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CHAPTER IV.

FASCINATION.

It takes time to rise to the surface. And Gwynplaine had been thrown
into an abyss of stupefaction.

We do not gain our footing at once in unknown depths.

There are routs of ideas, as there are routs of armies. The rally is not
immediate.

We feel as it were scattered--as though some strange evaporation of self
were taking place.

God is the arm, chance is the sling, man is the pebble. How are you to
resist, once flung?

Gwynplaine, if we may coin the expression, ricocheted from one surprise
to another. After the love letter of the duchess came the revelation in
the Southwark dungeon.

In destiny, when wonders begin, prepare yourself for blow upon blow. The
gloomy portals once open, prodigies pour in. A breach once made in the
wall, and events rush upon us pell-mell. The marvellous never comes
singly.

The marvellous is an obscurity. The shadow of this obscurity was over
Gwynplaine. What was happening to him seemed unintelligible. He saw
everything through the mist which a deep commotion leaves in the mind,
like the dust caused by a falling ruin. The shock had been from top to
bottom. Nothing was clear to him. However, light always returns by
degrees. The dust settles. Moment by moment the density of astonishment
decreases. Gwynplaine was like a man with his eyes open and fixed in a
dream, as if trying to see what may be within it. He dispersed the mist.
Then he reshaped it. He had intermittances of wandering. He underwent
that oscillation of the mind in the unforeseen which alternately pushes
us in the direction in which we understand, and then throws us back in
that which is incomprehensible. Who has not at some time felt this
pendulum in his brain?

By degrees his thoughts dilated in the darkness of the event, as the
pupil of his eye had done in the underground shadows at Southwark. The
difficulty was to succeed in putting a certain space between accumulated
sensations. Before that combustion of hazy ideas called comprehension
can take place, air must be admitted between the emotions. There air was
wanting. The event, so to speak, could not be breathed.

In entering that terrible cell at Southwark, Gwynplaine had expected the
iron collar of a felon; they had placed on his head the coronet of a
peer. How could this be? There had not been space of time enough between
what Gwynplaine had feared and what had really occurred; it had
succeeded too quickly--his terror