Had he been there,
indeed, in spiritual presence? Was it his hand that had left that band
about my brow--that surging in my brain--that weight upon my heart? O
God! had I indeed become the sport of fiends? At last I wept, and in my
tears found sullen comfort. The image so often caviled at as false in
_Hamlet_ came to me then as the readiest interpretation of what I
suffered, and thus proved its own fidelity and truth. "A sea of sorrow"
did indeed seem to roll above me, against which I felt the vanity of
"taking arms."
My destruction was decreed, and I had nothing to do but suffer and
submit!
All the persecution I had sustained since my father's death, at the
hands of Evelyn and Basil Bainrothe--all my wrongs, beginning at the
heart-betrayal of Claude, and ending with the immurement I was suffering
now at the hands of his father--all my strange life at Beauseincourt,
with its episode of horror, its one reality of perfect happiness too
fair to last, its singular revelations, its warm and deep attachments,
my fearful and nightmare-like experience on the burning ship, the level
raft, with the green wares curling above it, the rescue, the snare into
which I had inevitably fallen, the Inquisition-walls closing around
me--all were there in one vivid and overwhelming mental summary!
I think if ever madness came near me in my life, it came that night, so
crushing, so terrific was this weight which, Sysiphus-like, memory was
rolling to the summit of the present moment, to fall back again by the
power of its own weight to the valley below--the valley of despair---
and destroy all that it encountered or found beneath it.
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