Meantime, John Huish sat through the night, thinking, and calling up from the past all the strange things that had been laid to his charge.
“What does it mean?” he said aloud. “Am I a madman or a somnambulist, or do I lead a double life?”
It was terrible, that being shut up in such a place; for when the other prisoners were silent, there was a dreadful clock close by, which seemed in its cold, harsh, brazen way to goad him to distraction. It was a hurried clock, that always seemed manifesting itself and warning people of the flight of time, so that every quarter of an hour it fired off a vicious “ting-tang” in the two discordant notes that made a bad descending third, repeating itself at the half-hours, tripling at the third quarter, and at the hour snapping as it were at the world four times before allowing the hammer on another bell to rapidly go off slam—slam—slam! till its duty was done. “Clocks are bad enough,” he thought, “from the warnings they give of how short our lives are growing; but when a man is in trouble and bells are added, the effect is maddening indeed.”
He sat trying to think till he was bewildered, and at last, in a complete maze, he sat listening to the noisy singing of a woman in the next cell, and the drunken howlings of a man on the other side.
“My poor darling!” he cried at last; “it will almost break her heart. A burglary! and if they should prove that I was guilty—oh, it is monstrous!”
He tried to pace his cell, but it was too narrow, and he sat down again with his hands pressed to his forehead, with the mental darkness coming down upon him thicker than that of his cell.
“It’s like some nightmare,” he said at last, “and as if in some way my brain were unhinged. Absence—absence of mind! My God! will a judge believe me if I say for defence that I committed a robbery in a fit of absence of mind? One has read of strange things in people’s lives,” he thought after a time—“how they have been totally unconscious of what took place in one half of their existence. Is it possible that my life is divided into two parts, in each of which I am ignorant of what passes in the other? But who would believe it! I’ll have Stonor here first thing to-morrow.”
He sat with his mind growing darker and darker, and vainly struggling against the black oppression; and at last, with a weary wail; he exclaimed unconsciously:
“My poor darling, what a night for you! Last night happy and admired—to-night—oh, thank God—thank God!”
For the light had come.