Howbeit, Simon Heriot, with all his knowledge of men and of the world, was without knowledge of the power of God. As soon as the news was brought to him that his nephew was condemned to the block, a singular change came over his life. The success of his design gave him not a crumb of satisfaction; indeed he took a morbid, an overmastering distaste for the society of his fellows. He shut himself up in his gloomy manor house with his old and stupid servants. He shunned the light of day. His one desire was to avert his face from all men and from the sight of Heaven.
A brooding lethargy fixed itself upon his soul. A kind of slow horror stole into his brain. He could not settle his mind to anything. Asleep or awake, he knew no peace. He would have undone his deed could he have found the courage that such an act demanded.
This night was as many others. After a solitary meal in a large, dim, comfortless room, Simon Heriot sat long at the table, staring straight before him at the huge open fireplace, whose emptiness was like a yawning chasm. At his elbow had been set a large flagon of wine, of which he drank continually.
There was not a sound in the old house, save that made by an occasional mouse behind the paneling. The servants had gone to bed; it was near eleven o’clock of a perfectly still and moonless summer’s evening; and Simon Heriot was alone with his thoughts.
Wine, it is true, did a little to soften their sting. But when the hand of God has been laid upon a man, it is not amenable to human resources. Behind that dull lethargy of spirit was a never-ceasing pressure. Strange phantoms had begun to lurk on the edge of the outer darkness, away beyond the flickering half-light of the candles on the table.
At last, in sheer fatigue, the unhappy man began to doze. Worn out in mind and body, he fell presently into a troubled sleep. But his unquietness of spirit would not let him rest. He awoke with a start. There was a sense of a continual presence, unseen but all-pervading, in the room.
He strained his eyes beyond the circle of light made by the candles set on the table at which he sat. But away in the ghostly outer darkness of the large room, he could discern no visible shape. He strove to fix some faint and remote sound that thrilled in his ears. But, after all, it was only the little sound of the summer wind stirring in the trees.
Again the jaded brain tried to pierce together the slender core of will that might disperse these phantoms and perhaps enable it to sleep. But it was not to be. Each night as he sat there, besieged by this horror that had entered his soul, the will grew more inert. There was a faint voice within that had begun to whisper to him that he would never sleep again.
Yes, it was true. He would never sleep again. He was tormented by unseen phantoms. Never again would he know peace in this life and perhaps never in the life to come.
Once again he strained his ears to listen. It was only the little voice of the summer wind in the wide chimney-place. All was silence save for that. Yet there was an abiding sense of an unseen, all-pervading presence in the room. And then, quite suddenly, without warning of any kind, a thing happened that made the very soul of Simon Heriot recoil.