Awful was the explosion that followed; the wretch was torn into a hundred pieces; his limbs, his brains, his blood were scattered all about. A portion of the mangled carcass struck the Doctor; the lamp was broken by the shock and darkness prevailed in the room.
The inmates of the house, frightened at the noise, rushed to the scene of the catastrophe with lights. Frank Sydney, Sophia and Mrs. Franklin, as well as several other male and female domestics, entering the apartment, stood aghast at the shocking spectacle presented to their gaze. There stood the Doctor, with folded arms and his face stained with blood; here an arm, here, a blackened mass of flesh; and here, the most horrible object of all, the mutilated and ghastly head, with the same expression of malignant hate upon its hideous features as when those livid lips had last uttered curses!
'The deed is done,' said the Doctor, addressing Sydney, with a grim smile—'justice has its due at last, and the diabolical villain has gone to his final account. Summon some scavenger to collect the vile remains, and bury them in a dung-hill. To give them Christian, decent burial would be treason to man, sacrilege to the Church, and impiety to God!'
Thus perished the 'Dead Man,' a villain so stupendous, so bloodthirsty and so desperate that it may well be doubted whether such a monster ever could have existed. But this diabolical character is not entirely drawn from the author's imagination; neither is it highly exaggerated;—for the annals of crime will afford instances of villainy as deep and as monstrous as any that characterized the career of the 'Dead Man' of our tale. What, for example, can be more awful or incredible than the hideous deed of a noted criminal in France, who, having ensnared a peasant girl in a wood, brutally murdered her, then outraged the corpse, and afterwards ate a part of it? Yet no one will presume to doubt the fact, as it forms a portion of the French criminal records. Humanity shudders at such instances of worse than devilish depravity.
Moreover, to show that we have indulged in no improbabilities in portraying the chief villain of our tale, we assert that a person bearing that name and the same disfigurement of countenance, really existed not two years ago. He was renowned for his many crimes, and was murdered by a former accomplice, in a manner not dissimilar to the death we have assigned to him in the story.
But we turn from a contemplation of such villains, to pursue a different and somewhat more agreeable channel.
CHAPTER XXX
Showing that a man should never marry a woman before he sees her face—The Disappointed Bridegroom—Final Catastrophe.
Two months passed away. Two months!—how short a space of time, and yet, perchance, how pregnant with events affecting the happiness and the destiny of millions! Within that brief span—the millionth fraction of a single sand in Time's great hour-glass—thousands have begun their existence, to pursue through life a career of honor, of profit, of ambition, or of crime!—and thousands, too, have ceased their existence, and their places are filled by others in the great race of human life.