61. CHAPTER LXI.
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
— Merchant of Venice.
The past is past. I see the future stretch
All dark and barren as a rainy sea.
— Alexander Smith.
Morton took possession again of his house in the country,
which still remained in the keeping of one of his humble
relatives, into whose charge he had given it. He turned the
key of his long-deserted library. A loving influence had
presided here in his absence, and, even when he was given up
for lost, every thing had been scrupulously kept as he had
left it.
Here he immured himself; avoided all society but that of
a few personal friends; and by plunging into the studies
which had formerly engrossed him, tried to escape the persecution
of his own thoughts. It was a forced and painful
task. The marks in his books, the pencil notes on their margins,
his voluminous piles of memoranda, were all so many
sharp memorials of the past, to remind him that he was resuming
in darkness and despondency the work that he had
left in sunshine.
In process of time, however, his ancient interest in his
favorite pursuit began to rekindle. He began to feel that
the years of his imprisonment had not been the dead and
barren blank which he had inclined to think them. His mind
had ripened in its solitude, and the studies which he had
before followed with the zeal of a boy, more eager than able
to deal with the broad questions which they involved, he
could now grasp with the matured intellect of a man.
But while Morton was thus laboring on, Edith Leslie was
passing through an ordeal incomparably more severe. Month
after month dragged on, and her father still lingered, sinking
again and again to the very edge of the grave, and then rallying,
as if with a fresh life. Vinal, meanwhile, was in a good
measure recovered from the effects of his accident. His home
and hers, if it could be called a home, was now a house in
town, which her father had fitted up for her in view of her
marriage. She had a painful and delicate part to act — at her
father's bedside, to appear as the happy and contented wife;
at home, to endure the presence of the man whose treachery
filled her with horror, and whose love for her, though she had
never spoken a word of reproof, had changed into fear and
hatred. Of his actual presence, however, she had to endure
little; for he shunned her studiously; and her house was to
her a solitude, where she passed hours of a suffering more
intense than Morton had ever known in the dungeons of
Ehrenberg.
Meanwhile, the servants, those domestic spies, did not fail
to rumor abroad the singular mode of life of the bride and
bridegroom; that Vinal avoided the house; that they seldom
met, even at meals; and that no word or look of sympathy or
confidence seemed ever to pass between them. Such rumors
found their currency among the busier gossips of the town;
but Morton, secluded among his books, remained wholly ignorant
of them.
