. As though a criminal should be chained in a stationary boat
on a deep clear river, condemned, whatever countless leagues of water
flowed past him, always to see the body of the fellow-creature he had
drowned lying at the bottom, immovable, and unchangeable, except as
the eddies made it broad or long, now expanding, now contracting
its terrible lineaments; so Arthur, below the shifting current of
transparent thoughts and fancies which were gone and succeeded by others
as soon as come, saw, steady and dark, and not to be stirred from its
place, the one subject that he endeavoured with all his might to rid
himself of, and that he could not fly from. The assurance he now
had, that Blandois, whatever his right name, was one of the worst of
characters, greatly augmented the burden of his anxieties. Though the
disappearance should be accounted for to-morrow, the fact that
his mother had been in communication with such a man, would remain
unalterable. That the communication had been of a secret kind, and that
she had been submissive to him and afraid of him, he hoped might be
known to no one beyond himself; yet, knowing it, how could he separate
it from his old vague fears, and how believe that there was nothing evil
in such relations? Her resolution not to enter on the question with him,
and his knowledge of her indomitable character, enhanced his sense of
helplessness. It was like the oppression of a dream to believe that
shame and exposure were impending over her and his father's memory, and
to be shut out, as by a brazen wall, from the possibility of coming to
their aid. The purpose he had brought home to his native country, and
had ever since kept in view, was, with her greatest determination,
defeated by his mother herself, at the time of all others when he feared
that it pressed most. His advice, energy, activity, money, credit,
all his resources whatsoever, were all made useless. If she had been
possessed of the old fabled influence, and had turned those who looked
upon her into stone, she could not have rendered him more completely
powerless (so it seemed to him in his distress of mind) than she did,
when she turned her unyielding face to his in her gloomy room.

But the light of that day's discovery, shining on these considerations,
roused him to take a more decided course of action.

Confident in the rectitude of his purpose, and impelled by a sense of
overhanging danger closing in around, he resolved, if his mothe