‘Ted, dear, I’m afraid you have not left off being unhappy about Laura,’ she murmured, sympathetically.
‘I am only unhappy about her when I think she is married to a scoundrel.’
‘Oh, Ted, how can you say such a thing?’
‘Celia, a man who can give no account of seven years of his life must be a scoundrel,’ Edward Clare said decisively. ‘Say nothing to alarm Laura, I beg you. I am talking to you to-day as if you were a man, and to be trusted. Wait and watch. Wait and watch, as I shall.’
‘Edward, how you frighten me! You make me feel as if we were living in one of those villages at the foot of Vesuvius, with a fiery mountain getting itself ready to explode and destroy us.’
‘There will be an explosion some day, Celia, depend upon it; an explosion that will blow up the Manor House as surely as Kirk o’ Field was blown up the night Darnley was slain.’
He said no more, though Celia did not willingly let the subject drop. Indeed, he was inclined to be angry with himself for having said so much, though he had not given his sister his confidence without a motive. He wanted to know all that could be known about John Treverton, and Celia was in a position to learn much that he could not discover for himself.
‘I really thought you were beginning to like Mr. Treverton,’ the girl said, presently. ‘You and he seem to get on so well together.’
‘I am civil to him for Laura’s sake. I would be guilty of a worse hypocrisy if I thought it would serve her interests.’
Edward sighed, and gave his head another angry jerk upon the cushion. He wanted to do John Treverton deadly harm; and yet he knew that the worst he could do to his rival would bring about no good result to himself. There was nothing to be gained by it. The injury would be irrevocable, deadly; a blight upon name and fortune—perchance the gallows—a shame so deep that a loving wife would scarcely survive the blow. All this was in Edward Clare’s mind as a not impossible revenge. And unhappily there was no smaller revenge possible. He felt himself possessed of a deadly power; but of no power to wound without slaying. He was like the cobra, whose poisonous fangs are provided with an ingenious mechanism which keeps them in reserve until the creature wants to use them. Two hinged teeth lie back against the roof of the snake’s mouth. When he attacks his victim the hinge moves, the fangs descend, the poison gland is pressed, and the deadly poison runs down a groove in the tooth, and drops into the puncture prepared to receive it. Lop off the wounded limb ere the shadow on the dial has marked the passage of twenty seconds, or the venom will have done its work. Medicine has yet to discover the antidote that can save the life of the victim.