The information which Mistrial gleaned concerning the provisions of his
father-in-law's will was bitter in his mouth. On the morrow he gave some
time to thought--he read too a little. The taunt which Justine had flung
at him, bit; and with the idea of dulling the hurt and of ministering
also to his own refreshment, he consulted a book which treated of
certain conditions of the nervous system, and a work on medical
jurisprudence as well. But literature of that kind is notoriously
unsatisfactory. It may suggest, yet the questions which it prompts
remain unanswered. Roland put the volumes down: they were productions of
genius, no doubt, but to him they were nothing more. From the pursuit of
exact knowledge he turned and looked out into the street.
The hour then was midway in one of those green afternoons which we are
apt to fancy the adjunct of lands we never see, and as he looked he saw
astride a bay hunter a man ambling cautiously over the stones. From the
roofs opposite a breath of lilacs came, and a breeze that was neither
cool nor warm loitered on its way from the river beyond. Mistrial let
the breeze, the fragrance, the fulfilment of spring, pass unnoticed. The
bay hunter had caught his eye: it seemed to him that an argument with an
imperative horse was just the thing he needed most, and a little later
he secured a cob from a stable on the street above.
The cob was docile enough, affecting once only to regard a sewer-grating
in the bridle-path as a strange, unhallowed thing which it was needful
to avoid. But the initial shy was the last. The spur gave him such a nip
that during the remainder of the ride, whatever distasteful object he
may have encountered, he gave no outward evidence of abhorrence. He had
an easy canter, a long and swinging trot; and now on one, now on the
other, they passed through and out of the Park, and on beyond the
brand-new edifices that line Seventh Avenue, to that scantier outlying
district where the Harlem begins and the city ends. And here as he was
about to turn he noticed a gig such as physicians affect. In it was a
negro driving, and at his side sat Justine's cousin, Guy.
"H'm!" mused Mistrial; "judging by the locality, his patients must be
the last people in the city." At the moment the feebleness of the jest
pleasured him; then simultaneously the unforgotten hatred crackled in
his breast. At each one of the important epochs of his life that man had
stood in his way. It was he that had forced him from college at the
moment when honors were within his reach. It was he that had kept him
from his father's side at the time when he might have saved his father's
estate. It was he that had come between Dunellen and himself at the
hour when he could have persuaded Justine's father to give him Justine's
hand. It was he that had forced him to elope with her. It was because of
him that he was now enjoying the small miseries of the shabby genteel.
It was he, unless Providence now intervened, who would inherit the
wealth he had toiled to make his own. And it was he who the day before
had again crossed and halted in his path.
These premises, however colored, were logical enough in this--the
natural deduction sprang out and greeted the eye. And, as they flashed
before him, Mistrial saw himself rinsing out each one in blood squeezed
from Thorold's throat. In the fury which suddenly beset him he could
have found the strength, the courage it may be, to have torn him from
the gig in which he sat, to have trampled on him with horse's hoofs,
bent over and beat him as he writhed on the ground, and exulted and
jubilated in the doing of it. Then indeed, though he swung for it, the
ultimate victory would be his. If he stamped Thorold out of existence,
though his own went with it, he would not have suffered wholly in vain;
in facing the gallows he would have the joy of knowing that even were he
prevented from bathing in the Dunellen millions, so was Thorold too.
But when he looked out from himself his enemy had disappeared. A woman
in an open landau passed and bowed. Mechanically Mistrial raised his
hat. To every intent and purpose he was self-possessed--occupied, if at
all, but with those threads of fancy that float in and out the mind. As
he raised his hat, he smiled; the woman might have thought herself the
one it gave him the greatest pleasure to salute. Her carriage had not
advanced the jump of a cat before he had forgotten that she lived. But
no one can turn his brain into a stage, create for it, and feel a drama
such as he had without some outward manifestation, be it merely a
strangled oath. On the horse he rode his knees had tightened, he gave a
dig with the spur, and went careering down the street. In that part of
New York you are at liberty to cover a mile in two minutes. Roland
covered thirty squares at breakneck speed.
Presently he drew the animal in and suffered him to walk. During the run
he had had no time to think; he had been occupied only in keeping the
horse he rode out of the way of vehicles, and in preventing that
possible cropper which comes when we expect it least. But as the cob
began to walk, the present returned to him with a rush. About the
animal's neck the fretting of the reins had produced a lather; the
breeze had died away. Mistrial felt overheated too, and he drew out a
handkerchief and wiped his face. Even while he drew it from his pocket
an idea came to him, fluttered for a second as ideas will, and before he
got the handkerchief back it had gone, leaving him just a trifled
dazed. But in a moment he called to it, and at his bidding it returned.
It was minute, barely fledged as yet; but as the horse jogged on, little
by little it expanded, and to such an extent that before he reached the
park its pinions stretched from earth to sky. Whoso is visited with
inspirations knows with what diabolical swiftness they can enlarge and
grow. When Mistrial put the horse back in the stable the idea which at
first he had but dimly intercepted possessed him utterly. It succeeded
even in detaining his step: he walked up the street instead of down; at
a crossing he hesitated; night had come, and as he loitered there,
suddenly the whole avenue was bright as day. The vengeance which not an
hour before he could have wreaked on Thorold seemed now remote and
paltry too. There need be no shedding of blood, no scandal, no newspaper
notoriety, no police, no coroner to sit upon a corpse, no jury to bring
a verdict in. There need be nothing of this: a revenge of that order
was in bad taste, ill-judged as well. To make a man really suffer,
sudden death was as a balm in comparison to some subtle torment that
should gnaw at the springs of life, retreat a moment, and then returning
make them ache again, and still again, forever his whole life through.
The French woman is not so ill-advised when she pitches a cup of vitriol
in her betrayer's face. In Spain, in Italy even, they stab; the deed is
done; the culprit has had no chance to experience anger, pain even, or
remorse. He is dead. The curtain falls. But a revenge that blasts and
corrodes, one that leaves the victim living, sound in body and in limb,
and yet consumed by an inextinguishable regret, burning with tortures
from which he can never escape--a thing like that is the work, not of an
apprentice, but of a master in crime. Yet when the victim receives that
cup of vitriol, not from another's hands, but from his own; when he has
been lured into devastating his own self;--it is no longer a question of
either apprentice or of master: it is the artist that has been at work.
To gain the Dunellen millions was to Mistrial a matter of paramount
importance; but to gain them through the instrumentality of the man whom
he hated as no one ever hates to-day, particularly when that man was the
one to whom those millions were provisionally bequeathed, when he was
one whom Mistrial--justly or unjustly, it matters not--fancied and
believed was plotting for them; to gain them, not only through him, but
through his unwitting, unintentional agency, through an act which, so
soon as he learned its purport, all his life through he would regret and
curse;--no, that were indeed a revenge and a reparation too. And as he
thought of it there entered his eyes a look perplexing and
enervating--that look which demons share with sphinxes and the damned.