“Brave words!” said Garvin, sneering. “Will you stand up in the open court, to be branded as a murderer? Will you receive the penalty the law awards your crime?”
“Man!” said Edward Clifdon, sternly, and raising his shaken form from the couch upon which he had fallen, “I tell you that in one moment of remorse, one glance to the dark past, there may be more horror than in all the shame and agony of the hangman’s rope; and if by my death I may expiate before human eyes the sin that I have repented before my God, I tell thee, I will meet it, and never tremble.”
“And your children?” returned the other, with a sardonic smile. “Your little Lilia, and your boy, with his haughty brow and curling lip? Think you they will not die for shame? A goodly heritage would you leave them!”
Clifdon bowed his face upon his hands and groaned aloud.
“Revenge for me!” pursued his companion, tauntingly. “Revenge, to heap ashes upon the head of the old man who looked scorn upon me to-night! Revenge, to humble the gay youth who has already learned his pride! Revenge, to see the beauty I covet cast friendless upon the world, and perchance within my reach!”
With a wild cry Clifdon threw himself at his feet.
“Spare me!” he said; “spare them! By the heaven above us, I swear, that from this moment I will be your slave! See, I kneel to you, mine enemy! I will crouch beneath your feet; I will beg for you, toil for you; I will bind myself to you, body and soul—only spare them!”
“No!—never! never!”
“Hark, man! If you have a human soul, listen to me! When I did the deed, it was to save my wife, my child from starvation, from madness. I thought not of myself, Garvin; by the great God, I did not! And by the loss of the child I loved, of the wife for whom I had periled my soul; by years of lone remorse and agony I was punished. Pity me! Pity them—the boy with her sweet eyes and her smiling lips; the child she left me on her death-bed—my little Lilia! Oh, mercy! mercy!”
Like the shriek of a damned spirit thrilled those last words.