"Tell me, curse you!" shaking him until his teeth rattled.
He was too far gone to answer and fell under the table. The judge kicked him, and with a muttered curse took up a glass of whisky, and tossing it down his throat, hurriedly left the cabin, and began to pace the deck in violent agitation.
This man who had so ruthlessly set a pitfall for his neighbor had suddenly tumbled into one which retributive justice had dug deep for himself!
"It must be true," he was saying. "It accounts for the strange feeling I had toward him when he asked me to help him do that infernal deed. I could not understand it then, but it is plain enough now. He is my son! And I have not only transmitted a tainted life to him, but helped to damn him in its possession! God! what irony! Of course the quack never knew that I, too, am living under a false name! I wonder if it is too late to stop him? Yes—it's done, and he is miles away! It's almost daybreak now! Whewwwh! It's horrible!"
He dashed his clenched fist on the railing of the vessel. While he stood there, his mind ran back into the past. He lived over again those passionate days when he had won and betrayed a young, beautiful, impressionable girl. His heart beat with a swifter stroke as he remembered the excitement of their hurried flight from her parents, and the wild joy of their adventurous lives, and then sank again to its steady, hopeless throb as he recalled her penitence and misery after the birth of the boy, his consenting to marry her, the ceremony, the respite from self-reproach, the few happy months, the relapse into old bad habits, the sobered mother becoming a devout and faithful member of a Quaker church, his disgust at this, his quarrels with her and finally his desertion of her. And then the whole subsequent series of adventures and disasters passed before him—a moving panorama of dishonor and crime! He paced the deck again; then he paused and leaned over the gunwale, listening to the water lapping the sides of the vessel. Nothing could have been more astonishing to him than the sudden activity of his conscience. It had been so long since he had experienced remorse that he believed himself incapable of it. But suddenly a fierce and unendurable pang seized him. To a man who had been long accustomed to feeling nothing in the contemplation of his deeds, but a dull consciousness of unworthiness, this sharp and terrible attack of shame and guilt was startling indeed. He could not understand it. The pain seemed disproportionate to the sin; but he could not resist the repugnance and horror with which it filled him! And this is an element in the moral life with which bad men forget to deal! Because conscience ceases to remonstrate and remorse to torment, they think the exemption permanent. They do not know that at any moment, in some unforeseen emergency—this abused faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life. This elemental power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated from the soul than heat from fire! It may smoulder unobserved, but a breath will fan it into flame! Without it, the soul would cease to be a soul; its permanent eradication would be equivalent to annihilation! If conscience can be eliminated, man has nothing to brag of over a tadpole! We are no more safe from it than from memory! Who can be sure that what he has forgotten has ceased to survive? The sweet perfume of a violet may revive a bitter memory dormant for fifty years! At a word, a look, a glance, conscience—abused, suppressed, despised, inoperative—may rise in all her majesty and fill the heart with torment and despair!
This corrupted judge, this faithless lover, this dishonorable parent, had become accustomed to dull misery; but this fierce onslaught of an avenging sense of personal unworthiness and dread of divine justice was more than he could bear. Life had long since lost its charms and he had more than once seriously contemplated suicide.
"There seems to be no use in trying to beat nature in any other way, and so I will try the dernier resort," he said aloud. Opening his pocket knife, he cut a piece of rope from the flagstaff, looked around, found a heavy bar of iron, and fastened rope and weight together. In one end of the rope he made a noose, slipped it over his neck, approached the railing and leaned upon it to reflect. His mind now went back into the still more remote past; he was a boy again, and at his mother's knee. Half audibly and half unconsciously, he began murmuring, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray—no—I'll be consistent," he added, with a sigh. "I have lived without the mummery of prayer, and I will die without it."
And then by one of those strange freaks of the mind that make people do the most absurd things at the most sacred times—mourners laugh at funerals, and soldiers in the thick of battles long for puddings—he began to say over that old doggerel which he used to repeat when shivering on the spring-board over the cold waters of the Hudson river:
"One, two, three, the bumble bee,
The rooster crows and away she goes!"
The absurdity of so trivial a memory at such a serious moment excited his sense of humor, and he smiled.