WITHOUT any awe, or indeed much interest—with the indifference of a man absorbed in his own affairs, and the still more revolting carelessness of one who had begun to play in his dark thoughts with other human lives, and to find them obstacles in his way—Horace Scarsdale entered the sick room of his employer. Mr. Stenhouse lay, huddled among his pillows, in all the exhaustion of his terrible disease, shivering and blue beneath the load of coverings with which his attendants vainly endeavoured to restore vital warmth to his frame. He was not dying yet—he had still force enough to retain the dismal, anxious look into which that malady writhes and puckers the suffering face; but he had reached to that condition of entire occupation with his own pangs, which sometimes happily, sometimes miserably, beguiles the departing soul out of the shrinkings of nature on the verge of death. The appearance of Horace, recalling him from that absorbing consciousness of pain, he perceived with all a sick man’s impatience. He had got free of his thoughts by means of those bodily tortures through which he had just passed—and to feel himself brought back to the more delicate agony of heart and conscience, seemed an infliction of wanton cruelty to the sufferer. He turned aside his chilled and colourless face, and closed his eyes on the unwelcome apparition of the man he had himself desired to see. He did not desire to see him now, nor to return to the anxieties of a living man in contemplation of death. He was no longer at a sufficient distance from that event to be able to contemplate it. Almost in the river, he would rather have forgotten what these dark waters were, and be left at the present moment to himself and his pain.
But as Horace drew close to the bed, a little cry of impatience from the sharp voice of little Edward, who was then being carried downstairs, startled the father. He was still open to the touch of human love and anxiety in that point. He opened his eyes instantly, and made a sign of recognition to the young man standing beside him. “Go away, let them all go—Mary, leave me,” he said faintly; then louder, as Mrs. Stenhouse lingered timidly—“leave me, do you hear; I have something to say to him; go, I tell you, or it will be all the worse for your boy. Scarsdale,” continued the sick man, watching with his anxious eyes his wife’s figure disappearing, “come closer—no one is aware of it but you—sit down here.”
Horace obeyed, bringing his ear near to the wavering voice. He was not sympathetic, and did not pretend it; he listened without a look or a word of pity, and the sufferer’s spirit rallied into its wonted expression at the sight of his cold, business face.
“I’ve left everything to Edmund, if he lives,” gasped the dying man; “here, Scarsdale, are you sure you hear me?—and about that young Musgrave’s concern, you know. I don’t want the boy to hear of it; eh, do you understand?—I had nothing to do preserving Musgrave’s interests; do you hear me?—the boy is not to know.”
“I shall not tell him,” said Horace, briefly.
“Tell him!—that is not enough. He is not to know. Do you hear me? The child’s a Quixote. How can I tell what he would do? He is not to hear of it! And, Scarsdale,” continued the sufferer, almost piteously, in a tone of deprecating cunning, “there’s Amelia; she has a little fortune, and if she’ll have you, I shan’t object.”
“No,” said Horace, looking with his eyes still fiery in their excitement, and all the superiority and contempt of youth and health upon the dying man, whose will, twenty-four hours hence, would be impotent as the grave could make it. “No!” There was almost a smile upon his lip; it was cruel life exulting over the vain intentions of the dying. A few hours, and what would his objection signify? Undisguised and manifest, that thought rung in the mocking tone of the young man’s reply, and looked out of his uncompassionating face.
Perhaps the congenial spirit lying there felt it!—and knew his own impotence. He threw out his shivering hands in a gesture which might be appeal—which might be passion—which was actual physical agony, a paroxysm of returning pain. The wife and her assistants came back, and Horace stood aside from the bed, without the sufferer being aware of it. “Remember, Scarsdale, the boy is not to know!” he shouted out in the height of his sufferings. Horace remained in the room with a morbid curiosity strange to himself, though his eager thoughts were with Amelia below. He was not aware that few men depart in a paroxysm of pain, and he stood there with a strange excitement, almost thinking that, for the first time, he should see a fellow-creature die.
When those pangs subsided the sufferer was nearer the last act of life; a merciful haze and dimness of exhaustion had begun to creep over him. Through this mist he spoke faintly out of his wandering mind—words only half audible, only half intelligible. One of these murmuring sounds was over and over repeated, until the watchers recognized it:—“In its mother’s milk—in its mother’s milk; seethe a kid in its mother’s milk; Scarsdale!” said the dying man, opening his dim eyes with a sudden renewal of energy—“isn’t it in the Bible so?—ah! the Bible, boy—you know!”
“Yes, Julius dear—yes!” cried poor weeping Mrs. Stenhouse, eager, poor soul, to thrust into his mind, even then, more hopeful words—“and a great deal more, and better, about the forgiveness of sins. Oh, Julius! let me read—you can hear me yet!”
“Oh! you are there, are you?” said Stenhouse, raising his eyes with an effort. “I thought it was Scarsdale—ha!—he’s off to Amelia, is he? to court the girl when her father’s dying? But I tell you, Scarsdale,” cried the sufferer, raising his sharp voice high and ghastly in the stillness, “the boy is not to know!”
These were the last words Horace heard from the man who had crossed so actively, yet so briefly, the current of his life. Warned by the unspoken appeal of Mrs. Stenhouse, and feeling that even decorum forbade him to remain, he left the room; nor had even he hardihood sufficient to linger long with Amelia, who awaited his return in the drawing-room. He told her a rapidly-invented fable as to what Mr. Stenhouse had said to him, and left the house almost immediately. His regard for ordinary proprieties was small enough, certainly; but he was not quite bold enough to come from the father’s death-bed and make violent love to the daughter below. He postponed it for that night.
This episode turned the young man’s thoughts back a little into a more familiar and less tragic current; and now that the lawyer’s secret threatened to become known, Horace bethought himself of one way still remaining by which he might have, even although nothing happened at Marchmain, some benefit by his grandfather’s will. That merciless document precluded the heir from availing himself of the aid of money-lenders, under penalty of losing the inheritance; and it was, accordingly, vain to think of availing himself of the common resource of impatient heirs. Mr. Stenhouse dead, and Roger Musgrave’s friends aroused to the first inklings of a discovery, Mr. Pouncet’s character and credit, and no inconsiderable portion of his wealth, lay absolutely in the power of Horace. If he could exercise that power so as to procure such support as he felt himself entitled to from the unwilling lawyer, it might save him yet from the deadly, secret, and unexpressed impulse in his hidden mind. Something might happen at Marchmain, without any agency of the unnatural son. Was it a good angel which put the lesser sin of deceit before those covetous eyes, to guard them from the bigger sin which loomed darkly within their vision? Heaven knows: but, at least, the phantoms crowding round his bed that night were less hideous than the latent horror which still cowered darkling in a corner of his heart.