It would have at
all events sprung; what was at least complete was his belief in the
truth itself of the assurance given him. The change from his old
sense to his new was absolute and final: what was to happen had so
absolutely and finally happened that he was as little able to know
a fear for his future as to know a hope; so absent in short was any
question of anything still to come. He was to live entirely with
the other question, that of his unidentified past, that of his
having to see his fortune impenetrably muffled and masked.
The torment of this vision became then his occupation; he couldn't
perhaps have consented to live but for the possibility of guessing.
She had told him, his friend, not to guess; she had forbidden him,
so far as he might, to know, and she had even in a sort denied the
power in him to learn: which were so many things, precisely, to
deprive him of rest. It wasn't that he wanted, he argued for
fairness, that anything past and done should repeat itself; it was
only that he shouldn't, as an anticlimax, have been taken sleeping
so sound as not to be able to win back by an effort of thought the
lost stuff of consciousness.
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