“By G—d, I’ve done it!”
He had done it! No matter what noise accompanied the removal of horse and rider, the wife, whom in his sober hours he professed to love so passionately lay insensible to sight or sound, and wakened only to a morrow of delirium.
CHAPTER THE FORTY-FIFTH.
WOUNDS INFLICTED AND ENDURED.
THE spark lies cold in the flint until it is struck; and Ellen had not believed her quiet husband capable of so much passionate indignation as burst from him on the receipt (at Sheffield) of the details just given.
“Brute! ruffian!” burst from his lips, as the letter he had crushed in his grasp fell to the floor; and with a stamp he rose to his feet, pressed one hand across his knitted brows, and paced the dingy carpet from end to end in a state of restless perturbation, his wrath finding vent in epithets and invectives foreign to his tongue.
“Whatever is the matter, Jabez, love?” Ellen asked in amazement.
“Oh, Ellen, dear! that brute Aspinall——” He could get no further. Feeling choked his utterance.
She picked up the crumpled letter, and with almost equal exasperation and pain made herself mistress of its contents, in her womanly indignation and love for her cousin losing sight of her husband’s excessive emotion.
Jabez left his journey unfinished, and drove back home with all speed. Ellen shared with Mrs. Ashton and her own mother the anxious watch in that large dim room, where the favourite of the family tossed her head from side to side, and muttered incoherent words.