ince nothing else they saw would so detach his thoughts from the past
as the leave him free to begin life again. The relapse brought on by the
cruel reply to Osbert's message had been very formidable: he was long
insensible or delirious and then came a state of annihilated thought,
then of frightfully sensitive organs, when light, sound, movement, or
scent were alike agony; and when he slowly revived, it was with such
sunken spirits, that his silence was as much from depression as from
difficulty of speech. His brain was weak, his limbs feeble, the wound in
his mouth never painless; and all this necessarily added to his listless
indifference and weariness, as though all youthful hope and pleasure
were extinct in him. He had ceased to refer to the past. Perhaps he had
thought it over, and seen that the deferred escape, the request for the
pearls, the tryst at the palace, and detention from the king's chamber,
made an uglier case against Eustacie than he could endure to own even to
himself. If his heart trusted, his mind could not argue out her defence,
and his tongue would not serve him for discussion with his grandfather,
the only person who could act for him. Perhaps the stunned condition of
his mind made the suspense just within the bounds of endurance, while
trust in his wife's innocence rendered his inability to come to her aid
well-nigh intolerable; and doubt of her seemed both profanity and misery
unspeakable. He could do nothing. He had shot his only shaft by sending
Landry Osbert, and had found that to endeavour to induce his grandfather
to use further measures was worse than useless, and was treated as mere
infatuation. He knew that all he had to do was to endeavour for what
patience he could win from Cecily's sweet influence and guidance, and
to wait till either certainty should come--that dreadful, miserable
certainty that all looked for, and his very helplessness might be
bringing about--or till he should regain strength to be again effective.

And miserably slow work was this recovery. No one had surgical skill to
deal with so severe a wound as that which Narcisse had inflicted; and
the daily pain and inconvenience it caused led to innumerable drawbacks
that often--even after he had come as far as the garden--brought him
back to his bed in a dark room, to blood-letting, and to speechlessness.
No one knew much of his mind--Cecily perhaps the most; and next to her,
Philip--who, from the time he had been admitte