Sometime--when, he never knew--a gray
light stinging his eyes like pain, and again a slow sinking into
warm, unsounded darkness and unconsciousness. It might be years,
it might be ages. Even in after-life, looking back, he never
broke that time into weeks or days: people might so divide it for
him, but he was uncertain, always: it was a vague vacuum in his
memory: he had drifted out of coarse, measured life into some
out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm. When, by long
degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was
feebly done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet clinging to
him, as if he had been drowned in Lethe, and had brought its
calming mist with him out of the shades.
The low chatter of voices, the occasional lifting of his head on
the pillow, the very soothing draught, came to him unreal at
first: parts only of the dull, lifeless pleasure. There was a
sharper memory pierced it sometimes, making him moan and try to
sleep,--a remembrance of great, cleaving pain, of falling
giddily, of owing life to some one, and being angry that he owed
it, in the pain. Was it he that had borne it? He did not
know,--nor care: it made him tired to think. Even when he heard
the name, Stephen Holmes, it had but a far-off meaning: he never
woke enough to know if it were his or not. He learned, long
after, to watch the red light curling among the shavings in the
grate when they made a fire in the evenings, to listen to the
voices of the women by the bed, to know that the pleasantest
belonged to the one with the low, shapeless figure, and to call
her Lois, when he wanted a drink, long before he knew himself.
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