His position now seemed worse to Clide than it had ever been. The thought of Isabel’s being in a mad-house, a prey to the most awful visitation that humanity is subject to, rudely, perhaps cruelly, treated by coarse, pitiless menials, was so horrible that at first it haunted him till he almost fancied he was going mad himself. The image of the bright young creature who had first stirred the pulses of his foolish heart was for ever before his eyes as she appeared to him that day—how long ago it seemed!—in the midst of the splendors of Niagara, and that he took her for a sprite—some lovely creature of the water and the sunlight. He remembered, with a new sense of its meaning, the strange air she wore, walking on as if half unconscious he had wondered if she were not walking in her sleep. Was it a phase of the cruel malady that was then showing itself? And if so, was she not, perhaps, blameless from the beginning? This blight that had fallen on her in her brilliant maturity might have been germinating then, making strange havoc in her mind, and impelling her character, her destiny, to fearful and fantastic issues. Some weeks passed while Clide was a prey to these harrowing thoughts, when he received a letter from the lawyer, saying he had something to communicate to him of interest.
“It is not good news,” he said, as the Englishman entered his office; “but it is better than complete suspense. The signora is not in St. Petersburg. All our researches were useless from the first, as she was carried off almost immediately to a lunatic asylum in Saxony.”
“And she is there still?”
“Yes; and she has been admirably treated with the utmost skill and care, so much so that it is expected she will be quite restored after a short period of convalescence.”
“How did you ascertain all this?” inquired Clide.
“Through a client of mine who has been for some time a patient of the establishment. He left it very recently, and came to see me on his return, and in talking over the place and its inmates he described one in a way that excited my suspicions. I wrote to the director, and put a few questions cautiously, and the answer leaves me no doubt but that the patient whom my client saw there a few days before his departure was the lady who interests you.”
“Did you hear who accompanied her to Saxony?”
“My client saw a person walking in the grounds with her once, and from the description it must be the same who travelled with her from England—her uncle, in fact: a middle-sized man with coal-black hair and very white teeth; ‘decidedly an unpleasant-looking person’ my client called him.”
“Strange!” murmured Clide. “That description does not tally with my recollection of the man who called himself her uncle, except that he had a forbidding countenance and was of medium height. He had a quantity of gray, almost white, hair, and not a sound tooth in his head.”