Yet if
I were but allowed candles, or a lantern, or a torch, some books,
paper, pencil, and tobacco, and the knowledge that I had not killed
Juste Duvarney, I could abide the worst with some sort of calmness.
How much might have happened, must have happened, in all these hours
of sleep! My letter to Alixe should have been delivered long ere
this; my trial, no doubt, had been decided on. What had Voban done?
Had he any word for me? Dear Lord! here was a mass of questions
tumbling one upon the other in my head, while my heart thumped
behind my waistcoat like a rubber ball to a prize-fighter's fist.
Misfortunes may be so great and many that one may find grim humour
and grotesqueness in their impossible conjunction and multiplicity.
I remembered at that moment a friend of mine in Virginia, the
most unfortunate man I ever knew. Death, desertion, money losses,
political defeat, flood, came one upon the other all in two years,
and coupled with this was loss of health. One day he said to me:
"Robert, I have a perforated lung, my liver is a swelling sponge,
eating crowds my waistband like a balloon, I have a swimming in
my head and a sinking at my heart, and I can not say litany for
happy release from these for my knees creak with rheumatism.
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