And now let the curtain drop for a space of three years.
Morton was still a prisoner. Despair was at hand. He longed to die. His longing at length seemed near its accomplishment. A raging fever seized him, and for days he lay delirious, balanced on the brink of death. But his constitution endured the shock; and late one night he lay on his pallet, exhausted, worn to a skeleton, yet fully conscious of his situation.
The locks clashed, the hinges jarred, and a physician of the prison, a bulky German, stood at his side.
He felt his patient's pulse.
"Shall I die, or not?" demanded the sick man.
"Die!" echoed the German, a laugh gurgling within him, like the first symptom of an earthquake; "all men die, but this sickness will never kill you. It would have killed ninety-nine out of a hundred; but you are as tough as a rhinoceros."
Morton turned to the wall, and cursed the hour when he was born.
The German gave a prescription to his attendant; the locks clashed again behind him, and Morton was left alone with his misery.
The lamp in the passage without shone through the grated opening above the door, and shed a square of yellow light on the black, damp stones of the dungeon. They sweated and trickled with a clammy moisture; and the brick pavement was wet, as if the clouds had rained upon it. Morton lay motionless as a dead man. The crisis of his disorder was past; but its effects were heavy upon him, and his mind shared the deep exhaustion of his body. Perilous thoughts rose upon him, spectral and hollow-eyed.
"By what right am I doomed to this protracted misery? By what justice, when a refuge is at hand, am I forbidden to fly to it? I have only to drag myself from this bed, and rest for a few moments on those wet, cold bricks, and all the medicines in Austria could not keep me many days a prisoner. And who could blame me? Who could say that I destroyed myself? It is not suicide. It is but aiding kindly nature to do a deed of mercy."