“I am stupid as death!” he said to himself: “I have let her call me in vain!”
“I am coming!” he cried again, revived with sudden joy. He dropped on the roof, and sped down the stair to the door that opened on the second floor. All was dark as underground, but he knew the way so well he needed but a little guidance from his hands. He hurried to lady Arctura’s chamber, and the spot where the press stood, ready with one shove to send it yards out of his way. There was no press there!—nothing but a smooth, cold, damp wall! His heart sank within him. Was he in a terrible dream? No, no! he had but made a mistake—had trusted too much to his knowledge of the house, and was not where he thought he was! He struck a light. Alas! alas! he was where he had intended! It was her room! There was the wardrobe, but nearer the door! Where it had stood was no recess!—nothing but a great patch of fresh plaster! It was no dream, but a true horror!
Instinctively clutching his skene dhu, he darted to the great stair. It must have been the voice of Arctura he had heard! She was walled up in the chapel!
Down the stair, with swift noiseless foot he sped, and stopped at the door of the half-way room. It was locked!
There was but one way left! To the foot of the stair he shot. Good heavens! if that way also should have been known to the earl! He crept through the little door underneath the stair, feeling with his hands ere his body was through: the arch was open! In an instant he was in the crypt.
But now to get up through the opening into the passage above—stopped with a heavy slab! He sprang at the steep slope of the window-sill, but there was no hold, and as often as he sprang he slipped down again. He tried and tried until he was worn out and almost in despair. She might be dying! he was close to her! he could not reach her! He stood still for a moment to think. To his mind came the word, “He that believeth shall not make haste.” He thought with himself, “God cannot help men with wisdom when their minds are in too great a tumult to hear what he says!” He tried to lift up his heart and make a silence in his soul.
As he stood he seemed to see, through the dark, the gloomy place as it first appeared when he threw in the lighted letter. All at once he started from his quiescence, dropped on his hands and knees, and crawled until he found the flat stone like a gravestone. Out came his knife, and he dug away the earth at one end, until he could get both hands under it. Then he heaved it from the floor, and shifting it along, got it under the opening in the wall.
CHAPTER LXXIV.
A MORAL FUNGUS.
Spiritual insanity, cupidity, cruelty, and possibly immediate demoniacal temptation had long been working in and on a mind that had now ceased almost to distinguish between the real and the unreal. Every man who bends the energies of an immortal spirit to further the ends and objects of his lower being, fails so to distinguish; but with the earl the blindness had wrought outward as well as inwardly, so that he was even unable, during considerable portions of his life, to tell whether things took place outside or inside him. Nor did this trouble him—he was past caring. He would argue that what equally affected him had an equal right to be by him regarded as existent. He paid no heed to the different natures of the two kinds of existence, their different laws, and the different demands they made upon the two consciousnesses; he had in fact, by a long course of disobedience growing to utter disuse of conscience, arrived nearly at non-individuality. In regard to what was outside him he was but a mirror, in regard to what was inside him a mere vessel of imperfectly interacting forces. And now his capacities and incapacities together had culminated in a hideous plot, in which it would be hard to say whether the folly, the crime, or the cunning predominated: he had made up his mind that, if the daughter of his brother refused to wed her cousin, and so carry out what he asserted to have been the declared wish of her father, she should go after her father, and leave her property to the next heir, so that if not in one way then in another the law of nature might be fulfilled, and title and property united without the intervention of a marriage. As to any evil that therein might be imagined to befall his niece, he quoted the words of Hamlet—“Since no man has ought of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?”—she would be no worse than she must have been when the few years of her natural pilgrimage were of necessity over: the difference to her was not worth thinking of beside the difference to the family! At the same time perhaps a scare might serve, and she would consent to marry Forgue to escape a frightful end!
The moment Donal was gone, he sent Forgue to London, and set himself to overcome the distrust of him which he could not but see had for some time been growing in her. With the sweet prejudices of a loving nature to assist him, he soon prevailed so far that, without much entreaty, she consented to accompany him to London—for a month or so, he said, while Davie was gone. The proposal had charms for her: she had been there with her father when a mere child, and never since. She wrote to Donal to let him know: how it was that her letter never reached him, it is hardly needful to inquire.