“The very worst thing you could possibly do—go away by yourself and brood and get more and more morbid every minute. What you want is to think of something else for a while, and then when you come back to this subject you’ll be in a condition to regard it in its correct light. Let’s—let’s play a game of cribbage, or read some Rossetti; or suppose you fiddle a little?”
“No, I feel the need of air and exercise. I’ll go out and take a walk. I sha’n’. brood, I’ll reflect on the sensible things you’ve said. Good-by.”
I walked briskly through the streets, striving to collect my faculties, striving to regain sufficient mental tranquillity to comprehend exactly what the long and short of the whole business was. But the feeling that there was something more in it than I could make out, intensified. It would not be dispelled. The oftener I went over the circumstances, the more significant they seemed.—Significant of what? Precisely the question that I could not answer. The longer I allowed my mind to dwell upon them, the more acute became that sensation of wrestling with a problem, of groping for a something suspended near to me in the dark. My father had destined me to be a murderer; the name of my intended victim was Pathzuol; I had been engaged to a young lady of the same name, very possibly the daughter of my father’s foe; she had indeed been murdered, though not by my hand; and yet I, despite my innocence, had been deemed guilty of the crime: this chain of facts kept passing over and over before me. I felt that it must mean something; it could not be purely fortuitous; there was a break, a missing link, which, if I could but supply it, would make the hidden meaning clear. I walked the streets all night, unable to fix my thoughts on any thing else. I said, “You are merely wearing yourself out and getting your brains into a tangle: try to divert your attention. Count up to a thousand. See how much you can remember of the Moonlight Sonata. Conjugate a Hebrew verb. Do what you will, only stop puzzling over this matter. As Merivale says, when you have thought of something else for a while, you will be in a condition to return to it with refreshed intelligence, and view it in the right light.” But the next moment I was at it again, in greater perplexity than ever. Of course, I succeeded in working myself up to a high degree of nervousness: was as exhausted and as exasperated as though I had spent an hour in futile attempts to thread a needle.