His terror this time on awaking was, if such a thing were possible, more extreme than it had ever been before, inasmuch as he felt that he had been closer to the verge of death. "Another half-minute, and I should have been gone past recovery," he said to himself as he wiped the great drops of agony off his brow. "Devil!" he muttered aloud--"yellow-skinned son of the bottomless pit, so this is your revenge, is it?" There was a sort of stony despair in his set colourless face, but a wild, almost insane defiance lashed from the hollow caverns of his eyes. "You may win the day, perhaps: I cannot help that," he cried. "But the victory shall be in my fashion--not in yours!"
From that moment he seemed to accept the fate which he saw looming before him as a foregone conclusion from which it was impossible to escape.
Unconsciously to himself, perhaps, he was somewhat of a fatalist in his ideas: the maxim, that "What is to be, must be," was one that was often in his mind if seldom on his lips. He felt like one of those doomed beings whose tragic woes the Greek dramatists loved to sing; he was pursued by a shadowy Nemesis, from whose relentless grasp there was no escape. He could only bow his head in silence and submit.
He got out of bed and made himself some chocolate, and sat brooding over the fire for the remainder of the night.
Two or three times he fell off into a broken doze, which lasted for only a few minutes each time, and each time his brief slumber was broken by the menace rather than the reality of the terrible Hand.
The access of terror through which he had passed early in the night had the effect of rendering him comparatively callous to these minor visitations. Still they all had their effect in helping to wear him out, both in body and mind.
After breakfast--which with him was a mere pretence of a meal--he ordered up pens, ink, and paper, and sat down to write.
With a few intervals of rest he kept on writing through the day, and did not finish till an hour after candles had been brought up. He put what he had written into two different envelopes, which he sealed up and addressed. Then he burned several old letters which lay at the bottom of his despatch box, and, lastly, he took a long, brown, silky ringlet, which he had not looked at for years, from its resting-place in a tiny satin-lined case, and after pressing it passionately two or three times to his lips, he dropped that too into the fire. After that he sat for a full hour gazing with sorrowful eyes into the smouldering embers without stirring a limb.
The doctor had called about noon, whereupon Ducie had assured him that he had passed an excellent night, and felt himself very much better than on the previous day.
The medico looked rather dubious, but could not get over his patient's assurances that he was rapidly improving. Indeed, to-night, after he rose from his seat by the fire and began to pace his room, there was a brightness in his eyes, and an amount of energy in his manner, that might have deceived an inexperienced person into thinking that the morrow would find him perfectly recovered.