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.