Here he was joined by Romer and Peixada.
“What is it—what has happened?” Romer asked.
“What has happened?” he repeated, dully. “Did—didn’t you know? She is my wife!”
CHAPTER VIII.—“WHAT REST TO-NIGHT?”
PUT yourself in his place. At first, as we have seen, he was simply stunned, bewildered. His breath was taken away, his understanding baffled. His senses were thrown into disorder. It was as if a cannon had gone off under his feet, all was uproar and smoke and confusion. But by degrees the smoke lifted. The outlines of things became distinct.
One stupendous fact stared Arthur in the face. Its magnitude was appalling. Its proportions were out of nature: The sight of it froze his blood, sickened his heart, turned his brain to stone. Judith Peixada, the woman whom he had pursued, insnared, betrayed; the woman whom he had delivered over to the clutches of the law, whom the officers had just dragged away from him, who even at this moment was under lock and key for a capital offense in the Tombs prison; the woman whom he had heretofore regarded as an abandoned murderess, beyond the pale of human pity, but whom he knew now, all appearances, all testimony, to the contrary notwithstanding, now at the eleventh hour, to be somehow as guiltless as the babe unborn: this woman was identical with his wife, with Ruth, with the lady whom he had wooed and married! He had been groping in the dark. He had brought his own house crashing down around his ears.
The vastness of the catastrophe, its apparent hopelessness, its grim, far-reaching corollaries, and the bitter knowledge that he might have prevented it, loomed up before him like a huge, misshaped monster, by which his earthly happiness was irretrievably to be destroyed. Add to this his consciousness of what she thought of him, and the sternest reader must pity his condition. She believed that, surreptitiously, he had been prying into the story of her life—a story which on more than one occasion she had volunteered to tell him, but to which, with feigned magnanimity, he had refused to listen, preferring to gather it covertly from other lips. She believed that, once having discovered her identity, he had ceased to love her, and had entered ruthlessly into a conspiracy whose object it was to lure her within reach of the criminal law. Unnatural, impossible, enormous, as such baseness would be, she nevertheless believed it of him. Ignorant of the circumstances, too indignant to suffer an explanation, she had jumped to the first conclusion that presented itself, and had gone to her prison, convinced that her husband had played her false.
His sensations, of course, were far too complicated, far too turbulent, to be easily disentangled. Senseless hatred of Peixada for having crossed his path; senseless hatred of himself for having accepted Peixada’s case; self-reproach, deep and bitter, for having forbidden her to share her secret with him; a wild desire to follow her, see her, speak to her, force her to understand; an intense wish to be doing something that might help to remedy matters, without the remotest notion of what ought to be done; a remorse that bordered upon fury, in thinking of the past; a despair and a terror that bordered upon madness, in thinking of the future; a sense of impotence that lashed him into frenzy, in thinking of the present; these were a few of the emotions fermenting in Arthur’s breast. His intelligence was quite unhinged. He had lost his reckoning. He was buffeted hither and thither by the waves of thought and feeling that smote upon him, like a ship without a rudder in a stormy sea. He wandered aimlessly through the streets, neither knowing nor caring whither his steps might lead him: while the people along his route stopped to stare and wonder at this crazy man, who, without a hat, with eyes gleaming vacantly from their sockets, with the pallor of death upon his cheek, hurried straight forward, looking neither to the right nor to the left. His blood coursed like liquid fire through his arteries. There was the hubbub of bedlam in his ears. The sole relief he could obtain came from ceaseless motion.