Hour after
hour, day after day, she started up with passionate cries on her
father to save Jem; or rose wildly, imploring the winds and waves,
the pitiless winds and waves, to have mercy; and over and over again
she exhausted her feverish fitful strength in these agonised
entreaties, and fell back powerless, uttering only the wailing moans
of despair. They told her Jem was safe, they brought him before her
eyes; but sight and hearing were no longer channels of information
to that poor distracted brain, nor could human voice penetrate to
her understanding.
Jem alone gathered the full meaning of some of her strange
sentences, and perceived that, by some means or other, she, like
himself, had divined the truth of her father being the murderer.
Long ago (reckoning time by events and thoughts, and not by clock or
dial-plate), Jem had felt certain that Mary's father was Harry
Carson's murderer; and although the motive was in some measure a
mystery, yet a whole train of circumstances (the principal of which
was that John Barton had borrowed the fatal gun only two days
before) had left no doubt in Jem's mind.
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