Taffy went to Vibraye, cross-examined everybody he could, communicated with the Paris police, but with no result, and every afternoon, with a beating heart, he went to the Morgue....
The news was of course kept from Little Billee. There was no difficulty about this. He never asked a question, hardly ever spoke.
When he first got up and was carried into the studio he asked for his picture "The Pitcher Goes to the Well," and looked at it for a while, and then shrugged his shoulders and laughed—a miserable sort of laugh, painful to hear—the laugh of a cold old man, who laughs so as not to cry! Then he looked at his mother and sister, and saw the sad havoc that grief and anxiety had wrought in them.
It seemed to him, as in a bad dream, that he had been mad for many years—a cause of endless sickening terror and distress; and that his poor weak wandering wits had come back at last, bringing in their train cruel remorse, and the remembrance of all the patient love and kindness that had been lavished on him for many years! His sweet sister—his dear, long-suffering mother! what had really happened to make them look like this?
And taking them both in his feeble arms, he fell a-weeping, quite desperately and for a long time.
And when his weeping-fit was over, when he had quite wept himself out, he fell asleep.
And when he awoke he was conscious that another sad thing had happened to him, and that for some mysterious cause his power of loving had not come back with his wandering wits—had been left behind—and it seemed to him that it was gone for ever and ever—would never come back again—not even his love for his mother and sister, not even his love for Trilby—where all that had once been was a void, a gap, a blankness....
Truly, if Trilby had suffered much, she had also been the innocent cause of terrible suffering. Poor Mrs. Bagot, in her heart, could not forgive her.
I feel this is getting to be quite a sad story, and that it is high time to cut this part of it short.