinging head downwards from the branch of a camel-thorn, and seeing him, it did strike one that if he had had a tail he would have been swinging by that. Phoebe called to him: he never answered, but set off running to her, and landed himself under her nose in a wheel somersault.
“I hope you are watching them, Tim,” said his mistress.
“Iss, missy, always washing 'em.”