In his struggling soul, striving back to consciousness from his long stupor, the wretched man had been the victim of three several hallucinations.
First, that he was dead and buried, and while in that state he made no sign.
Second, that he was in hell, and then his wail for water and the drink that was given him dispelled the illusion, which was replaced by the fancy that he was in purgatory.
Now the meeting with the living James Campbell had cured him of that delusion also, and left him to one more natural but not the less painful.
When next he awoke from temporary oblivion his brain was clearer and his memory more accurate than either had yet been since his illness; still, both were somewhat clouded, so that they mixed up time and space, and dreams and realities in weird phantasmagoria.
For instance, he remembered every detail of the two murders he thought he had committed, but not an item of the meeting with his two intended victims living to accuse him, not of murder, but of attempted murder.
And without reflecting, or being now able to reflect, that he could not possibly be hung in England for murders committed in America, he now thought that he was in the condemned cell of an English prison, waiting for speedy execution; that the huge giant who loomed through the shadows of the prison was his death watch, and that James Campbell had come to him in his clerical capacity to prepare him for death.
“But I will not allow him to worm any confession out of me. I have been convicted on the frailest circumstantial evidence, and they dare not hang me at the last. I will have nothing to do with the parson. I won’t even know him.”
This was the most coherent thought that Gentleman Geff had formed since he sank into stupor in the drawing-room of Haymore Hall. But the instinct of self-preservation is a wonderful stimulant to the brain.
So when James Campbell came next to him he turned his face to the wall and would not notice him.