"You suspect me!" exclaimed Mr. Howard, with a sudden laugh of terrible mirth, and in a voice elevated into accents of indescribable fury, while his eye throwing off the torpor in which it had been shrouded, glittered with the fearful brightness of delirium, his veins became swollen, and his figure dilated beyond its ordinary height, assuming an aspect of rage and of almost supernatural strength, such as insanity alone can give. "You suspect me, and you have dared to confess it. Many a word lightly spoken carries weight. The arrow has been shot at random, but you are right. Lightning rushes through my brain! I would be destructive as a whirlwind to you, De Lancey, as I once was to your wretched mother. She stood in the way of my advancement, as you may yet do,—she accused, betrayed, and ruined my sister," continued he in a rapid voice, insupportably shrill and piercing. "You too have injured me, and you shall suffer for it as she did—she died!"
With the spring and the strength of a tiger, he rushed toward Henry, and a knife which he had plucked from his sleeve, gleamed like lightning in the air, when suddenly Sir Arthur placed himself so as to intercept the madman's career, and fixed upon him his commanding eye, with a look of calm, stern, and lofty composure, while Henry vainly strove to advance before him, and Marion, with frantic vehemence, called for help.
"Take my life, if you must have blood. I have trusted you, Howard,—shown you kindness when no other hand was stretched out in compassion, and through my heart only shall you reach that boy!" said Sir Arthur, firmly. "I am old, and ready to die, but he is a son to me, and shall not perish in my sight."
"Your life! no! not yours," replied the maniac, in accents of vehement horror, yet still fastening his glaring eyes on Henry, with looks of deadly malignity. "May my hand wither before it injures one hair of your venerable head! May my life be sacrificed first, and my limbs be manacled in chains! But for him, his days shall be few! He bears a charmed life, or he must have died long ago! I would extinguish all mankind!—the whole human race, if I could; but there are two whom I have sworn to destroy, and he is one! I have said it! The will and the power are mine! I cannot fail! His life shall be hunted by night and by day! This knife shall be plunged to the very hilt in his blood! I have said it. One blow—one mortal blow, and it is done!"
Having said these words, with gestures of outrageous madness, he bounded towards the door, broke through every impediment with a strength which ten men could scarcely have mastered, and giving a loud delirious cry of insufferable wildness, he instantaneously vanished.
Before long, the neighborhood was aroused, lights gleamed and reddened in the opposite windows, shouts arose among the assembling crowd, and a rapid search was made for the frantic and mysterious criminal, but not a trace of any living being could be discovered, and when they paused to listen, not a sound broke the stillness of the night.
"This is my second preservation from a violent death!" said Henry, in once more taking leave of Sir Arthur. "And most forcibly do all these circumstances bring to mind the horrors of that fearful night which first threw me on the care of my benefactor. It is exactly such a shadowy form bending over me in the silence of midnight, which has often from that hour haunted me in my dreams. I am ready, I trust, to brave any danger in the open face of day; but there is something terrible to me, I confess—something vague and appalling in the stealthy, mysterious, death-like approach of an enemy evidently insane, who has pursued me with remorseless hatred from childhood to the present hour, breaking upon me in the darkest hours of midnight, and invading me amidst the moments of helpless repose; but I am under the care of one who slumbereth not, nor sleepeth, and to Him I confidently commit myself."
CHAPTER XXVII.
Every man should be considered accountable to Providence, not only for diffusing as much enjoyment around him as he possibly can, but also for being as happy himself as is consistent with the many gifts bestowed on him individually; and it is a duty to look back with self-reproach on any hour of existence, which, on account of our ill temper or discontent, has been less enjoyed by ourselves or by another, than it might have been; yet it is an obvious truth, that all men might be happier than they are, if mankind would but make the best of life for themselves and others. Never had this remark appeared so undeniable to Marion as now, in the case of Agnes, who alienated Sir Patrick more and more by her peevishness, though the arrows of her satire had more poison than point in them, and he was always ready enough to enter on a skirmish in the diamond-cut-diamond style of conversation, while it often blistered the very heart of their gentle sister, to hear the bitter taunting remarks and repartees which they levelled at each other.
One day, Agnes, in a magnificent fit of ill-humor, had seated herself at that universal refuge for idleness and discontent, an open window, complaining that the dulness of Edinburgh was quite maddening; while it became evident that the needle of her temper pointed in the most stormy direction. It was a favorite doctrine with Agnes, that ennui is peculiar to intellectual beings, and that those who never suffered from it were like cows or sheep, scarcely to be considered rational. On the present occasion, therefore, she was relieving the intolerable tedium which oppressed her, by delivering her opinion to Sir Patrick, in no measured terms, on the unutterable cruelty of his leaving her stranded in Edinburgh, while she understood he was going soon to amuse himself abroad.