Sometimes he thought that
John had discovered, and thus bloodily resented, the attentions
which Mr. Carson had paid to his daughter; at others, he believed
the motive to exist in the bitter feuds between the masters and
their work-people, in which Barton was known to take so keen an
interest. But if he had felt himself pledged to preserve this
secret, even when his own life was the probable penalty, and he
believed he should fall execrated by Mary as the guilty destroyer of
her lover, how much more was he bound now to labour to prevent any
word of hers from inculpating her father, now that she was his own;
now that she had braved so much to rescue him; and now that her poor
brain had lost all guiding and controlling power over her words.
All that night long Jem wandered up and down the narrow precincts of
Ben Sturgis's house. In the little bedroom where Mrs. Sturgis
alternately tended Mary, and wept over the violence of her illness,
he listened to her ravings; each sentence of which had its own
peculiar meaning and reference, intelligible to his mind, till her
words rose to the wild pitch of agony, that no one could alleviate,
and he could bear it no longer, and stole, sick and miserable,
downstairs, where Ben Sturgis thought it his duty to snore away in
an arm-chair instead of his bed, under the idea that he should thus
be more ready for active service, such as fetching the doctor to
revisit his patient.
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