Night waned: and Sybil was at length slumbering. The cold
that precedes the dawn had stolen over her senses, and calmed
the excitement of her nerves. She was lying on the ground, covered with a cloak of which her kind hostess had prevailed on her to avail herself, and was partly resting on a chair, at which she had been praying when exhausted nature gave way and she slept. Her bonnet had fallen off, and her rich hair, which had broken loose, covered her shoulder like a mantle. Her slumber was brief and disturbed, but it had in a great degree soothed the irritated brain. She woke however in terror from a dream in which she had been dragged through a mob and carried before a tribunal. The coarse jeers, the brutal threats, still echoed in her ear; and when she looked around, she could not for some moments recall or recognise the scene. In one corner of the room, which was sufficiently spacious, was a bed occupied by the still sleeping wife of the inspector; there was a great deal of heavy furniture of dark mahogany; a bureau, several chests of drawers: over the mantel was a piece of faded embroidery framed, that had been executed by the wife of the inspector when she was at school, and opposite to it, on the other side, were portraits of Dick Curtis and Dutch Sam, who had been the tutors of her husband, and now lived as heroes in his memory.
Slowly came over Sybil the consciousness of the dreadful eve
that was past. She remained for some time on her knees in
silent prayer: then stepping lightly, she approached the
window. It was barred. The room which she inhabited was a
high story of the house; it looked down upon one of those half
tawdry, half squalid streets that one finds in the vicinities
of our theatres; some wretched courts, haunts of misery and
crime, blended with gin palaces and slang taverns, burnished
and brazen; not a being was stirring. It was just that single
hour of the twenty-four when crime ceases, debauchery is
exhausted, and even desolation finds a shelter.
It was dawn, but still grey. For the first time since she had
been a prisoner, Sybil was alone. A prisoner, and in a few
hours to be examined before a public tribunal! Her heart
sank. How far her father had committed himself was entirely a
mystery to her; but the language of Morley, and all that she
had witnessed, impressed her with the conviction that he was
deeply implicated. He had indeed spoken in their progress to
the police office with confidence as to the future, but then
he had every motive to encourage her in her despair, and to
support her under the overwhelming circumstances in which she
was so suddenly involved. What a catastrophe to all his high
aspirations! It tore her heart to think of him! As for
herself, she would still hope that ultimately she might obtain
justice, but she could scarcely flatter herself that at the
first any distinction would be made between her case and that
of the other prisoners. She would probably be committed for
trial; and though her innocence on that occasion might be
proved, she would have been a prisoner in the interval, instead of devoting all her energies in freedom to the support and assistance of her father. She shrank, too, with all the delicacy of a woman, from the impending examination in open court before the magistrate. Supported by her convictions, vindicating a sacred principle, there was no trial perhaps to which Sybil would not have been superior, and no test of her energy and faith which she would not have triumphantly encountered; but to be hurried like a criminal to the bar of a police office, suspected of the lowest arts of sedition, ignorant even of what she was accused, without a conviction to support her or the ennobling consciousness of having failed at least in a great cause; all these were circumstances which infinitely disheartened and depressed her. She felt sometimes that she should be unable to meet the occasion: had it not been for Gerard she could almost have wished that death might release her from its base perplexities.