Page:Braddon--The Trail of the Serpent.djvu/154

 years have passed since the trial of Richard Marwood. How have those eight years been spent by "Daredevil Dick?"

In a small room a few feet square, in the County Lunatic Asylum, fourteen miles from the town of Slopperton, with no human being's companionship but that of a grumpy old deaf keeper, and a boy, his assistant—for eight monotonous years this man's existence has crept slowly on; always the same: the same food, the same hours at which that food must be eaten, the same rules and regulations for every action of his inactive life. Think of this, and pity the man surnamed "Daredevil Dick," and once the maddest and merriest creature in a mad and merry circle. Think of the daily walk in a great square flagged yard—the solitary walk, for he is not allowed even the fellowship of the other lunatics, lest the madness which led him to commit an awful crime should again break out, and endanger the lives of those about him. During eight long years he has counted every stone in the flooring, every flaw and every crack in each of those stones. He knows the shape of every shadow that falls upon the whitewashed wall, and can, at all seasons of the year, tell the hour by the falling of it. He knows that at such a time on a summer's evening the shadows of the iron bars of the window will make long black lines across the ground, and mount and mount, dividing the wall as if it were in panels, till they meet, and absorbing altogether the declining light, surround and absorb him too, till he is once more alone in the darkness. He knows, too, that at such a time on the grey winter's morning these same shadows will be the first indications of the coming light; that, from the thick gloom of the dead night they will break out upon the wall, with strips of glimmering day between, only enough like light to show the blackness of the shade. He has sometimes been mad enough and wretched enough to pray that these shadows might fall differently, that the very order of nature might be reversed, to break this bitter and deadly mono-