"I tell you it is beyond my power to marry him, even if I wished to. I cannot achieve the impossible. Gerald's future cannot depend upon me."
"Then, if it is to depend upon me, a cruel future it will be for him. By a new will I am leaving everything to him."
"Mr. Barton, you are an incarnate devil!"
"Nothing of the kind—only very much a man."
"A coward, since you revenge yourself on a dead woman."
At this Barton was seized with a sudden fury.
"I revenge myself on the son of a woman who ruined me," he almost shouted. "I would have lived and died a decent man but for her. Within me I had the seeds of a wicked heredity, which drove me, if not to crime, at least into contact with crime. The woman I loved would have saved me from myself, and my sister stepped in to prevent my salvation. I hated her for it, I hate her son, and the knowledge that he will go headlong to ruin after my death, will be the sweetest of my dying thoughts."
Miriam looked at the old man with amazement, as he shook with fury and impotent rage. His face became positively brutish, his eyes glittered with insane light, and he shook from head to foot, as though seized with a palsy.
"You say that I am an opium-eater," he continued wrathfully. "I am—I am! For years I was possessed of seven devils which tore at me, and, in despair, I took to the drug. Mother Mandarin! you know her well, and she knows me. Many a time have I crept down that foul lane in Lambeth to the foul den of that old hag, and there with many a pipe have I sought to smoke myself into oblivion—into an imaginary paradise where at least I might hope to dream of her who was lost to me. But did oblivion come—was Paradise opened? No, no! I was taken into hell—to suffer the tortures of the damned. My waking life was agony—my sleeping, pain everlasting; yet I could not tear myself away from the thing. It gained too strong a hold on me, and I am a slave to it even now—I confess it, a slave to Satan, to Apollyon, to Beelzebub. You know now why I go to London, and seek to deliver myself into the grip of those things which lie in darkness."
In his agitation he rose and paced the floor, rent and torn by the devils which, as he said, and which Miriam, with the spectacle before her, was constrained to believe, possessed him.