“Nobody’s put you in prison into Abbot’s Etchery,” she murmured.
Yet they were so like prisoners, Silas in his darkness, Gregory in his silence, that she almost looked for gyves about their wrists and ankles. When they stirred, it should have been to the accompaniment of a heavy clank. When Silas fought, when he cried aloud, it was the struggle of a chained man. But his struggles were so ineffective; Nan, who was not oppressed from within, but only from without, thought that he could help himself if he would. She had all the impatience of the naturally buoyant with the dogged tragedy of the fatalistic.
“Come away,” she urged. “What is it that keeps you here? There are warm, pretty places. Let’s make the best of things.”
“I might get away from Abbot’s Etchery, I shouldn’t be getting away from myself,” said Silas.
Nan cried out, “Can’t one get away? Who says so? Isn’t it in our own hands?”
“Is it?” replied Silas, letting drop the sorrowful query as though it were rather the echo of a perpetual self-communion revolving in his soul, than an idle response.
The old mournfulness, the old anguish, closed down upon them again. They were like haunted people, who would not help themselves. They seemed haunted by the past,—which contained indeed the death of Hannah, a death so rough and dingy,—by the present, and by the overcharged future. But their dread was not to be defined; it was of the nature of a mystic sentence, presaged from a long way off. Sometimes she thought that they were afraid of themselves; sometimes that they were too apathetic to be afraid. Only Silas made his dungeon clamorous sometimes with his wild revolt, that led to nothing, to no change, to no illumination.
III
Calthorpe found her sitting listless in a corner. She showed a hunted preference for corners, and for shelter behind furniture.
“Why, you’re pale,” he said. He came closer, “You’re wan.”