It is, unhappily, the nature of jealousy to magnify small things into great ones, and to build upon the flimsiest supposition a series of incidents inflaming to the brain of the jaundiced thinker, but which, nevertheless, have no foundation in fact. Unfortunately, the jealous too often act upon these probabilities as if they had really happened, and in the paroxysms of rage and agony created by unworthy visions, reason takes to flight, and the worst extravagances are the result.
This was the case with Colonel Mires. He had assumed interviews between Flora and young Vivian which had never taken place. His prurient mind, not improved by his residence in India, had wrought out love passages which had not occurred, and he groaned, gnashed his teeth, and even wept with agony.
That he passionately loved Flora, even unto frenzy, was beyond a doubt, and that it worked him up to a pitch of insanity is equally true, as his recent conduct proved. In India, in command of a native regiment, his power was great—he was, in a small sphere, a monarch; in England, he felt curbed, trammelled, shackled, and if he had not had an Indian servant, in close attendance, to expend that love and inordinate desire for supreme command upon, he would have been constantly committing some outrageous outbreak of temper, which, of necessity, would have often precipitated him into trouble.
He chafed at the restraint the state of society in England placed upon him; and when it was impossible to conceal from himself that he was the veriest slave to Flora’s beauty, he was infuriate to find that his wish, no less than his will, went for nothing in effecting a result in which the happiness or misery of his whole future life was involved.
The confession of love for Vivian, which Flora had made to her father, and the expressed determination of old Wilton to give her hand to the Honorable Lester Vane, scattered any floating delusive hopes he might have entertained. He saw that she could only become his by some bold act of villany, perpetrated regardless of all consequences attendant upon its frustration.
He formed a plan with subtlety, and made his arrangements with skill. He went over the whole distance between Harleydale and Southampton carefully, making a chart of the bye-ways. He provided relays of horses at unfrequented spots; and at every house, where it would be necessary to rest for the night or stay for refreshment, he palmed off on the host a story that his task was the distressing one of conveying a young lady, afflicted with raving insanity, to an asylum for lunatics. Every minute detail of the plan was carefully considered before adoption, and every possible contingency foreseen and provided against.
There was one exception!
It did not strike Colonel Mires that he was distrusted, suspected of evil machinations, and was, therefore, closely watched.
Such a probability was omitted from his calculations. How, in fact, was he to conjecture that Nathan Gomer, having perused his physiognomy carefully, while Vivian was replying to the charges he had made against him, had formed a conclusion most unfavourable to him; that, in short, the shrewd little man had believed he read in the workings of his features a strong determination to commit an evil deed, by which Vivian directly and Flora indirectly would be made to suffer.
Yet such was the fact; and Nathan Gomer was not the man to pause in doubt when he suspected evil. Having several agents in his pay, he instructed one upon whom he could rely, and from that moment Colonel Mires went nowhere abroad without an unknown attendant, of whose existence he was unconscious, but who dogged his footsteps with untiring pertinacity.