Fernando laid his weary head on his shoulder, and said, 'If my father is not poisoned against me!'
'Do not fear that, Fernando. You are where he left you. You have given up something for the sake of your new Lord and Master; you will have his armour another time.'
Fernando let himself be helped to sit down, and sighed. He was thoroughly worn out, and his victory was not such as to enliven his spirits. He took up the drawing that lay on the table, and gazed on it in a sort of dreamy fascination.
'You have checked him this time,' said Mr. Audley.
'Here or there, I will never bet again,' said Fernan solemnly. 'God help me to keep the resolution! It is the one thing that I care for, and I know I should have begun the first day I was away from you.'
'I think that with those tastes you cannot make too strong a resolution against it,' said Mr. Audley.
Their dinner was brought in, but Fernando had no appetite. He soon returned to his chess-player, and seemed to be playing over the game, but he was too much tired for talk, and soon went to bed; where after a short sleep feverishness set in, bringing something approaching to delirium. The nurse had gone a fortnight previously; but as he was still too helpless to have no one within call, Felix slept on the bed in the corner of the room.
When he came down the opening of the door was greeted by 'Don't let him come! Is Mr. Audley there?'
Then he knew Felix, but soon began again to talk of the game at chess, evidently mixing up his uncle with the personage with the long feather.
'He has been checked once. I've taken one piece of his. He is gone now. Will he come back after my Baptism? No; I shall go to him.'
This lasted till past midnight, when, as they were deliberating whether to send for Mr. Rugg, he fell soundly asleep, and awoke in the morning depressed, but composed and peaceful; and this state of things continued. The encounter with his uncle, and the deliberate choice, had apparently given some shock to his nerves; and whenever night recurred, there came two or three hours of misery, and apparently of temptation and terror. It took different forms. Sometimes it was half in sleep--the acting over again of one or two horrible scenes that he had partly witnessed in the Southern States, when an emancipator had been hunted down, and the slaves who had listened to him savagely punished. In spite of his Spanish blood, the horror had been ineffaceable; and his imagination connected it with the crowd of terrors that had revealed themselves to his awakened conscience. He seemed to think that if he lost in the awful game of life, he should be handed over to that terrible slave-master; and there were times when Diego's fate, and his own lapses, so fastened on his mind, as to make him despair of ever being allowed to quit that slave-master's dominions; and that again joined with alarm lest his uncle should return and claim him.