The moral condition of Henry Holford was a striking proof of the daring flights of which the human mind is capable. On the very first occasion of his visit to the palace, he had allowed himself to be carried away by all the wildest emotions and the strangest impressions that were produced by the novelty of what he then saw and heard. Royalty had been ever associated, in his vulgar conception, with something grand and handsome in man, and something wonderfully beautiful in woman. Thus, when he first saw the Queen, he was prepared to admire her:—he admired her accordingly; and that feeling increased to a degree the insolence of which at times overawed and terrified even himself.
By another wayward inclination of his unhealthy but enthusiastic mind, he had from the first been prepared to dislike the Prince; and this feeling increased in violence with those circumstances which each successive visit to the royal abode developed. At length—as if his evil destiny must infallibly hurry him on to some appalling catastrophe—he was discovered by the Prince in the detestable condition of an eaves-dropper, and was ignominiously driven forth from that dwelling where his mind had gradually collected the elements of a most unnatural excitement.
He knew that any attempt to repeat his visits would be frustrated by the precautions which were certain to have been adopted to prevent future intrusions of a like nature; and he now felt precisely as one who is compelled suddenly to abandon a habit to which he had become wedded. Strange as it may appear, the morbid excitement attendant upon those visits to the palace was as necessary to Holford's mental happiness as tobacco, opium, snuff, or strong liquors are to so many millions of individuals.
With a person in such a state of mind, the first impulse was bitter hatred against the one who had deprived him of a source of pleasurable excitement; and in that vengeful feeling were absorbed all those rational reflections which would have convinced him that his own insolent intrusion—his own unpardonable conduct—had provoked the treatment he had received. He never paused to ask himself by what right he had entered the palace and played the ignoble part of a listener to private conversation and a spy upon the hallowed sanctity of domestic life:—the dominant idea in his mind was his ignominious expulsion.
"Fate has now filled my cup of bitterness to the brim," he would say to himself; "and all that remains for me to do is to avenge myself on him whom my destiny has made the instrument of this crowning degradation."
By degrees the mind of that young man found its gloomy broodings upon vengeance associating themselves with other sentiments. He gradually blended this idea of revenge with the ardent desire of breaking those trammels which kept his name imprisoned in the silent cavern of obscurity. The two sentiments at length united in his imagination; and his pulse beat quickly—and his eyes flashed fire, when he surveyed the possibility of gratifying his thirst for vengeance and suddenly rendering his name notorious at the same moment, and by one desperate—fearful deed!
The reader cannot now be at a loss to comprehend how this wretchedly mistaken young man was brought to study the history of those regicides who have gained an infamous renown in the annals of nations.
And as he dwelt with an insane enthusiasm upon those narratives, the feeling of admiration—nay, adoration—which he had once experienced towards the Queen, was merged in the terrible longing for a diabolical notoriety that now became his predominating—his all-absorbing passion!
"Yes!" he exclaimed, as he pushed the book away from him, that night on which we have introduced the reader to his garret: "I will be talked about—my name shall be upon every tongue! Obscurity shall no longer enshroud me: its darkness is painful to my soul. I will do a deed that shall make the Kingdom ring from one end to the other with the astounding tidings:—the newspapers shall struggle with all the eagerness of competition to glean the most trivial facts concerning me;—and when the day arrives for me to appear before my judges, the great nobles and the high-born ladies of England shall crowd in the tribunal to witness the trial of the pot-boy Henry Holford!"
The act on which the young man was now resolved, appeared not to him in its real light as an atrocious crime—a damnable deed that would arouse a yell of execration from one end of the land to the other:—it seemed, on the contrary, a glorious achievement of which he would have reason to be proud.