
he had drowned lying at the bottom, immovable, and unchangeable, except as the
eddies made it broad or long, now expanding, now contracting its terrible
lineaments; so Arthur, below the shifting current of transparent thoughts and
fancies which were gone and succeeded by others as soon as come, saw, steady and
dark, and not to be stirred from its place, the one subject that he endeavoured
with all his might to rid himself of, and that he could not fly from.
    The assurance he now had, that Blandois, whatever his right name, was one of
the worst of characters, greatly augmented the burden of his anxieties. Though
the disappearance should be accounted for to-morrow, the fact that his mother
had been in communication with such a man, would remain unalterable. That the
communication had been of a secret kind, and that she had been submissive to him
and afraid of him, he hoped might be known to no one beyond himself; yet,
knowing it, how could he separate it from his old vague fears, and how believe
that there was nothing evil in such relations?
    Her resolution not to enter on the question with him, and his knowledge of
her indomitable character, enhanced his sense of helplessness. It was like the
oppression of a dream, to believe that shame and exposure were impending over
her and his father's memory, and to be shut out, as by a brazen wall, from the
possibility of coming to their aid. The purpose he had brought home to his
native country, and had ever since kept in view, was, with her greatest
determination, defeated by his mother herself, at the time of all others when he
feared that it pressed most. His advice, energy, activity, money, credit, all
his resources whatsoever, were all made useless. If she had been possessed of
the old fabled influence, and had turned those who looked upon her into stone,
she could not have rendered him more completely powerless (so it seemed to him
in his distress of mind) than she did, when she turned her unyielding face to
his, in her gloomy room.
    But, the light of that day's discovery, shining on these considerations,
roused him to take a more decided course of action. Confident in the rectitude
of his purpose, and impelled by a sense of overhanging danger closing in around,
he resolved, if his mother would still admit of no approach, to make a desperate
appeal to Affery. If she could be brought to become communicative, and to do
what lay in her to
