“Or perhaps there is still another,” was the low reply.
Tossing from side to side on the bed, working his fingers on the counterpane, every lineament of his face betraying the terrible mental agonies he was undergoing, Aylesford lay, a picture of remorse which had come too late. As his broken ejaculations went on it became evident that another person, as the surgeon had hinted, now mingled in his thoughts with Miss Aylesford.
“Forgive me, Mary, forgive me,” he cried, clasping his hands, “I have indeed deserted our child; but if I had known—if I had—”
Here his words sunk into indistinct babblings, all that could be distinguished being the single phrase, “they call her his niece, you know.”
He lay still for nearly a minute. Suddenly he sprang up again, glaring wildly at the opposite part of the bed.
“Take him away,” he shrieked, in a voice that made the hair of his hearers stand on end with horror, and was heard far away out across the silence of the night; “his fingers almost touch me.”
He clung to the clergyman, as a child, when woke from a dream in which it has seen horrible shapes, clings to its mother; his eyeballs starting from their sockets, his features convulsed with agony, and the perspiration exuding, like huge rain drops, over his clammy forehead.
It was a scene, which those who were present, could never shake off. The terrified countenance of the dying man, the despairing clutch with which he held on to the chaplain, and the fixed, stony gaze of horror which he fastened, as if on some object right across the bed, and almost within reach; the whole rendered, for an instant, visible with more than ordinary distinctness, as a burning deck of one of the ships that was consuming, fell in, shooting a quick, intense glare into the room.
“Oh! my God,” he cried, “they come; there is a hell.”
The piercing tone, almost amounting to a shriek; the awful look; the gesture of horrible fear with which he shrank closer yet to the clergyman; these no pen can adequately paint.