CHAPTER XX
HOW that dark interval of time had passed at Marchmain no one could tell – for Peggy, the only individual who could have known, had long ceased to speculate on her master’s sentiments and feelings, and learned to content herself with things as they came. But just as Colonel Sutherland, in single-minded devotion to the interests of his young friend Roger, and an honest and simple desire to set right the harm which he supposed to have been done by his nephew, had drawn close in his circles of laborious but unprofitable investigation to Lanwoth Moor, Peggy’s attention had been called to her master’s bodily condition. He had spent an agitated and restless night, as she could hear by his motions in his own room, and, for the first time in twenty years, did not get up in the morning. When Peggy went to him, alarmed by this extraordinary occurrence, she found him in bed, paralysed in one side, unable to speak, his face somewhat distorted, and everything helpless about him except his eyes. It was evidently and beyond any doubt “a stroke,” and poor Peggy, alone in her solitude, and not knowing what to do – afraid to leave him to seek assistance, and unable to ascertain what were his own wishes – put the disordered room tidy by instinct in the first place, until she was driven out of it, scared and breathless, by those eyes which followed her movements everywhere. “Like as if an evil spirit had ta’en possession,” she said to herself, as she went quicker than usual in her fright and perplexity down the stairs; and Peggy described many a day after how it was like an angel of mercy to hear “Mr. Edward, that is now the Cornel, the Lord bless him,” knocking at the door all of a sudden, and asking if all was well at Marchmain. “I tould him all was as ill as ill could be; and he never so much as cam in to rest, but went forth with his staff in his hand five mile of road for the doctor and help,” said Peggy; “and ye may all tell me about his own business and other things he had in hand, and owght ye please, but no man shall make me believe, if he preaches till Christmas, that it was aught but the very Lord himsel’ in grace and mercy that sent the Cornel that morning, and no other, to the master’s door.”
That was a busy day for Colonel Sutherland. He sent not only the nearest country doctor, but an express to Kenlisle for a more noted physician there, and sent abundant help to Peggy, and everything which the surgeon could suggest as likely to be of use. The old soldier’s heart of pity yearned over the unfortunate man who had shut himself out from all the tender charities of love. He despatched a letter instantly to Susan, bidding her come at once to nurse her father; and when he had done everything that his kind heart could suggest, went back slowly and thoughtfully across the moor, with very sad thoughts in that good heart. Not because he thought it sad to die; the Colonel had too many waiting for him on the other side of the river to compassionate those who were arriving at that conclusion of trouble; but it was sad to consider the ending of this melancholy and miserable life. Better for himself, for his children, for everybody within his influence, would it have been, if twenty years ago the grave had received him into its harmless quiet, instead of this miserable seclusion. And now, without even that privilege of a conscious pause upon the grave’s brink, which sweetens so many memories, and endears so many of the dead, who, living, were less loveable, he was going away, this unhappy man. No wonder the tender heart of the old soldier was sad. It had been better not to be born than thus to die.
When Colonel Sutherland returned to Marchmain he was reluctant to enter the sick-room, fearing that even there the imprisoned mind, debarred of ordinary expression, would chafe at his presence, and put a cruel interpretation upon his kindness; but the importunities of Peggy, the silent surprise of the surgeon, and indeed the forlorn and pitiful loneliness of the patient himself, overpowered his objections. He went in and spoke to the stricken man lying there dumb upon his bed. He detailed all the circumstances of his own arrival, dwelling upon its accidental character – he spoke of Susan, he spoke of Horace – for the doctor had declared that to restore his speech and faculties it would be well to rouse him, even to passion; but all without effect. Mr. Scarsdale lay in his dressing-gown among the bedclothes, in that dead silence which looked almost malicious, and of purpose, contrasted with the wild watchfulness of his eyes. One hand lay powerless and numb beside him; the other held with a tight grasp some folds of the white coverlid. There he lay stretched out motionless, attempting no notice of the remedies they applied to him, suffering himself to be moved and shifted about like a log, but following every movement, every gleam of light, every passing shadow, with those eyes so desperately alive and awake. When he had once entered that melancholy sick-room, the Colonel for very pity could not leave it. He sat down by the side of the bed, his whole heart moved with a compassion unspeakable. He could not bear to think that no kindred blood or familiar voice was near the unhappy sufferer. Peggy, it was true, went and came; but Peggy was afraid of her master, whom she had served so long and faithfully. She was superstitious, with her long solitude and broken spirit; she thought her master had already gone to his account, and that it was some malignant spirit which looked out of these wild waking eyes.
