“Can I help you with any of the unhappy arrangements that have to be made in these circumstances?”
Quixtus obeyed, meekly. He wore an air of great lassitude, like a man who has just risen from a bed of sickness. He passed his hands over his eyes:
“There was a sealed packet, if I remember rightly, and a child. I think we might see now what the packet contains.”
“Are you fit to read it?” she asked. He smiled vaguely, for her tone softened the abruptness of the question.
Clementina opened the envelope and drew out the two documents, the letter and the will, and read them aloud. Neither added greatly to the information given by Poynter. Hammersley charged them as his two oldest, most loved and trusted friends, to regard themselves as the parents and guardians of his orphaned child, to whom he bequeathed a small but comfortable fortune, to be administered by them jointly in trust, until she should marry or reach the age of twenty-five years. No mention being made of the dead wife, her identity still remained a mystery. Like Clementina, Quixtus had not heard of his marriage, could think of no woman whom, six years ago, while he was in England, he could have married.
But six years ago. . .! Quixtus buried his face in his hands and shuddered. Had the man been false to every one—even to the wife of the friend he had betrayed?
Suddenly he rose with a great cry and a passionate gesture of both arms.
“I am lost! I am lost! I am floundering in quicksands. The meaning of the earth has gone from me. I’m in a land of grotesques—shapes that mop and mow at me and have no reality. The things they do the human brain can’t conceive. They have been driving me mad, mad!” he cried, beating his head with his knuckles, “and yet I am sane now. Did you ever know what it was to be so sane that your soul was tortured with sanity? Oh, my God!”
He walked about the room quivering from the outburst. Clementina regarded him with amazed interest. This was a new, undreamed of Quixtus, a human creature that had passed through torment.
“Tell me what is on your mind,” she said quietly. “It might ease it.”
“No,” said he, halting before her. “Not to my dying day. There are things one must keep within oneself till they eat away one’s vitals. I wish I had never come here.”