“On my very door steps, Andrew Britton, I saw a face. Young and beautiful—so like—so very like—hers who—”
“You don’t mean the Lady Monimia?”
“Hush, hush. ’Twas she—I knew her—come to look at me, as she looked—now two and twenty years ago, in the spring of her rare beauty, when we—we—quenched her life, Andrew Britton.”
“That’s all your beastly imagination,” said Britton, “I wonder at you. On your step, do you say?”
“Yes.”
“Stuff—you don’t drink enough to clear your head of the vapours. Some of these days you’ll fancy you see your—”
“Hush, hush. My conscience tells me the name you were about to pronounce Hush, hush, I say. Oh! Andrew Britton, you are a man rough in speech and manners. Your heart seems callous, but have there been no times—no awful moments when your mental eye has been, as it were, turned inwards on your soul, and you have shrunk aghast from—from yourself, and wished to be the poorest, veriest abject mortal that ever crawled, so you were innocent of man’s blood? Britton—savage, wild as you are, you must have felt some portion of the pangs that bring but one awful consolation with them, and that is, that hell can inflict no more upon us.”
“I’ll be hanged if I know what you are driving at,” cried Britton. “I should recommend brandy-and-water.”
“No, no; I cannot drink. That vulgar consolation is denied to me. My blood dries up, and my brain inflames, but I get no peace from such a source. Besides it shortens life.”
“Have your own way. All I’ve got to say is, that I feel as sure as that I am standing here, that some one has been watching me at the Chequers.”