"'You can not stoop to such vileness—to such wrong. You know that I am striving for a great end—that I will make restitution full and ample if I live to reach England.'
"This was the sense of what I said, but his answer was clearly prepared long before he knew what I should urge. It came gnashing through his closed teeth like the hiss of an adder.
"'I must do my duty. It is my place to overlook the accounts of all the clerks. You will show me your books to-morrow.'
"He turned away. I prayed he might not speak again, for his voice stirred up a feeling I had never known before; but my bad angel, I suppose, brought him back. I scarcely recollect what he said. I have a vague notion of hearing him mention Bertha's name with some cursed plan that was to give her up to him forever, and then he would, 'for the sake of old friendship, deal as gently as he possibly could with me.' Those words I remember well, and those were the last he ever spoke to me. I dread to think they were his last on earth. The feeling I had wrestled against mastered me now. I could restrain myself no longer, and struck at him with a knife. He clutched my left hand in his teeth like a tiger-cat. For a second we were grappling together for life or death, but he had no chance against me; and when I had breath to look at him next, he was lying on his back, the hands that he had tried to parry my blows with cut and bleeding, and red stains on the broad mimosa leaves around. Oh, God! what a reproach there was in all the calm and silence of the night! How the deep quiet of the sky spoke to my heart, so troubled, dark, and guilty! As on the first dread day by sin polluted, the voice of God in Eden drove Adam forth abashed, so spoke the still small voice of holy Nature with more than earthquake tones to me, and straight I fled away.
"My Bertha does not know the whole. She only knows that Brian had me in his power, owing to some money transactions. If she did know it, my conscience tells me she would not now be sleeping here. There—all will be well in England. Pray Heaven we get there safe. I will go up on deck a few minutes. Writing it down has brought the whole affair so fresh before me, that it is useless trying to sleep in this fever. But yet I am glad it is written.
"October 15th.—We entered the Channel this afternoon. It is my wife's birthday; she took it as a happy omen, and seemed so pleased with the glitter and joyance of the busy river, that for a whole hour—the first since I left Rio—the dreadful secret hidden 'mid those leaves was absent from my mind.
"October 16th.—The first news that meets me on entering London is, that my uncle has died suddenly, and left all his affairs frightfully embarrassed. My chief dependence was on him. This is a sad beginning; indeed, I feel that 'all these things are against me.'"
Several pages were here torn from the unfortunate Darke's manuscript; and in the succeeding ones the entries were scanty, and with long intervals between each other. They detailed the sufferings of the writer and his wife on their arrival in London; his repeated efforts to obtain employment, and the difficulties he met with, owing to his uncle's death, and his own inability to refer any one to the directors of the mine at Rio. For more than a year (judging from the dates, by no means regularly affixed) he appeared to have struggled on thus, until, when his hopes were fast sinking, and his health rapidly giving way under this succession of disappointments, he obtained a situation on a recently-opened line of railway in the north, through the interest of an old schoolfellow, whom he accidentally met, and who retained in manhood schoolboy heart enough to show gratitude for many kindnesses in olden days. The language was strangely impassioned and earnest in which he expressed his joy at this change of fortune; and the full-hearted thankfulness with which he described telling his wife the good news, seemed to prove that affliction had exerted a calming and blessed influence on his passion-tossed mind. But the clergyman could not help noticing that the spirit pervading the latter part of the diary was strangely different from that which animated the commencement, it being written apparently with the firm conviction of an inevitable destiny hanging over the writer; and this, like the shadow of an unseen cloud in a fair picture, gave a sombre meaning to his self-communings.
After briefly mentioning the fact of his taking up his abode with Bertha and one little child at the cottage provided by the company, and that he had heard by chance that his enemy was still alive, he proceeded:
"I like this new home much. It is a tiny, sheltered cottage, with beehives in the garden, and honeysuckles peeping in at the lattice, nestling innocently among the pine-trees, like a fairy islet. The railway runs for about a mile parallel with the canal, and the two modes of traveling contrast curiously. The former with all its brightness, freshness, and precision; the latter a very sluggard. I often have long talks with Huntly, my assistant here, and try to make him see the change it will work; but he is not over shrewd; or, rather, fate did not give him a bookworm uncle like it did me, and so reasoning is hard work to him; it always is to the untaught. The canal is picturesque certainly. Let me try a description. The surface of the water is overlaid with weeds rank and luxuriant, save where the passage of a boat has preserved a trench, stagnant, and cold, and deep. There is not a human habitation near except ours. Scarcely any paths, the thickets are so tangled. This does not read an inviting account, I know, but there is a charm to me in the leaves of myriad shapes, in fern, and moss, and rush, in every silvan nook and glittering hedgerow—above all, in the dark slumberous pines, those giant sentinels round our dear home. Bertha smiled quite like her old self when she saw it. Oh, how, in all the wreck of this last year, has her love upheld me! always lightening, never adding to our weight of grief. She has, indeed, been faithful, true, and beautiful—like the Indian tree, that has its flower and fragrance best by night. I can not explain why it is that my love seems to grow each hour, but with a kind of tremble in its intensity, as though there were a separation coming. Perhaps it is only the result of the change in my fortunes.