His prison pained him much, his passion more.—Palemon and Arcite.
Since his illness, Morton had had some of an invalid's privilege. He had been allowed to walk on the rampart for half an hour daily. In the distance, a great mountain range bounded the view, and, nearer, the Croatian forest stretched its dark and wild frontier. The scene recalled kindred scenes at home; and when he was led back to his cell, when the heavy door clashed and the bolts grated upon him, he leaned his forehead on his hand, and stood in fancy again among the mountains of New England, with all their associations of health, freedom, and golden hopes. The White Mountains seemed to rise around him like a living presence, rugged with their rocks and pines, scarred with avalanches, cinctured with morning mists; and, standing again on the bank of the Saco, he seemed to feel their breezes and hear the brawling of their waters. Then his roused fancy took a wider range; carried him across the Alleghanies and along the Ohio, up the Mississippi to its source, and downward to the sea, picturing the whole like the shifting scene of a panorama.
"Ah," he thought, "if my story could be blown abroad over those western waters! How long then should I lie here dying by inches? The farmers of Ohio, the planters of Tennessee, the backwoodsmen of Missouri, how would they endure such outrage to the meanest member of their haughty sovereignty! A hopeless dream! I have looked my last on America. My wrongs will find no voice. They and I are smothering together, safely walled up in sound and solid mason-work. Strange, the power of fancy! Heaven knows how or why, but at this moment I could believe myself seated on the edge of the lake at Matherton, under the beech trees, on a hot July noon. The leaves will not rustle; the birds will not sing; nothing seems awake but the small yellow butterflies, flickering over the clover tops, and the heat-loving cicala, raising his shrill voice from the dead pear tree. The breathless pines on the farther bank grow downward in the glassy mirror. The water lies at my feet, pellucid as the air; the dace, the bream, and the perch glide through it like spirits, their shadows following them over the quartz pebbles; and, in the cove hard by, the pirate pickerel lies asleep under the water lilies.
"On such a day, I came down the garden walk, and found Edith reading under the shade of the maple grove. On the evening of such a day, I heard from her lips the words which seemed to launch me upon a life of more than human happiness. Could I have looked into the future! Could I have lifted the glowing curtain which my fancy drew before it, the gay and gilded illusion which covered the hideous truth! Where is she now? Does she still walk in the garden, and read under the grove of maples? She thinks me dead: almost four years! She has good cause to think so; and perhaps at this moment some glib-tongued suitor, as earnest and eager as I was, is whispering persuasion into her ear, winning her to his hearth stone and his arms. Powers of hell, if you would rack man's soul with torments like your own, show him first a gleam of heaven; bathe him in celestial light; then thrust him down to a damnation like this."
And he groaned between his set teeth, in the extremity of mental torture.