It was the old story. They all seemed to have the second time on the brain. I, too, was getting it on the brain. It was like a trip-hammer pounding in my head.
I forced myself, however, to make some foolish, semi-jovial speech in which there was no congratulation, begging him, then, for the love of Heaven, to clear out, as I wanted to go to sleep.
No record of the next few weeks exists for me. I suppose I must have done things—little things. I must have gone in and out, and eaten my meals, and fulfilled Lovey’s orders—for, lacking volition of my own, I was entirely at his command. But the recollection of it all has passed from me. I remember reading in some one’s reminiscences of prison life that the weeks of solitary confinement went by; but the released prisoner could not say how. Nothing remained with him, apparently, but a big, black blur; and of these first weeks in New York it was all that stayed with me.
I know that Christmas came and went, and that I spent the festival at Atlantic City. I did this in a wild hope, which I knew was idiotic when I formed it. I told Lovey what I was about to do; I knew he, in the course of his valeting, which he still kept up, would tell Cantyre; I guessed that Cantyre would tell Regina; and I hoped—it never really amounted to hoping, I only dreamed—that Regina might find the moment a favorable one for slipping away and joining me. Then we should actually do the thing so impossible to plan.
But, of course, nothing came of it; and I returned to New York more unsatisfied than I had gone away. The sense of being unsatisfied sent me at last to Sterling Barry’s door.
You will observe that I had not talked with Regina since our last night on board ship. On the morning of landing her quick movements, as compared with my slow, lumbering ones, enabled her to elude me. Since our landing my will had been positively paralyzed. Those words of hers, “Oh, Frank, I hope you won’t make me!” were always in my memory; but the very sense that I could use the power held me back from doing it. I meant to use it; but as each minute came round when I might have taken a step toward that end I seemed to fall backward, like the men who went out with swords and staves to take the Christ.