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!