The boy, bold as he was, shuddered; but after a pause so brief that a breath scarce passed between his silence and his words, he replied with emphasis,—
"Father, you have read my heart. I have been persuaded by Lucretia (for she bewitches me) to watch you,—at least, when you are with Sir Miles. I knew that this was mixed up with Mr. Mainwaring. Now that you have made me understand your own views, I will be true to you,—true without threats."
The father looked hard on him, and seemed satisfied with the gaze. "Remember, at least, that your future rests upon your truth; that is no threat,—that is a thought of hope. Now sleep or muse on it." He dropped the curtain which his hand had drawn aside, and stole from the room as noiselessly as he had entered. The boy slept no more. Deceit and cupidity and corrupt ambition were at work in his brain. Shrink back, Moon and Starbeam! On that child's brow play the demons who had followed the father's step to his bed of sleep.
Back to his own room, close at hand, crept Olivier Dalibard. The walls were lined with books,—many in language and deep in lore. Moon and Starbeam, ye love the midnight solitude of the scholar! The Provencal stole to the casement, and looked forth. All was serene,—breathless trees and gleaming sculpture and whitened sward, girdled by the mass of shadow. Of what thought the man? Not of the present loveliness which the scene gave to his eye, nor of the future mysteries which the stars should whisper to the soul. Gloomily over a stormy and a hideous past roved the memory, stored with fraud and foul with crime,—plan upon plan, schemed with ruthless wisdom, followed up by remorseless daring, and yet all now a ruin and a blank; an intellect at war with good, and the good had conquered! But the conviction neither touched the conscience nor enlightened the reason; he felt, it is true, a moody sense of impotence, but it brought rage, not despondency. It was not that he submitted to Good as too powerful to oppose, but that he deemed he had not yet gained all the mastery over the arsenal of Evil. And evil he called it not. Good and evil to him were but subordinate genii at the command of Mind; they were the slaves of the lamp. But had he got at the true secret of the lamp itself? "How is it," he thought, as he turned impatiently from the casement, "that I am baffled here where my fortunes seemed most assured? Here the mind has been of my own training, and prepared by nature to my hand; here all opportunity has smiled. And suddenly the merest commonplace in the vulgar lives of mortals,—an unlooked-for rival; rival, too, of the mould I had taught her to despise; one of the stock gallants of a comedy, no character but youth and fair looks,—yea, the lover of the stage starts up, and the fabric of years is overthrown." As he thus mused, he placed his hand upon a small box on one of the tables. "Yet within this," resumed his soliloquy, and he struck the lid, that gave back a dull sound,—"within this I hold the keys of life and death! Fool! the power does not reach to the heart, except to still it. Verily and indeed were the old heathens mistaken? Are there no philters to change the current of desire? But touch one chord in a girl's affection, and all the rest is mine, all, all, lands, station, power, all the rest are in the opening of this lid!"
Hide in the cloud, O Moon! shrink back, ye Stars! send not your holy, pure, and trouble-lulling light to the countenance blanched and livid with the thoughts of murder.