After a few minutes in the open air, the Doctor returned to his room; he was sober, although he had taken enough punch to make ten men drunk; and steady of hand, although he had smoked so much tobacco; but the veins on his face stood out like purple cords, his eyes were bloodshot, his great lips were trembling.
He did not go to bed, but lit a fresh pair of candles, and sat in his chair thinking.
His thoughts carried him back to some time of trouble, for he presently reached out his hand, seized his tobacco-pipe, and crushed it in fragments; then he took the glass from which he had been drinking, and crushed that, too, in his great strong fingers.
“I knew not,” he murmured, “that the villain was dead. If I had known that he was ill, I should have gone to see him, if only to remind him, with a curse, of the past. He is dead; I can never curse him face to face, as I hoped to do. I did not think that he would die before me; he seemed stronger, and he was younger. I looked to seek him out at any time, when I wanted a holiday, or when I wanted a diversion. I thought I would take him in his own house, and show him, in such words as only I can command, how mean a creature he was, and what a treacherous cur. Now he is dead. He actually never will be punished at all.”
This reflection caused him the greatest sadness. He shook his head as he thought it over.
“It is not,” he said to himself, “that I wished to be revenged on him (though doubtless, as men are but frail, that desire entered somewhat into my hopes), so much as that I saw in him a man who, above most men, deserved to be punished. I break the law daily, incurring thereby the penalty of a hundred pounds, which I never pay, for each offence. Yet truly am I less burdened in my conscience than should have been this Lord Chudleigh. And he hath died in honour. In this world one man steals a pig, and receives the approbation of his kind; another looks over a wall, and is clapped in gaol for it; one man slaughters a thousand, and is made a duke; another kills one, and is hanged. I am in prison, who never did anything against the law until I came here, nor harmed any except my creditors. My lord, who thought the ten commandments made for creatures of baser blood, and the round world, with all that therein is, only created for his own insatiable appetite, lives in honour and dies—what can I tell?—perhaps in grace; fortified, at least, with the consolations of the Church and the benedictions of his chaplain. So all things seem matter of chance. As Solomon Stallabras says, in one of his fables:
“‘We little flies who buzz and die,
Should never ask the reason why.’”
He yawned; then, struck with a sudden thought, he took one of the candles and softly mounted the stairs. Shading the light with his hand, he looked upon the face of the young man sleeping on his bed. A handsome young man, with regular features strongly marked, delicate lips, and pointed chin.
“Truly,” said the Doctor, “a youth of great beauty. Another David. He is more handsome than his father, even in those young days when he caressed me to my ruin, and led me on with promises to my undoing. Yet he hath the trick of the Chudleigh lip, and he hath his father’s nose. Would that his father were alive, and that it was he and not his son lying here at my mercy! The son is something; out of regard to his father’s memory, he shall not get off scot-free. But what is to be done? There is nothing, I think, that I would not do”—his red face grew purple as he thought of his wrongs—“were his father living, and could I make him feel through his son. Nothing, I believe. As I am a Christian man, if my lord were alive this day, I think I could tie a stone round the boy’s neck and chuck him into the Fleet Ditch at Holborn Bridge. And yet, what a poor and miserable thing to do! A moment of brutal satisfaction in thinking of the father’s agony—an eternity of remorse. But his father is dead; he cannot feel at all any more, whatever I do. If I could”—his face grew dark again, and he ground his teeth—“I believe I could drag the boy downwards, little by little, and destroy his very soul, to make his father suffer the more.”
He gasped and caught his breath.