If he lost his chances with Olive, beggary stared him in the face; drops of perspiration started to his forehead, and chance now confirmed his diabolical resolution. The gloomy fiend was uppermost, his revenge, and perhaps future triumph, stood embodied before him. He did not pause, and all these dire thoughts occurred to him in less than the space of one vibration of a pendulum.
Had the Master of Aberfeldie turned sharply round he might have read in Holcroft's white face an expression that was not pleasant to look upon just then—the face of one that would work him mischief if he could; but the unwitting Allan was doing what he had not done since boyhood, he was peering with vague curiosity into the profundity below.
A fury, a clamorous anxiety, seemed to blaze up in the heart and brain of Holcroft, who was a practised 'bruiser,' and he suddenly gave Allan an awful blow under the left ear—a blow hit right out from the shoulder—that shot him headlong into the vault.
He vanished from the light; there was a heavy thud far down below, and then all became still—unnaturally so; but Holcroft could hear the beating of his own pulses, while the blood seemed to be surging about his throbbing temples.
Was he acting in a dream from which he would waken to find himself in bed? or was all this happening, not to him, but to some one else? No, there was the bruised right hand, from which the violence of his blow had torn the skin.
He had read of dark crimes, of murders, but little did he think he would ever become the participator in such a deed; but opportunity is always the devil's game.
For a minute—an eternity it seemed, by the chaos of his mind, the sudden inversion of all thought—he did not breathe, he scarcely seemed to live.
There was a whisper of 'murder' on his lips, and it seemed to have an echo, that terrible whisper, but whether from the walls, the trees that waved below them, the blue sky, or the crows that were winging their way through it, he knew not. He seemed to whisper the awful word to himself, with quivering lips, again and again, as if he required an assurance of its truth, and then sought to rouse himself from his lethargic stupor, quit the scene of his sudden crime, and seek safety in flight—flight!
But, then, to quit Dundargue thus would fix suspicion on himself. Had not Clairette, the French maid, seen him but lately with Allan? And flight would mar the very object for which he had committed the crime.
Should he—could he—at all risks to himself and his fortune, ere it was too late, strive to undo what he had done; to give an alarm, and make some excuse or explanation ere life had departed from the shattered frame of his victim, or leave the latter to his obscure fate—a grave under his father's roof!