“It has been broken ever since my remembrance,” returned the other.
As he spoke, his companion rising, either accidentally, or, as Philip afterward suspected, from design, managed to catch with his foot the leg of a table upon which a group of his companions had arranged their smoking glasses. It was overthrown; and after the confusion this created had in a measure subsided, Mordaunt looked in vain for the author of the mischief. He had vanished, and with him the borrowed knife.
“So much for my confounded carelessness,” said the youth, internally, as half vexed, half amused, he left the bar-room. “I will see to this to-morrow; but not to-night, not to-night.” And why “not to-night” might have been explained by the dreams that floated through his brain, as beneath the moon that shone brightly in the now cloudless sky, he paced to and fro upon the broad piazza of the inn.
——
CHAPTER IV.
Upon a couch, in one corner of a mean apartment, with folded arms and a countenance livid with despair, sat Edward Clifdon; and before him, with an exulting smile, stood the man who had so dexterously escaped during the confusion in the bar-room.
“It is as I tell you, Clifdon,” he said, “the proofs are in my possession. See you now. The drop of blood and your wounded finger; the broken point which fell from the twist of the rope, and which tallies exactly with the knife found in the possession of your own son—the knife I have seen you use a hundred times; the money due from you to the murdered man; your previous quarrel. Truly as that I now stand before you, Edward Clifdon, it was your hand that tampered with the swing from which Mark Brendon fell to meet his death.”
Huge drops gathered upon the brow of the wretched man, but no words fell from his blanched and quivering lips.
“It was the horror of that thought that killed your wife,” pursued his tormentor. “I knew it; I needed no further proof. But you are in my power now, mine enemy.”
“Do as you will,” said Clifdon, gradually recovering from the shock inflicted by this sudden and terrific accusation, and speaking with a remnant of his ancient pride. “If years of anguish and remorse, and the loss of her who was dearer than life’s self, be not sufficient punishment, death has none darker.”