He was in blissful ignorance that his forsaken wife and her infant were on the same ship.
The wife whom he believed to be in her pauper grave in potter’s field, and the child of whose birth he had never heard!
Gentleman Geff was riding on the topmost wave of success and popularity. He had paid a high price for his fortune, but he told himself continually that the fortune was worth all he had given for it.
Certainly there were two awful pictures that would present themselves to his mental vision with terrible distinctness and persistent regularity.
The first was of a deep wood, in the dead of night, and a young man’s ghastly face turned up to the starlight.
The other was of a silent city street, in the dark hours before day, and a girl’s form prone upon the pavement, with a dark stream creeping from a wound in her side.
There were moments when the murderer would have given all that he had gained by his crimes to wake up and find that they had all been “the phantasmagoria of a midnight dream”; that he was not the counterfeit Randolph Hay, Esquire, of Haymore, with a rent roll of twenty thousand pounds sterling a year, and an income from invested funds of twice as much, and with two atrocious murders on his soul, but simply the poor devil of an adventurer who lived by his wits, and was known to the miners as Gentleman Geff.
At such times he would drink deeply of brandy, and under its influence find all his views change. He would philosophize about life, fortune, destiny, necessity, and try to persuade himself that he had been more sinned against than sinning. He then felt sure that, if he had been born to wealth, he would have been a philanthropist of the highest order, a benefactor to the whole human race; would have founded churches, and sent out missionaries; would have established hospitals and asylums, and erected model tenement houses for the poor.
Ah! how good and great a man he would have proved himself if he had only been born to vast wealth! But he had been born to genteel poverty. Fate had been unkind. It was all the fault of fate, he argued.
In this exaltation he would go into the gentlemen’s saloon, sit down at one of the gaming tables, and stake, and win or lose, large sums of money; and so, in the feverish mental and physical excitement of drinking and gambling, he would seek to drive away remorse.