"Take me away from this place," he said with a kind of cry: "I'm not fit to go about among people."
And they went away, and moved from place to place, but still the malady grew, till at last, unutterably mournful as it was, Mary felt it a relief when he ceased to be capable of watching the progress of it himself: his misery at least was over. Thereafter he slipped into perfect mindlessness, happy and harmless, but hopelessly mindless and vacant. Meantime, Lady Louisa Moor made a very brilliant marriage to a marquis, the eldest son of a duke, the account of which Mary Brunton read in the newspapers while watching her brother's face with its meaningless smile. How her heart swelled! and she burst into a passion of weeping. She threw her arm round him as if to shield him from evil as she said, "Oh, Jamie, nothing can reach you now—nothing." He looked at her with the look that was always so touching, as if he were vainly trying to remember or comprehend: that occasional look of effort was the only remnant left of all his powers of mind.
The duchess of Dover asked her sister the marchioness one day if she knew what had become of Dr. Brunton.
"No," said she, "I don't. He has left the Birns, I know."
"Shortly after he wrote that letter to you he became insane," said the duchess: she put the information in that form, fearful that her sister would be overwhelmed with self-reproach.
"He was insane before he wrote it," said the young marchioness: "only insanity could excuse such presumption. Men don't go mad from disappointed love, or women either, I believe, unless there's a predisposition to madness. He must have had that, and any other accident in his life would have brought it out as well as his foolish fancy for me. If he had been thrown from his gig, or had two or three of his patients die on his hands at once, the effect would have been the same;" and she passed easily to other topics.
The marchioness was wonderfully beautiful, and she was clever and ambitious, and took and kept a very conspicuous place in her sphere; but her amusements were sometimes costly in their nature, whether she thought so or not. The Author of "Blindpits."
WALPURGIS NIGHT.
Three travelers making haste,
And whisp'ring of some errand of their own,
With arms enlinked and garments backward blown,
Across a twilight waste.