Meanwhile Sir John, catching the sound of one word, which tickled the ear of his possessing demon, muttered to himself, “Pretty sisters!” Then added aloud, “Going to see your mother, Roger? Possibly she’s got something further to tell us—I’ll go too.”
CHAPTER XVII.
WHEN Horace returned to Harliflax it was night—too late even for an accepted lover to gain admittance to the widowed house of Mrs. Stenhouse, and Horace was not even an openly accepted lover. These ten days had changed him greatly. This monstrous crime had indeed germinated in his mind from the very hour of his return from London; but that passion of temptation was very different from the horror of unbearable suspense and anxiety which consumed him now. While he was still only about to do it, his mind was buoyed up by a hideous fascination, which carried him over time and space as though upon a devil’s wings. Now that he had done it, every hour was a staring, wide-eyed Medusa, watching and petrifying; and still, through the cold, creeping silence, there came no sound; no cry of the death-agony which he had contrived, nor shout of the avenger of blood behind; no sobbing forth of the dear life shed by his hands, and no cry of Murder! Murder!—only a convulsive whisper of the word among the grass and leaves, and secret spies of nature, which pricked him into madness, and turned the blood in his veins to fire. He was changed, imperceptibly to himself, but in the strangest way. Every day of this week in which he had been compassing his father’s death had made him more like his father. His face had lost its colour and roundness—the soft outline of youth was gone; and in its place had come a sharpened distinction of feature, unusual at his years. His hair, which, to his great wonder, came out in handfuls when he dressed it, fell lank, like that of the recluse at Marchmain; and even his dress took the same resemblance, and flew back from his figure, as he went, with his restless haste of motion, from street to street. But the sneer and the disdain had almost gone out of Horace’s face: he could no longer afford these light emotions. His whole soul was burnt up with passions more intense—self-horror—anxiety, more acute and devouring than ever was the anxiety of love, to know his father’s fate; and, above all, that overpowering certainty of personal guilt, which all the world and all its powers could never again loosen from his self-convicted heart.
It was night, and nobody saw him. Few knew him, besides, in these streets of Harliflax. He rushed to his lodgings, and found there were no letters there; then out again, and did not draw breath till he stood in the dark, on the opposite side of the way, looking into the bright moonlight at the house where Amelia Stenhouse slept the untroubled sleep of youth. There he stood in the depth of the night-shadow, looking how the night-radiance and illumination of that weird moon brought out the long, lofty line of terrace, the line of great houses of which Harliflax was proud. The night was so bright, and the air so still, that one slow figure, gliding along there in front of the high, silent houses, was caught and wrapped in a silvery mantle, and drawn along noiselessly, like a pigmy, in the great flood of silent light. So white on that side of the road—so black here where he stood, among the shadows where the devils and lovers of darkness congregate. But, Amelia, which was she? He raised his eyes to the window which he knew was Amelia’s, and tried to think of all the glories before him; fortune past counting, youth, love—nothing left out that was worth having, but—But!—that one miserable step out into the light across the blackness of darkness—the step which, God help his miserable brain, he was not about to take, but had taken, be the consequences what they might. When he thought of it there, opposite Amelia’s window, standing in the darkness, his head swam and his tongue clove to his mouth. He had done it; he was not projecting, nor discussing, nor entertaining his subtle mind with the temptation; the temptation, with all its thrills of intoxicating excitement, its fascinations of fierce and hostile fancy—its wild impulses of passion—was over for ever, and for ever, and for ever!—and the victim, disenchanted, stood cold, looking always into the blanched face of the deed which he had done. And Horace could no longer think of Amelia; not of the delight of marrying, and carrying away, and making his own property of the beauty; not of the boundless wealth he should have to bestow on her one day; not of the thousand a-year which he believed would induce her to marry him immediately, and which for that sole reason, and no other, he had wrung out of Mr. Pouncet. He had pled his cause warmly with herself, and his love had blazed about her not so many days ago when he was at Harliflax; but he could not turn his thoughts to her now; he could not warm his torpid mind with remembering her beauty; he could not rouse his fierce animal passion. Something black and cold stood first in his mind between him and his fortune—between him and what he called happiness. Murder had overshadowed love, and killed it. He had no longer any thoughts to spare save for that horrible hag whom he had taken into his heart!
As he stood, however, thinking his own thoughts, it soon became vaguely visible to Horace that all was not entirely at rest in the house he was gazing at. Scarcely visible in the great flood of moonlight, there still was now and then the gleam of a light showing for a moment from one floor to another, as somebody went or came downstairs; and sounds began to be audible in the extreme stillness even where he stood. Shortly afterwards Stevens came to the door rubbing his eyes, and went down the street, with a sort of reluctant rapidity, to the doctor’s house at the corner. Horace comprehended it as well as though he had been within and knew all. Edmund was ill. Death was not to be defrauded of that little victim: Edmund was going to die. When the servant came back with the doctor, Horace crossed the road and entered with them, nobody observing him in the excitement—entered he scarcely knew why, with a morbid craving after death and suffering. He was anxious to see how that child would meet the last adversary; curious to observe how the family would arrange itself around the deathbed of the little heir; the poor little heir! who had enjoyed for so short a time his childish importance, his eager liberality of intention. But Horace had no pity to spare for Edmund, or for any other person in the world.
Edmund Stenhouse was dying (as they thought) in the warm parlour where he had lived. He had been worse than usual for a day or two, and was laid there upon a sofa, so that he might not have the fatigue of removal; but though propped up with pillows, for the sake of his painful and hard breathing, he looked very little different from his usual condition. He was shouting out eagerly for pen and paper when Horace passed in at the door. He did not want the doctor; he would not be blistered any more, whatever the doctor said. He wanted somebody out of papa’s office; he was going to make his will, and die.
“I tell you, mamma, I’m not going to take any more physic!” cried the poor child, thrusting aside with his hasty, feeble hand the glassful of some stimulating mixture which the anxious woman held to him. “I’m going to die! I tell you I’ve made up my mind!—what’s the use of sending for doctors and stuff? Send for Scarsdale, or somebody. I’m going to make my will—I’m going to die!”
“I don’t believe he is, though,” said Horace, involuntarily coming forward, without very well knowing what he did. He was desperately interested, somehow, in this dread death which he had invoked. He was curious to see its workings, and how it approached; but he could not recognize that awful presence here.
Mrs. Stenhouse turned round with a little cry of recognition. There was a gleam of gratitude in her eyes: she could almost have taken into her arms the stranger who did not believe that Edmund was dying, and forgave Horace his former offences on the moment. “Oh, Mr. Scarsdale!—then you don’t see a great difference in him?” cried the poor woman, with a flutter at her heart. She could take courage even from that feeble flicker of hope.
“Oh, here’s Scarsdale,” said Edmund, with a gasp of hard-drawn breath. “I want you to write out my will directly—directly, do you hear? because I’m going to die; you’re to put it all down about me, Edmund Stenhouse, like papa’s—I’d do it myself, only I can’t write as well as a grown-up man; and I want to leave everything—except plenty of money for my mother and a little for the girls—to my brother Roger. Make haste, do you hear? because I’ll die first if you don’t be quick, and then what’s the good of your coming here?”