It was not till he had got nearly across the bridge that Captain
Devereux, as it were, waked up. It was no good waking. He broke forth
into sheer fury. It is not my business to note down the horrors of this
impious frenzy. It was near five o'clock when he came back to his
lodgings; and then, not to rest. To sit down, to rise again, to walk
round the room and round, and stop on a sudden at the window, leaning
his elbows on the sash, with hands clenched together, and teeth set; and
so those demoniac hours of night and solitude wore slowly away, and the
cold gray stole over the east, and Devereux drank a deep draught of his
fiery Lethe, and cast himself down on his bed, and fell at once into a
deep, exhausted lethargy.
When his servant came to his bed-side at seven o'clock, he was lying
motionless, with flushed cheeks, and he could not rouse him. Perhaps it
was well, and saved him from brain-fever or madness.
But after such paroxysms comes often a reaction, a still, stony, awful
despondency. It is only the oscillation between active and passive
despair. Poor Leonora, after she had worked out her fit, tearing 'her
raven hair,' and reviling heaven, was visited in sadder and tenderer
guise by the vision of the past; but with that phantom went down in fear
and isolation to the grave.
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