Sturk's brain was in a hubbub. He had fifty plans, all jostling and
clamouring together, like a nursery of unruly imps--'Take _me_'--'No,
take _me_'--'No, _me_!' He had been dreaming like mad, and his sensorium
was still all alive with the images of fifty phantasmagoria, filled up
by imagination and conjecture, and a strange, painfully-sharp
remembrance of things past--all whirling in a carnival of roystering but
dismal riot--masks and dice, laughter, maledictions, and drumming, fair
ladies, tipsy youths, mountebanks, and assassins: tinkling serenades,
the fatal clang and rattle of the dice-box, and long drawn, distant
screams.
There was no more use in Sturk's endeavours to reduce all this to order,
than in reading the Riot Act to a Walpurgis gathering. So he sat
muttering unconscious ejaculations, and looking down, as it were, from
his balcony, waiting for the uproar to abate; and when the air did clear
and cool a little, there was just one face that remained impassive, and
serenely winked before his eyes.
When things arrived at this stage, and he had gathered his recollections
about him, and found himself capable of thinking, being a man of action,
up he bounced and struck a light, vaulted into his breeches, hauled on
his stockings, hustled himself into his roquelaure, and, candle in hand,
in slippered feet, glided, like a ghost, down stairs to the back
drawing-room, which, as we know, was his study.
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