Basil eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 436 pages of information about Basil.

Basil eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 436 pages of information about Basil.

Soon, these thoughts began to take a form that I could recognise.

In the clinging heat and fierce seething fever, to which neither waking nor sleeping brought a breath of freshness or a dream of change, I began to act my part over again, in the events that had passed, but in a strangely altered character.  Now, instead of placing implicit trust in others, as I had done; instead of failing to discover a significance and a warning in each circumstance as it arose, I was suspicious from the first—­suspicious of Margaret, of her father, of her mother, of Mannion, of the very servants in the house.  In the hideous phantasmagoria of my own calamity on which I now looked, my position was reversed.  Every event of the doomed year of my probation was revived.  But the doom itself, the night-scene of horror through which I had passed, had utterly vanished from my memory.  This lost recollection, it was the one unending toil of my wandering mind to recover, and I never got it back.  None who have not suffered as I suffered then, can imagine with what a burning rage of determination I followed past events in my delirium, one by one, for days and nights together,—­followed, to get to the end which I knew was beyond, but which I never could see, not even by glimpses, for a moment at a time.

However my visions might alter in their course of succession, they always began with the night when Mannion returned from the continent to North Villa.  I stood again in the drawing-room; I saw him enter; I marked the slight confusion of Margaret; and instantly doubted her.  I noticed his unwillingness to meet her eye or mine; I looked on the sinister stillness of his face; and suspected him.  From that moment, love vanished, and hatred came in its place.  I began to watch; to garner up slight circumstances which confirmed my suspicions; to wait craftily for the day when I should discover, judge, and punish them both—­the day of disclosure and retribution that never came.

Sometimes, I was again with Mannion, in his house, on the night of the storm.  I detected in every word he spoke an artful lure to trap me into trusting him as my second father, more than as my friend.  I heard in the tempest sounds which mysteriously interrupted, or mingled with, my answers, voices supernaturally warning me of my enemy, each time that I spoke to him.  I saw once more the hideous smile of triumph on his face, as I took leave of him on the doorstep:  and saw it, this time, not as an illusion produced by a flash of lightning, but as a frightful reality which the lightning disclosed.

Sometimes, I was again in the garden at North Villa accidentally overhearing the conversation between Margaret and her mother—­overhearing what deceit she was willing to commit, for the sake of getting a new dress—­then going into the room, and seeing her assume her usual manner on meeting me, as if no such words as I had listened to but the moment before, had ever proceeded from her lips. 

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Project Gutenberg
Basil from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.