Before that night was over the terrible visitor whom Horace believed his
own act to have brought to Marchmain entered the lonely house; but the
unhappy parricide did not hear or see the entrance of that last
messenger. While his father sank gradually into the longer and surer
quietude, sleep, feverish and painful, fell upon the son. He had not
slept for many nights, and his great excitement, added to the fatigue of
his journey, had completely exhausted his frame. The confused and
painful commotion in the adjoining apartment as the mortal moment
approached; the sobs of Susan, who saw Death for the first time, and
found the sight of those last agonies intolerable and beyond her
strength; the solemn bustle afterwards, when the last offices had to be
performed--were all insufficient to awake Horace out of the deep but
unquiet slumber, over which phantoms and fever brooded. He lay as Peggy
had left him, in his travel-soiled and disordered dress, fatigued,
haggard, bearing such weariness and exhaustion in his face, that it
would have taken harder hearts than those of his sister and uncle to
close themselves against him. But Horace was as unconscious of the visit
of Susan and Uncle Edward as of any other incident of the night. They
stood over him as he slept, talking in whispers; but those soothing
voices did not enter into the fever of his dream. Susan was crying
quietly, every word she spoke producing a fresh overflow of
tears--natural tears, which she could not help shedding, but soon must
wipe away. Nothing less was possible to her tender heart, and it would
have been strange if the end of that unloving and unlovely life had
produced anything more. "He looks so tired--poor Horace! Oh! Uncle
Edward, he is not so hard-hearted as people thought!--he will feel
_this_ very much; think how troubled he looked last night," said Susan.
"Yes, Susan," said Uncle Edward, with a sigh, "more than troubled; but I
do not blame him; it was not his fault--the evil was done before he was
born."
"What evil, uncle?" asked Susan, looking up with wonder through her
tears.
"My poor child, it would but horrify you," said Uncle Edward. "I cannot
think but Horace, somehow or other, has found it out. Your brother lying
there, Susan, is now one of the richest men in England; your
grandfather's will passed over your poor father, and left everything to
Horace. Ah, Susan! nothing but passion, and misery, and black revenge on
one side and the other; and look at this young heir--poor Horace! they
have heaped up money for him, but they have already robbed him of all
the bloom and promise of his life."
"You don't think he has done anything very wrong, Uncle Edward?" said
Susan, trembling and crying more and more.
For looking down upon that face, all darkly pale in its sleeping
passion, with its deep-drawn lines of pain and stealthy curves about the
closed eyes, it was hard to think of misery inflicted by other people.
Misery self-made, and guilt actual and personal, lay even in the sleep
of Horace Scarsdale's face. Susan's mind did not take in or comprehend
that statement about her grandfather and his wealth, and "one of the
richest men in England." The words had no meaning to her at that
melancholy moment. She thought only of the brother of her childhood in
that heavy sleep of exhaustion and misery, thrown down in a heap like
one who had not even heart enough to stretch himself out in common
comfort; and her heart yearned over him, whatever he might have done.
"I think, perhaps," said the Colonel, with hesitation, "that the journey
and the excitement, and, perhaps, taking something he was not used to,
overcame him last night. Sleep is the best thing for him; let us leave
him quiet--he will be better when he wakes."
And so they left him; Colonel Sutherland really believing that to brave
himself for a scene which must excite him painfully, but where real
grief was not to be expected from him, Horace had come intoxicated to
his father's death-bed, and Susan half-disgusted, half-comforted to
believe that his maniac looks of last night might be attributed to such
a cause. They went away, the Colonel to take an hour's sleep after his
long visit, and Susan to weep out her heart, thinking over that one
touch of natural sympathy, which, beyond death and the grave, gave her
more hold of love upon her father, than she had ever before felt herself
to possess. The morning was kindling over the moor, brightening the
golden-blossomed gorse, and glowing over the purple beds of heather; but
the blinds were drawn down and the shutters closed in Marchmain; the
obscure and gloomy atmosphere of death reigned in the house. Peggy sat
by the kitchen-fire, with her white apron thrown over her head--her mind
lost in long trains of recollection, sometimes her wearied frame
yielding to a half-hour's sleep, sometimes her troubled thoughts
overflowing in a few natural tears. The woman who had come to be nurse
and household assistant dozed on the other side of the fire. Colonel
Sutherland, very grave, and full of the thoughts which death brings in
his train, sat alone in the darkened dining-room, taking an hour's sleep
as he said--though in reality the old soldier had only read his morning
chapter in his old Bible, and was composing himself with the tender
strength of these words of God; while Susan, withdrawn in her own room,
gave the dead man his dues, and paid that duty of nature, a woman's
lamentations, to the concluded life.
In this languor and stillness of the death-consecrated house, where no
agony of living grief reigned, but only the natural pathos and the
natural rest, Horace awoke at bright mid-day from his unnatural sleep.
Accustomed to the noises of a town, and to the perpetual wasting of his
own burning thoughts, the stillness struck him strangely, with a chill
calm which he could not explain. He sat up mechanically, and put the
lank disordered hair from his face, trying to recollect where he was and
what had happened. Looking round at that room, strange yet familiar,
the shelter of all his youthful years, he could almost have supposed
that everything else was but a hideous dream, and that he himself was
nothing worse or guiltier than the rebellious lad who once slept and
dreamt within these homely walls. But then bit by bit the light
brightened upon him; he traced out the whole black history line by line;
the first suggestion of this guilt at which he had shuddered--the
returning thoughts which grew familiar to him--the deed itself, black
and breathless in its stealthy and secret crime; and now the
consummation had come! At that thought he started from his bed, all his
pulses beating with the strength of fear. What was he thinking of?--the
great stakes he had played for and won? the big inaccessible fortune
which made him this day, in this obscure house, as Uncle Edward said,
one of the richest men in England? the wealthy inheritance, which was
all his own? He thought of no such thing, poor madman, in his frightful
success and triumph; far from that ruined soul and miserable house were
now the delusions of love and fortune which had wiled him into crime;
no exultant thought of fortune gained--no lover's fancy of Amelia won,
warmed him in the first sharp access of misery. He thought of one thing,
and one only, in the abject horror of that guilt, which he himself knew,
though no one else did. The fatal box in which he had laid his train of
destruction--the medicine chest where his father had gone to seek
healing and had found death. Where was it? He saw it in his burning
imagination a far more dread obstacle than had been that life which he
had destroyed, standing between him and all the objects of his ambition;
he could not look anywhere but that fatal vision glided before him,
clear with its brass-bound corners, its tiny phials, and the lock which
closed with such a horrible jar. It haunted his miserable eyes, a guilty
spectrum--where was it?--had the doctor perhaps taken possession of if
already to detect the secret felon, lurking murderous under its seeming
innocence?--had the vindictive victim of that snare given it over into
some one's hand, a witness not to be intimidated against the parricide?
The heavy drops rained from his white face, his limbs trembled like
palsy, his very youth and strength forsook him in that dread emergency.
By a dark intuition he knew that his father was dead, that all was over;
that, so far as superficial appearances went, the fortune and the
triumph were his own; and so got up--God help him!--in a fever of
hopeless misery, to look for that fatal token which might, his excited
fancy supposed, turn all the tide against him, and take his very life.
He went out trembling and feeble, out of the shelter of his room--afraid
of the daylight, of the stillness, of everything about and around
him--trembling, like a felon as he was, at his own dreary and hideous
success. This was how Horace Scarsdale came into his fortune, in
faithful fulfilment of his grandfather's wicked will!