“There is,” said Julian, “one, from whom I was violently parted yesterday; if I knew but of her safety, I were little anxious for my own.”
“One!” returned the voice, “only one from whom you were parted yesterday?”
“But in parting from whom,” said Julian, “I felt separated from all happiness which the world can give me.”
“You mean Alice Bridgenorth,” said the Invisible, with some bitterness of accent; “but her you will never see more. Your own life and hers depend on your forgetting each other.”
“I cannot purchase my own life at that price,” replied Julian.
“Then DIE in your obstinacy,” returned the Invisible; nor to all the entreaties which he used was he able obtain another word in the course of that remarkable night.
CHAPTER XXXVI
A short hough’d man, but full of pride.
—ALLAN RAMSAY.
The blood of Julian Peveril was so much fevered by the state in which his invisible visitor left him, that he was unable, for a length of time, to find repose. He swore to himself, that he would discover and expose the nocturnal demon which stole on his hours of rest, only to add gall to bitterness, and to pour poison into those wounds which already smarted so severely. There was nothing which his power extended to, that, in his rage, he did not threaten. He proposed a closer and a more rigorous survey of his cell, so that he might discover the mode by which his tormentor entered, were it as unnoticeable as an auger-hole. If his diligence should prove unavailing, he determined to inform the jailers, to whom it could not be indifferent to know, that their prison was open to such intrusions. He proposed to himself, to discover from their looks whether they were already privy to these visits; and if so, to denounce them to the magistrates, to the judges, to the House of Commons, was the least that his resentment proposed. Sleep surprised his worn-out frame in the midst of his projects of discovery and vengeance, and, as frequently happens, the light of the ensuing day proved favourable to calmer resolutions.