Farewell my faith in aught of human kind.
I’ll hie me to some hermit’s cave, and there
Forget my race.”
When the doctor had left the library, Malcolm Montrose threw himself back in his chair, clasped his forehead between his hands, and strove to master the consternation that seemed to threaten his very reason.
Grief, horror, and amazement, sufficient to have shaken the firmness of the strongest mind, deprived him for the moment of all power of practical and definite action. And yet, through all the terrible emotion that shook his soul to its centre, he was conscious of a profound incredulity in the truth of the doctor’s statement. But the doubt, the uncertainty, the mere suspicion of such atrocious crimes, perpetrated in the bosom of his own family, overwhelmed him with consternation.
“Dead by the hand of the secret poisoner! the baron and his daughter too! the baron whose whole life had been one long act of the noblest beneficence, and his child, whose days had been ever devoted to the happiness of all around her! their benign lives cut off by poison! Impossible! impossible! it cannot be! it is not so!
“And yet, and yet the suddenness and the strangeness of both deaths, and the unquestionable competency of the physician who attended them in their last hours, and who now makes this dreadful assertion!
“And if this is so, by whom, great Heavens? By whom has this atrocious crime been perpetrated? and for what purpose? Who could have any interest in the premature death of this noble man and lovely girl?
“No one but—oh, Heaven! but Eudora! She is their heiress; the estate is now hers, but she is innocent! my life, my honor, my soul will I stake upon her innocence. And yet, if this father and child shall be proved to have died by poison, how black the evidence may be made to appear against her, and how weak her own position! She is an orphan and friendless, and though on her father’s side of English parentage, she is of foreign birth and education, and has been in this country too short a time to establish a character. She has no good antecedents to set against this dreadful charge with the strong testimony that may be brought to support it. She was the third in succession to this estate, and, consequently, her mercenary interest in the deaths of the baron and his daughter. She was the constant attendant of the late Lord Leaton, and prepared the drink of which he died. She watched last night by the side of Agatha, and administered to her the so-called fatal draught. If they are proved to have died by poison it will ruin her indeed. She will be called a second Brinvilliers. She will be arraigned, tried, condemned—oh, Heaven of Heavens! what unspeakable horrors remain in store for her, innocent as an angel though I know her to be.”
Such were the maddening thoughts that coursed through his brain and caused the sweat of agony to start from his brow. He wiped the beaded drops from his pale forehead, and sprang up and paced the room with disordered steps, laboring in vain for the composure that he could not obtain.