He saw his face in an oval silver glass. It fascinated him as it had never done before. He gripped the leather back of a chair and stared fiercely, hungrily, at the image. It was _this_, this man he was looking at, some stranger it seemed, who had done all this. He laughed--a dreadful, mirthless, hollow laugh. This mass of phosphates, carbon, and water, this moving, talking thing in a scarlet gown, was the pivot on which the world was turning!
His brain became darkened for a time, lost in an awful wonder. He could not realise or understand.
And no one knew save his partner and instrument. _No one knew!_
The secret seemed to be bursting and straining within him like some live, terrible creature that longed to rush into light. For weeks the haunting thought had grown and harassed him. It rang like bells in his memory. If only he could share his own dark knowledge. He wanted to take some calm, pale woman, to hold her tight and tell her all that he had done, to whisper it into her ears and watch the mask of flesh change and shrink, to see his words carve deep furrows in it, sear the eyes, burn the colour from the lips. He saw his own face was working with the mad violence of his imaginings.
He _wrenched_ his brain back into normal grooves, as an engineer pulls over a lever. He was half-conscious of the simile as he did so.
Turning away from the mirror, he shuddered as a man who has escaped from a sudden danger.
_That_ above all things was fatal. His luxuriant Eastern imagination had been checked and kept in subjection all his life; the force of his intellect had tamed and starved it. He knew, none better, the end, the extinction of the brain that has got beyond control. No, come what may, he must watch himself cunningly that he did not succumb. A tiny speck in the brain, and then good-bye to thought and life for ever. He was a visitor of the Lancashire Asylum--had been so once at least--and he had seen the soulless lumps of flesh the doctors called "patients." ... "_I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul_," he repeated to himself, and even as he did so, his other self sneered at the weakness which must comfort itself with a poet's rhyme and cling to an apothegm for readjustment.