But in his shattered state it did not come home fully to him at once. When it did, the effect on him was terrible--his head swam distressingly, his heart fluttered painfully, as he fell back gasping in his chair.
It seemed impossible to him, as his brain, caught in strange tangles, like water-weeds in an eddy, whirled this way and that.
The thing at last impressed itself upon his consciousness so as to blot out everything else for the time.
"What next? What next?" he cried aloud, in a voice that was hardly recognizable as his; it was the protest of a man goaded beyond the limit of endurance.
"Cooper Silwood dead--dead--dead--dead!" he babbled to himself, looking at the spots in the wall opposite him, and noting mechanically the shapes and sizes of them. "Dead--dead--dead!" he mumbled, till the words lost all meaning.
Something sub-conscious whispered to him this was madness, and with a mighty effort he sought to recover himself. The effort saved him.
The first force of the shock at length passed; its recoil passed off too, and he came to something like his senses. Desiring instinctively to lean on some one stronger than himself, his impulse was to send for his son Gilbert immediately, and accordingly, when he had pulled himself still further round, he summoned Williamson, and dispatched him to find and bring the young man to Lincoln's Inn. He had hardly done so, when his vacillating mind swung round again, and he regretted it. But by the time Gilbert arrived his mood had changed once more.
When Gilbert appeared in his father's room he found Francis Eversleigh in tears. They were the tears of weakness, of indecision, of self-pity; but when Gilbert heard what his father had to tell him he thought, of course, they were the tears of one who mourns. They could not but seem natural in the circumstances. He had always disliked Silwood; but his father and Silwood had been associated in business for many years, and though he was rather surprised that his father should be in tears over Silwood's death, he was not at a loss altogether to account for it: his father, he thought, had a good heart, and was overcome with sorrow. He supposed that a long acquaintance with Silwood had shown his father some excellent qualities in the man now dead--qualities which he himself could not see.