Chapter 44

Chapter 11

IN THE DARK

There was no sleep for Bradley Headstone on that night when
Eugene Wrayburn turned so easily in his bed; there was no sleep
for little Miss Peecher. Bradley consumed the lonely hours, and
consumed himself in haunting the spot where his careless rival lay
a dreaming; little Miss Peecher wore them away in listening for the
return home of the master of her heart, and in sorrowfully
presaging that much was amiss with him. Yet more was amiss
with him than Miss Peecher's simply arranged little work-box of
thoughts, fitted with no gloomy and dark recesses, could hold.
For, the state of the man was murderous.

The state of the man was murderous, and he knew it. More; he
irritated it, with a kind of perverse pleasure akin to that which a
sick man sometimes has in irritating a wound upon his body. Tied
up all day with his disciplined show upon him, subdued to the
performance of his routine of educational tricks, encircled by a
gabbling crowd, he broke loose at night like an ill-tamed wild
animal. Under his daily restraint, it was his compensation, not his
trouble, to give a glance towards his state at night, and to the
freedom of its being indulged. If great criminals told the truth--
which, being great criminals, they do not--they would very rarely
tell of their struggles against the crime. Their struggles are
towards it. They buffet with opposing waves, to gain the bloody
shore, not to recede from it. This man perfectly comprehended that
he hated his rival with his strongest and worst forces, and that if he
tracked him to Lizzie Hexam, his so doing would never serve
himself with her, or serve her. All his pains were taken, to the end
that he might incense himself with the sight of the detested figure
in her company and favour, in her place of concealment. And he
knew as well what act of his would follow if he did, as he knew
that his mother had borne him. Granted, that he may not have held
it necessary to make express mention to himself of the one familiar
truth any more than of the other.

He knew equally well that he fed his wrath and hatred, and that he
accumulated provocation and self-justification, by being made the
nightly sport of the reckless and insolent Eugene. Knowing all
this,--and still always going on with infinite endurance, pains, and
perseverance, could his dark soul doubt whither he went?

Baffled, exasperated, and weary, he lingered opposite the Temple
gate when it closed on Wrayburn and Lightwood, debating with
himself should he go home for that time or should he watch longer.
Possessed in his jealousy by the fixed idea that Wrayburn was in
the secret, if it were not altogether of his contriving, Bradley was
as confident of