“My dear fellow, you are going a great deal too far. Who said I suspected that unhappy woman of homicidal madness? The brain disease I suspect in Mrs. Porter is melancholia, the result of long years of self-restraint and solitude, the not unfrequent consequence of continuous brooding upon a secret grief.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
“My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,
For the same sound is in my ears
Which in those days I heard.”
That suggestion of Cuthbert Ramsay’s of latent madness in the lodge-keeper came upon Theodore like a flash of lurid light, and gave a new colour to all his thoughts. It was in vain that his friend reminded him of the wide distinction between the fury of the homicidal lunatic and the settled melancholy of a mind warped by misfortune. After that conversation in the Park he was haunted by Mrs. Porter’s image, and he found his mind distracted between two opposite ideas; one pointing to the man who had claimed Mrs. Danvers as his wife, the deserted and betrayed husband of James Dalbrook’s mistress; the other dwelling upon the image of this woman living at his kinsman’s gate, with an existence which was unsatisfactorily explained by the scanty facts which he had been able to gather about her former history.
He recalled her conduct about her daughter, her cold and almost vindictive rejection of the penitent sinner; her stern resolve to stand alone in the world.
Was that madness, or the consciousness of guilt, or what? It was conduct too unnatural to be accounted for easily, consider it how he might. He had heard often enough of fathers refusing to be reconciled with erring or disobedient children. The flinty hardness of the father’s heart has become proverbial. But an unforgiving mother seems an anomaly in nature.
He determined upon confiding Ramsay’s opinion and his own doubts to Lord Cheriton without delay.