He then went to town with Thornton, and constantly attended "the club" to
which Jonson had before introduced him; at first, among his new comrades,
and while the novel flush of the money, he had so fearfully acquired,
lasted, he partially succeeded in stifling his remorse. But the success
of crime is too contrary to nature to continue long; his poor wife, whom,
in spite of her extravagant, and his dissolute habits, he seemed really
to love, fell ill, and died; on her deathbed she revealed the suspicions
she had formed of his crime, and said, that those suspicions had preyed
upon, and finally destroyed her health; this awoke him from the guilty
torpor of his conscience. His share of the money, too, the greater part
of which Thornton had bullied out of him, was gone. He fell, as Job had
said, into despondency and gloom, and often spoke to Thornton so forcibly
of his remorse, and so earnestly of his gnawing and restless desire to
appease his mind, by surrendering himself to justice, that the fears of
that villain grew, at length, so thoroughly alarmed, as to procure his
removal to his present abode.

It was here that his real punishment commenced; closely confined to his
apartment, at the remotest corner of the house, his solitude was never
broken but by the short and hurried visits of his female gaoler, and
(worse even than loneliness), the occasional invasions of Thornton. There
appeared to be in that abandoned wretch what, for the honour of human
nature, is but rarely found, viz., a love of sin, not for its objects,
but itself. With a malignity, doubly fiendish from its inutility, he
forbade Dawson the only indulgence he craved--a light, during the dark
hours; and not only insulted him for his cowardice, but even added to his
terrors, by threats of effectually silencing them.

These fears had so wildly worked upon the man's mind, that prison itself
appeared to him an elysium to the hell he endured; and when his