“You’ve been drinking, sir,” said the doctor, in authoritative disgust. “You can’t do any good here—be quiet and go to bed. He distresses the patient; some of you take him away.”
“Mr. Horry, come with me,” said Peggy, laying her hand upon his shoulder. He followed her out of the room without saying anything. He was mad, crazed, intoxicated; but with a deadlier poison than was ever distilled from corn or vine!
The old woman took him into his own room and left him there. She shook her head at him in sad displeasure, but understood nothing of the tragic misery which made him mad.
“I bid ye not to grieve,” she said, reproachfully. “The Lord knows he’s been little of a father to you, that you should break your heart for him; but be dacent, Mr. Horry, be dacent; if it’s no for love’s sake, as is no possible, yet have respect to death.”
When Peggy left him Horace buried his haggard face in those hands which had grown thin and sharp like the claws of a bird of prey. “Have respect to death!”—to the death which he had invoked—to the destruction he had made. He sank down prostrate upon the floor, and lay there in a heap, helpless, overcome by the horror of what he had done. The strength of an army could not have kept him from Marchmain at that terrible crisis and climax of his fate; but now when he was here, he could but lie prostrate in the wildest hopeless misery, or, mad with his guilt, peer like a ghoul about his father’s death-bed. It was easier to do that, noting horribly every slow step of the approaching presence, than it was to lie here in the dismal creeping silence, with that footstep creaking on the stair, and chilling the night, and a hundred deadly sprites of vengeance shouting Murder! murder! all night long, into his miserable ear.
CHAPTER XXII.
BEFORE that night was over the terrible visitor whom Horace believed his own act to have brought to Marchmain entered the lonely house; but the unhappy parricide did not hear or see the entrance of that last messenger. While his father sank gradually into the longer and surer quietude, sleep, feverish and painful, fell upon the son. He had not slept for many nights, and his great excitement, added to the fatigue of his journey, had completely exhausted his frame. The confused and painful commotion in the adjoining apartment as the mortal moment approached; the sobs of Susan, who saw Death for the first time, and found the sight of those last agonies intolerable and beyond her strength; the solemn bustle afterwards, when the last offices had to be performed—were all insufficient to awake Horace out of the deep but unquiet slumber, over which phantoms and fever brooded. He lay as Peggy had left him, in his travel-soiled and disordered dress, fatigued, haggard, bearing such weariness and exhaustion in his face, that it would have taken harder hearts than those of his sister and uncle to close themselves against him. But Horace was as unconscious of the visit of Susan and Uncle Edward as of any other incident of the night. They stood over him as he slept, talking in whispers; but those soothing voices did not enter into the fever of his dream. Susan was crying quietly, every word she spoke producing a fresh overflow of tears—natural tears, which she could not help shedding, but soon must wipe away. Nothing less was possible to her tender heart, and it would have been strange if the end of that unloving and unlovely life had produced anything more. “He looks so tired—poor Horace! Oh! Uncle Edward, he is not so hard-hearted as people thought!—he will feel this very much; think how troubled he looked last night,” said Susan.
“Yes, Susan,” said Uncle Edward, with a sigh, “more than troubled; but I do not blame him; it was not his fault—the evil was done before he was born.”
“What evil, uncle?” asked Susan, looking up with wonder through her tears.
“My poor child, it would but horrify you,” said Uncle Edward. “I cannot think but Horace, somehow or other, has found it out. Your brother lying there, Susan, is now one of the richest men in England; your grandfather’s will passed over your poor father, and left everything to Horace. Ah, Susan! nothing but passion, and misery, and black revenge on one side and the other; and look at this young heir—poor Horace! they have heaped up money for him, but they have already robbed him of all the bloom and promise of his life.”