As he was about to close the chest, Elinor, who knew that without a necessary supply of money both her unborn infant and its avaricious father would perish for want, slid her hand into the box, and dextrously abstracted some of the broad gold pieces it contained. The coins, in coming in contact with each other, emitted a slight ringing sound, which arrested, trifling as it was, the ear of the sleeper.
"What! fingering the gold already?" he exclaimed, hastily slapping down the lid of the strong box. "Could you not wait till I am dead?"
Then staggering back to his apartment, he was soon awake, and raving under a fresh paroxysm of the fever. In his delirium he fancied himself confined to the dreary gulf of eternal woe, and from this place of torment he imagined that his brother could alone release him, and he proffered to him, while under the influence of that strong agony, all his hidden treasures if he would but intercede with Christ to save his soul.
These visions of his diseased brain were so frequent and appalling, and the near approach of death so dreadful to the guilty and despairing wretch, that they produced at last a strong desire to see his brother, that he might ask his forgiveness, and make some restitution of his property to him before he died.
"Elinor," he said, "I must see Algernon. I cannot die until I have seen him. But mark me, Elinor, you must not be present at our conference. You must not see him."
With quivering lips, and a face paler than usual, his wife promised obedience, and Grenard Pike was despatched to Norgood Hall to make known to Algernon Hurdlestone his dying brother's request, and to call in, once more, the aid of the village doctor.
As Elinor watched the grim messenger depart, she pressed her hands tightly over her breast to hide from the quick eye of the miser the violent agitation that convulsed her frame, as the recollection of former days flashed upon her too retentive memory.
"Surely, surely," she thought, "he will never come. He has been too deeply injured to attend to a verbal summons from his unnatural brother."
Although strongly impressed that this would be the case, the desire of once more beholding the love of her youth, though forbidden to speak to him, or even to hear the sound of his voice, produced a state of feverish excitement in her mind which kept alive her fears, without totally annihilating hope.
The misty, grey dawn was slowly breaking along the distant hills, when Grenard Pike, mounted upon a cart-horse which he had borrowed for the occasion, leisurely paced down the broad avenue of oaks that led through the park to the high road. Methodical in all his movements, though life and death depended upon his journey, for no earthly inducement but a handsome donation in money would Grenard Pike have condescended to quicken his pace. This Elinor had it not in her power to bestow; and she calculated with impatience the many hours which must elapse before such a tardy messenger could reach Norgood Hall. Noon was the earliest period within the range of possibility; yet the sound of the horse's hoofs, striking against the frosty ground, still vibrated upon her ear when she took her station at the chamber window, to watch for the arrival of the man whose image a separation of nearly twenty years had not been able to obliterate from her heart. Such is the weakness of human nature, that we suffer imagination to outspeed time, and compress into one little moment the hopes, the fears, the anticipations, and the events of years; but when the spoiler again overtakes us, we look back, and, forgetful of our former impatience to accelerate his pace, we are astonished at the rapidity of his flight.