But as he spoke, strength seemed to forsake his limbs; he could not stand any more, but sat down again in the chair by the bedside.

‘Perhaps Askam is sitting with her now. I suppose they will be married,’ he said, betraying in his sudden weakness what his secret fear had evidently been. ‘Perhaps she will keep him straight. He needs it, and she has a spirit, though I know Gilbert and my father never thought so; and——’

Here he began to wander in his talk; was shivering and shaking with cold one moment, burning hot the next. The thorough drenching which he had got after leaving the Brydges and riding for miles in the teeth of the bitter wind and rain; the excited condition of his brain over Gilbert’s treachery; the receipt of Magdalen’s letter, with its icy, unyielding egoism, showing him that all these years her own advantage was what she had been thinking of, and that there was not a spark of love for him in her dull heart;—these things broke through even his magnificent health and strength. He could not shake off the physical chill any more than he could the mental prostration. An attack of a tedious, wearing low fever reduced him to perfect physical weakness and docility; but far worse than the fever was the accompanying mental gloom, the result of the shock to the nervous system. The young man, shut up in his room, too weak in body to move and shake off his demon visitant, went through all the horrors of a complete nervous breakdown, and made intimate acquaintance with all its attendant crew of ghastly shades—those pallid ghosts which assemble and gibber and mouth at us when we have so imposed upon our hard-worked servants, nerves and brain, as to have rendered them for the time powerless to answer to our imperious demands. Exhausted, they sink down, and say to us, ‘We can no more,’ and then we are at the mercy of every shadow, every whisper, every vain imagining and thought of horror.

Michael Langstroth, with his superb constitution and youth and temperance to back him, and with the devoted nursing of two such friends as Roger and the doctor, was in the course of a few weeks restored to comparative strength. Gradually the shades and ghosts, the bats and owls that haunt the dark places of the human mind, retired before gathering physical strength. Things were gone that could never be restored—hopes, joys, faiths, enthusiasms; things which had once seemed all-important, appeared now almost too insignificant for notice. Under Roger’s eyes was the process accomplished which in his blindness he had long ago wished for his friend. He was made into a man: going into the valley of the shadow a youth, for all his six and twenty years, his bone, and his muscle, and his brain; coming out of it alive, sane, whole, if weak, but stripped of every superfluous hope, confidence, or youthfulness.

It was November when he went to his room that night; it was the very end of December when he came out of it, a hollow-eyed spectre enough. And it was a month later still when Dr. Rowntree carried him down to Hastings one day, returning himself the next, and leaving his adopted son there to recruit.

So ended Michael Langstroth’s youth, as a tale that is told.

CHAPTER XI
OTHO’S LETTER-BAG

A November morning, five years later. The sky gray and brooding, the trees still and leafless. Everything outside betokened the drear season of the year, and even the trimly kept lawns of Thorsgarth could not give brightness to this mood of Nature and the time o’ day.

Within, in a small room which he generally used for breakfasting, Otho Askam stood on the hearthrug, with his burly back turned towards a large fire. A letter was in his hand, to which he seemed to pay more attention than it was usually his habit to give to his correspondence, for he turned it about, and perused it often. What are the changes which five years may have wrought in his traits, or how many of them have become strengthened and accentuated during that time?

He would seem, outwardly considered, to have gained something, both in breadth and solidity, without having in any way weakened or deteriorated. The lines were as sturdy, as burly as before. The expression of his countenance was distinctly imperious, even more imperious than of yore. As he stood there, the letter in one hand, the other impatiently smoothing the hair on his upper lip—a dark line only, which seemed to accentuate the sullenness of his face, without hiding or softening a single harsh trait or feature—as he stood there his countenance was a dangerous-looking one; the expression or atmosphere which radiated from the man was not that of sincerity. In repose he had the old fierceness of appearance—whatever mental or moral change might have taken place, that old look remained; and when he raised his dark eyes and lifted his head, there was the same breathless, hunted, or hunting look about him, as in the days of his very young manhood there had been.