"The Spaker is dead the day. That's the way they go, the big ones that rob the people. But there's no pocket in the shroud, Dempster—no pocket in the shroud."
On the morning of the third day Stowell received a letter from London, telling him that His Majesty the King had withdrawn his commission, having no longer any use for his services. This smote him like a blow on the brain. It was an abject degradation, like that of an officer being stripped of his decorations before the eyes of the soldiers who had served under him.
But the worst of his pains were his thoughts about Fenella. Like a man suddenly struck blind he was always living over again the scenes of his past life. Sitting on his bed, with his head in his hands and his eyes tightly closed, all the beautiful moments of their love passed in procession before him, from the moment in the glen when he had picked her up in his quivering arms and carried her across the stream, to that parting in the porch at Government House, after she had promised to marry him, and he had seized her about the waist and fastened his lips to her mouth.
Do what he would, he could not resist the intoxication of these cruel memories. But crueller still were his dreams of the future—the dead dreams of their married love, when she would be wholly his, the beautiful body as well as the beautiful soul. Nothing in the world was to have been so lovely as her bare arms about his neck; nothing so thrilling as the throbbing of her breasts when he told her how much he loved her. But when he opened his eyes and saw the blank walls of his cell about him, he felt as if some devil from hell had been tormenting him.
Was this to be his greatest punishment—that what he had lost in Fenella was to be for ever haunting him? Was he never to be left in peace, now that all hope of her was gone from him for ever?
"Better die," he thought. "A thousand times better."
Several times every day the jailer had been in to talk with him. The prison was nearly full of prisoners now, many of the rioters having been arrested ("Not the ring-leaders, they are always too cunning"), so that his turnkeys and lady warder had as much as they could do to keep things going.
This, through the thick haze of his preoccupied mind, brought back to Stowell's memory a glimpse he had got of a woman in nurse's costume who had flashed past him when he was being hustled through that furnace of wrathful faces at the Castle gate, and he asked who she had been.
"Oh, that .... that's our lady warder," said the jailer.
"Is Mrs. Mylrea better then?"