Peggy stopped short in the middle of the kitchen, where she had been hastily laying out a rapidly prepared meal for her master’s son.
“Keepin’ ye out of what?” she said solemnly, and with a scared look in her eyes.
“Of my inheritance—it’s no use humbugging me any longer,” said Horace—“I know it all.”
Peggy set down the dish she had in her hands, dropped upon the stool before the fire, and throwing her apron over her head, rocked herself for a few moments back and forward, in silence.
“Amen! it ought to have comed sooner; it must have comed some time,” said Peggy at last to herself; “but the Lord forgive me, didn’t I say and prophesy that when wance the bairns knowed it the end would come? Oh, Mr. Horry! for the love of God and your mother, if you have any love in you, go your ways, and tarry not a moment in this doomed house.”
“You are not very charitable, Peggy,” said Horace, who, by some diabolical impulse, began to recover his spirits at this stage of the interview; “especially as I presume your preparations were for me—and I’m rather hungry. You can’t surely refuse me a dinner, if it is in the kitchen, in my father’s house?”
Peggy rose without a word, and placed bread and ale on the table beside the little dish of meat which she had abstracted from her master’s dinner for his son’s benefit.
“Eat, if ye can eat in this house and with sitch thoughts,” said Peggy; “but I crave of ye to give God thanks ere ye break the bread.”
As Peggy stood over him, severe and disapproving, the remembrance of many such scenes in his childhood came to the memory of Horace; scenes in which Susan appeared, sweetly saying her child’s grace, and he himself rebelling and refusing, with Peggy standing by exactly as she did now—her judicial eye fixed sternly on him. He was a man now, and had bigger rebellions in hand. With a little sneer and levity in that momentary diabolical exhilaration of spirits, he said the child’s grace which Peggy herself had taught him nearly twenty years ago. When he had repeated the amen, his father’s faithful servant turned away from him to go about her needful business, for it was drawing near to Mr. Scarsdale’s dinner hour. But Horace put down his knife and fork upon his plate with a shudder of self-horror—the food choked him—he could not swallow the bread on which his lips, without any help from his heart, had dared at that terrible moment to ask God’s blessing. The time of opportunity, which he tried to persuade himself he did not premeditate, but which was forcing itself upon him, approached moment by moment. He got up from the table with a nervous, imperceptible trembling, and went to stand by the fire where Peggy was busy, and then to wander through the apartment, always restlessly returning to that bright spot. An impulse of flight seized him at one moment—at another, a wild thought of thrusting himself into his father’s very presence, by way of escaping the devil within him, and rather getting into hot words and a violent contest than this miserable guilt. But while he was at the height of his horrible excitement, Peggy, calmly doing her usual business, went out of the kitchen to spread the table in her master’s lonely dining-room. Horace, wild as in a fever, drew with trembling hands out of his pocket one of his mysterious packets. He burst the paper open clumsily, awkwardly, with fingers which seemed made of lead. A great shower of white powder fell upon the floor at his feet, but none reached the dish to which he supposed he had directed it. Trying to remedy this failure, he was startled by a sound, as of Peggy’s return. With a great start, which spilt still more of that fatal dust, he thrust it back into his breast, and in a horror of discovery snatched at something near him, he could not see what it was, and swept into the fire that evidence of his purpose. Having done, or thinking that he had done this, he threw the cloth out of his hands into the fire, and rushed out of the room and the house. As he escaped he saw somehow, by virtue of his passion and fever of overpowering excitement, Peggy coming quietly with a napkin over her arm, and her great white apron shining through the obscurity of the narrow passage, into the kitchen. That home figure, in its everyday occupation, struck him bitterly in his own tremor; he had failed, but he was guilty. No harm to his father had the parricide left behind him, but he was his father’s murderer in his own heart; and all the world and all its riches could never make of him again the same Horace Scarsdale who scowled sullen but innocent upon that same Peggy, before the baleful knowledge for which he thirsted had scorched all nature out of his heart.