He sought and found relief in planning out something for his future life. The discovery of the murderer—the clearing up of the terrible mystery that involved that crime—had become a duty, and he resolved to apply himself to it steadily and determinedly. His unacquitted debt of vengeance on Linton, too, was not forgotten. These accomplished, he resolved again to betake himself to the “new world beyond seas.” Wealth had become distasteful to him; it was associated with all that lowered and humiliated him. He felt that with poverty his manly reliance, his courageous daring to confront danger, would return,—that once more upon the wild prairie, or the blue waters of the Pacific, he would grow young of heart, and high in spirit, forgetting the puerile follies into which a life of affluence had led him. “Would that I could believe it all a dream!” thought he. “Would that this whole year were but a vision, and that I could go back to what I once was, even as 'the buccaneer,' they called me!”
His last hours in Tubbermore were spent in arrangements that showed he never intended to return there. His household was all discharged; his equipages and horses despatched to the capital to be sold; his books, his plate, and all that was valuable in furniture, were ordered to be packed up, and transmitted to Dublin. He felt a kind of malicious pleasure in erasing and effacing, as it were, every trace of the last few months.
“I will leave it,” muttered he, “to become the wreck I found it—would that I could be what I was ere I knew it!”
The following day he left Tubbermore forever, and set out for Dublin.
CHAPTER XXXII. ON THE TRACK
“And with a sleuth-hound's scent,
Smells blood afar!”
It was nightfall when Roland Cashel entered Dublin. The stir and movement of the day were over, and that brief interval which separates the life of business from that of pleasure had succeeded. Few were stirring in the streets, and they were hastening to the dinner-parties whose hour had now arrived. It was little more than a year since Cashel had entered that same capital, and what a change had come over him within that period! Then he was buoyant in all the enjoyment of youth, health, and affluence; now, although still young, sorrow and care had worn him into premature age. His native frankness had become distrust; his generous reliance on the world's good faith had changed into a cold and cautious reserve which made him detestable to himself.
Although he passed several of his former acquaintance without being recognized, he could not persuade himself but that their avoidance of him was intentional, and he thought he saw a purpose-like insolence in the pressing entreaties with which the news-vendors persecuted him to buy “The Full and True Report of the Trial of Roland Cashel for Murder.”
And thus it was that he, whose fastidious modesty had shrunk from everything like the notoriety of fashion, now saw himself exposed to that more terrible ordeal, the notoriety of crime. The consciousness of innocence could not harden him against the poignant suffering the late exposure had inflicted. His whole life laid bare! Not even to gratify the morbid curiosity of gossips; not to amuse the languid listlessness of a world devoured by its own ennui; but far worse! to furnish motives for an imputed crime! to give the clew to a murder! In the bitterness of his torn heart, he asked himself: “Have I deserved all this? Is this the just requital for my conduct towards others? Have the hospitality I have extended, the generous assistance I have proffered—have the thousand extravagances I have committed to gratify others—no other fruits than these?” Alas! the answer of his enlightened intelligence could no longer blind him by its flatteries. He recognized, at last, that to his abuse of fortune were owing all his reverses; that the capricious extravagance of the rich man—his misplaced generosity, his pompous display—can create enemies far more dangerous than all the straits and appliances of rebellious poverty; that the tie of an obligation which can ennoble a generous nature, may, in a bad heart, develop the very darkest elements of iniquity; and that he who refuses to be bound by gratitude is enslaved by hate!