What with misery of mind and body, the _malaise_ of the fever, and the utter melancholy of the place, my lord’s manhood and his moral courage were in ruins within a week. He gave way to a sense of panic and to a delirious lust for self-preservation that would have seemed ridiculous but for the very real torment he was in. Whether he was hunted as a conspirator against the state or as a spiller of innocent blood were possibilities that pointed only to the one grim issue. A morbid belief in their having “sinned against the Holy Ghost” has sent superstitious mortals to Bedlam. A morbid dread of death seized on my lord with equal grimness, and in a week he had lost that larger consciousness, that cool sanity and shrewd sense of humor, that give a man power over the chances of life. His intelligence began to drop to the level of the animal that seeks to cover its tracks from possible pursuers. Sagacity gave place to cunning and a blind passion for the annihilation of everything that might betray him.
He sent his horse adrift, driving him out with savage prickings from his sword, so that the beast fled panic-stricken into the woods. As for the dog, he put a pistol bullet through his head, tied a weight to the carcass, and sunk it in the moat. Saddle and harness he buried in the garden, keeping the bar up across the court-yard gate, and going out from the house only at dusk. He even made his fire on the floor in the middle of the kitchen, enduring the smoke and the smarting of his eyes, so that the smoke might leak away through doors and windows and crevices instead of pluming up out of the chimney. He burned all the rough furniture in the place, save the couch and an old stool, and, taking up two of the flagstones in the floor, dug a hole under them to hide the store of food, not realizing, perhaps, that the stuff would be mouldy and rotten in a month. It was his feverish purpose to blot out every trace of life from Thorn, so that should it be raided by the Law there should be no clews. The marvel was that he found such a life worth living for the sake of the life he hoarded. But Stephen Gore was not wholly sane those days, what with the fever, and the sweat of fear in him at night, and the thoughts that haunted him as thirst haunts a straggler in the desert.