XXIX. — DARKE’S PAST LIFE.
Leaning on Nighthawk’s shoulder, I placed my eye at the aperture.
On a broken chair beside the three-legged table sat Darke, booted, spurred, and armed with pistol and sabre. In an old rocking-chair, without arms, the singular woman, who seemed to accompany him everywhere, sat rocking to and fro, and carelessly tapping with a small whip, the handsome gray riding-habit which defined her slender and graceful figure.
Facing them, on an old bed frame, sat the unfortunate Swartz—but I would scarcely have recognized him, if I had not known that it was he. His frame had fallen away almost to nothing. His clothes hung upon him as upon a wooden pole. His cheeks were pale, sunken; his eyes hollow; his bearing, cowed, abject, and submissive beyond expression. Let me spare the reader one horror, however. Hunger was not torturing the unfortunate man at this moment. Beside him, on the floor, lay a piece of meat, and an unfinished loaf—thus it was evident that food had been brought to him; and as some of that food remained uneaten, he must have satisfied his hunger.
From Swartz, my glance passed to Darke. This second survey of the worthy proved to me that he was what is succinctly styled “half-drunk.” But drink appeared not to have exhilarated him. It seemed even to have made him more morose. In the eyes and lips of the heavily bearded Hercules could be read a species of gloomy sarcasm—a something resembling bitter melancholy.
The woman in the gray dress, had never appeared cooler. She rocked to and fro in her chair with an air of perfect insouciance.
The interview had evidently lasted some time before our arrival at the house; but, as the reader will perceive, we came soon enough to overhear a somewhat singular revelation.
As I reached my position near the door, Darke was speaking to Swartz:—
“You ask why you are shut up here to starve,” he said, “and as I have some time on my hands to-night, I am going to tell you. That might be called ‘imprudent.’ No! I am talking to a dead man! You see I hold out no false hopes—you will not leave this house alive probably—I will go back, and tell you something which will serve to explain the whole.”
Darke paused a moment, and then gazed with a strange mixture of gloom and tenderness upon the gray woman.
“Perhaps you, too, madam,” he said, speaking in a low tone, “may be ignorant of a part of my history. You know the worst—but not all. You shall know every thing. Listen; and I beg you will not interrupt me. About ten years ago, I chanced to be at Dinwiddie Court-House, a few miles only from this spot; and one day a certain Mr. George Conway visited the courthouse to receive a considerable sum of money which was to be paid to him.”
At the words “a certain Mr. George Conway,” uttered by the speaker, in a hoarse and hesitating voice, I very nearly uttered an exclamation. That name, which General Davenant’s recent narrative had surrounded with so many gloomy associations, produced a profound effect on me, as it now escaped from this man’s lips; and had it not been for Nighthawk’s warning pressure on my arm, I should probably have betrayed our vicinity. Fortunately I suppressed the rising exclamation; it had attracted no attention; and Darke went on in the same low tone:—
“I was in the clerk’s office of Dinwiddie when the money I refer to was paid to Mr. Conway. It amounted to about ten thousand dollars, and as I had at that time no business in the region more important than hanging around the tavern, and drinking and playing cards—as, besides this, I was at the end of my resources, having lost my last penny on the night before, at the card-table—the idea occurred to me that it would not be a bad plan to ride after Mr. Conway; accost him on the road; represent my necessities to him, and request a small loan out of his abundant means, to prevent myself from being deprived of my luxuries—liquor and cards. Is that a roundabout way of saying I intended to act the highwayman, perhaps the—murderer—on this occasion? By no means, madam! What is highway robbery? Is it not the brutal and wanton robbery of the poor as well as the rich? Well, I was not going to rob anybody. I was going to request a small loan—and so far from intending violence, or—murder—,” he uttered that word always in a hesitating voice—“I swear, I had no such intention. I was entirely unarmed; upon my whole person there was not one deadly weapon—it was only by accident that I found, when riding out of the court-house, that I had a small pen-knife in my pocket. This I had picked up, by pure accident from the table of the clerk’s office, where some one had laid it down. I had carelessly commenced paring my nails with it—my attention was attracted by something else. I finished paring my nails, and without being aware of what I was doing, put the knife in my pocket.
“Well, you may think, perhaps, all this is irrelevant. You are mistaken. Many things turned on that knife. The devil himself placed it in my grasp that day!”