Most true was it.
On bringing me my tea next morning Goton urged me to call in a doctor.
I would not: I thought no doctor could cure me.
One evening--and I was not delirious: I was in my sane mind, I got up
--I dressed myself, weak and shaking. The solitude and the stillness of
the long dormitory could not be borne any longer; the ghastly white
beds were turning into spectres--the coronal of each became a death's-
head, huge and sun-bleached--dead dreams of an elder world and
mightier race lay frozen in their wide gaping eyeholes. That evening
more firmly than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate
was of stone, and Hope a false idol--blind, bloodless, and of granite
core. I felt, too, that the trial God had appointed me was gaining its
climax, and must now be turned by my own hands, hot, feeble, trembling
as they were. It rained still, and blew; but with more clemency, I
thought, than it had poured and raged all day. Twilight was falling,
and I deemed its influence pitiful; from the lattice I saw coming
night-clouds trailing low like banners drooping. It seemed to me that
at this hour there was affection and sorrow in Heaven above for all
pain suffered on earth beneath; the weight of my dreadful dream became
alleviated--that insufferable thought of being no more loved--no more
owned, half-yielded to hope of the contrary--I was sure this hope
would shine clearer if I got out from under this house-roof, which was
crushing as the slab of a tomb, and went outside the city to a certain
quiet hill, a long way distant in the fields. Covered with a cloak (I
could not be delirious, for I had sense and recollection to put on
warm clothing), forth I set. The bells of a church arrested me in
passing; they seemed to call me in to the _salut_, and I went in.
Any solemn rite, any spectacle of sincere worship, any opening for
appeal to God was as welcome to me then as bread to one in extremity
of want. I knelt down with others on the stone pavement. It was an old
solemn church, its pervading gloom not gilded but purpled by light
shed through stained glass.
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