For sixty years of his life, this man of the City, whose whole desire was to make money, to win in the game which he played with rare success and skill, regarded bankruptcy as the one thing to be dreaded, or at least to be looked upon, because it was absurd to dread it, as a thing bringing with it the whole of dishonour. Not to meet your engagements was to be in some sort a criminal. And now he was proclaimed as one who could not meet his engagements.
If he understood what had befallen him he did not care about it. The trouble was slight indeed in comparison with the other disaster. The honour of his wife and the legitimacy of his child—these were gone; and the man felt what it is that is greater than money gained or money lost.
The blow which fell upon him left his brain clear while it changed the whole course of his thoughts and deprived him partially of memory. But it destroyed his power of speech. That rare and wonderful disease which seems to attack none but the strongest, which separates the brain from the tongue, takes away the knowledge and the sense of language, and kills the power of connecting words with things, while it leaves that of understanding what is said—the disease which doctors call Aphasia—was upon Mr. Gabriel Cassilis.
In old men this is an incurable disease. Gabriel Cassilis will never speak again. He can read, listen, and understand, but he can frame no words with his lips nor write them with his hand. He is a prisoner who has free use of his limbs. He is separated from the world by a greater gulf than that which divides the blind and the deaf from the rest of us, because he cannot make known his thoughts, his wants, or his wishes.
It took some time to discover what was the matter with him. Patients are not often found suffering from aphasia, and paralysis was the first name given to his disease.
But it was very early found out that Mr. Cassilis understood all that was said to him, and by degrees they learned what he liked and what he disliked.
Victoria Cassilis sat up-stairs, waiting for something—she knew not what—to happen. Her maid told her that Mr. Cassilis was ill; she made no reply; she did not ask to see him; she did not ask for any further news of him. She sat in her own room for two days, waiting.
Then Joseph Jagenal asked if he might see her.
She refused at first; but on hearing that he proposed to stay in the house till she could receive him, she gave way.
He came from Lawrence, perhaps. He would bring her a message of some kind; probably a menace.