It may be supposed that the misery now weighing me to the earth was as much as could be imposed upon me; but I was destined to find, and that before the night was over, that misery is only comparative, and that there is no affliction so positively great that greater may not be experienced. In the dead of the night, when my woes had at last been drowned in slumber, I was roused by feeling a hand pressing upon my bosom; and, starting up, I saw, for there was a taper burning on a table hard by, a man standing over me, holding a pillow in his hand, which, the moment I caught sight of him, he thrust into my face, and there endeavoured to hold it, as if to suffocate me.
The horror of death endowed me with a strength not my own, and the ruffian held the pillow with a feeble and trembling arm. I dashed it aside, leaped up in the bed, and beheld in the countenance of the murderer the features of the long missing and abandoned son, Abbot Skinner.
His face was white and chalky, with livid stains around the eyes and mouth, the former of which were staring out of their orbits in a manner ghastly to behold, while his lips were drawn asunder and away from his teeth, as in the face of a mummy. He looked as if horror-struck at the act he was attempting; and yet there was something devilish and determined in his air, that increased my terror to ecstasy. I sprang from the bed, threw myself on the floor, and, grasping his knees, besought him to spare my life. There seemed indeed occasion for all my supplications: his bloated and altered visage, the neglected appearance of his garments and person, and a thousand other signs, showed that the whole period of his absence had been passed in excessive toping, and the murderous and unnatural act which he meditated manifested to what a pitch of phrensy he had brought himself by the indulgence. As I grasped his knees, he put his hand into his bosom, and drew out a poniard, a weapon I had never before known him to carry; at the sight of which I considered myself a dead man. But the love of life still prevailing, I leaped up, and ran to a corner of the room, where I mingled adjurations and entreaties with loud screams for assistance. He stood as if rooted to the spot for a moment; then dropping his horrid weapon, he advanced a few paces, clasped his hands together, fell upon his knees, and burst into tears, and all the while without having uttered a single word. But now, my cries still continuing, he exclaimed, but with a most wild and disturbed look—"Father, I won't hurt you, and pray don't hurt me!"
By this time the housekeeper Barbara, having been alarmed by my outcries, came into the chamber; and her presence relieving me of the immediate fear of death, I gave vent to the horror that his unnatural attempt on my life justly excited, and thus made the woman acquainted with his baseness.
The poor old creature, who had always loved him, was greatly affected, especially when, in reply to my reproaches, he began to talk incoherently, admitting the fact, one instant attempting to justify it by preferring some strange and incoherent complaint, and the next assuring me, in the most piteous manner, that he would do me no harm. To Barbara's upbraidings he replied with a like inconsistency; and when she reproached him for meditating violence at such a moment, while I was mourning the baseness of his brother, he paid little attention to what she said, seeming not only ignorant of Ralph's delinquency, but apparently indifferent to it.
For this reason I began to fear his brain was touched; of which, indeed, I had soon the most fatal proof; for Barbara, having led him to his chamber, came back, assuring me that he was going mad, that his mind was already in a ferment, and, in a word, that that horrible distraction which sooner or later overtakes the confirmed drinker, was lighting the torch in his brain that could only go out with life itself. A physician was sent for: our fears were but too just, and before dawn the miserable youth was raving distracted.
The day that followed was one of distraction, not only to the wretched Abbot, but to myself; and I remember it as a confused dream. The only thing that dwells on my recollection, apart from the outcries in Abbot's chamber and the tumult in my own heart, is, that some one who owed me a sum of money, due that day, came and paid it into my hands with great punctiliousness, and that I received and wrote the acquittance for it with as much accuracy as if nothing were the matter, though my thoughts were far from the subject before me.
At eleven o'clock at night a messenger came to me from the prison, and his news was indeed frightful. The wretched Ralph had just been discovered with his throat cut from ear to ear, having made way with himself in despair.
A few moments after I was summoned to the death-bed of his brother.