After two days of this hopeless lethargy, during which Colonel Sutherland never left his post, but watched night and day, dozing sometimes for an hour in the arm-chair by the bedside, Susan arrived, under charge of Patchey, to whom the thoughtful Colonel had written. It was a strange home-coming for Susan, in the midst of all her sweet new hopes and beginning thrills of life. But when Susan, instead of being taken into Peggy’s motherly arms, and kissed, and blessed, and cried over, as she expected, felt Peggy, after her first scream of welcome, bear heavily upon her shoulder, and drop off into a dead faint of exhaustion and over-excitement, she saw at once this was no time to think of herself. When Peggy was better, she took off her travelling dress, and went up without a moment’s delay to her father’s room, where Uncle Edward sat, pale with watching. Susan, too, was shocked and frightened more than she dared say by the sick man’s attentive eyes; but she took the nurse’s place with a natural and instinctive readiness, and begged her uncle to go away and get some rest. Why should they watch him with such careful, tender anxiety – the banished daughter and the insulted friend? Why, in this dismal need of his did these two come, whom he had sent away from him, and come as though that imprisoned spirit which they watched had been a heart of love? But nobody could tell in this world whether such thoughts touched the heart of the recluse, as he lay unmoving, unsleeping, speechless, upon that dreadful bed. The days which had now passed since he took any nourishment, the unnatural state in which he lay, made his condition, unhopeful enough at first, entirely hopeless now. He was dying slowly, no one knowing how it went with him in the depths of his hidden soul, and no one able to interpret if any late compunctions, any meltings of the shut-up heart, or touches of human charity, were shining at length, at last, when all utterance was over, out of these wakeful eyes.
When Susan took her uncle’s place for the next long night – when through all the silent hours she could not move without attracting these sleepless looks, which were all that remained of this man’s will and mind – Susan got frightened in spite of herself. So alive, so waking, so desperately conscious were these eyes, that the poor girl fell down on her knees by the bedside, and implored her father to speak to her.
“Only speak, say anything, if it was to curse me!” said poor Susan. It was impossible to believe that he could not if he would. And then one gleam of expression different from their usual strain of watchfulness appeared in Mr. Scarsdale’s eyes; a strange gleam, as if tears were in them; a momentary melting of the hard heart, a wandering movement of the unparalyzed hand to lay it on her head. Susan hid her face, weeping aloud, the touch going to her heart as never tender father’s blessing went, and her whole young soul heaving within her, at the thought how little she had loved him, he who relented over her and blessed her thus under the stony hand of death. Never in all his hard life had so sweet a gush of human gratitude followed any act of Mr. Scarsdale. It was well for him that it was his last.
CHAPTER XXI
AT that moment when Susan, full of tenderness and compunction, knelt by her father’s bedside, and Mr. Scarsdale’s hand still trembled upon her hair – token, all too late, of the love which might have been – the door of the room opened stealthily for a moment, and Horace looked in. Whether it was that Mr. Scarsdale had preserved the sense of hearing as distinctly as he seemed to do that of sight, or that a strange magic of hostility drew his eyes to that quarter, it is impossible to say; but when Horace’s gaze fell upon the bed and its ghastly inhabitant, his father’s eyes met his, with a look which all the world and all its pleasures could never efface from the young man’s mind. He staggered back, startled out of all self-control, and uttering, in spite of himself, a cry, half of defiance, half of horror; while the unhappy father of these two children, thrusting, with the force of extremity, Susan’s fair head away from him, swayed round, by a desperate impulse, his half-lifeless body, and turned his face to the wall. Startled out of her filial delusion, and with her faculties confused by the sudden thrust away, which was given with feverish force, Susan stumbled to her feet in sudden terror. Horace was standing ghastly pale by the door, his bloodless lips apart, his eyes dilated, his manner so frightfully excited and unnatural, that Susan’s first impulse was to interpose the frail protection of her own body between the helpless father and the frantic son. As she stood alarmed, protecting the bed, Horace gave a ghastly sneer at her, and said, “Too late!” hoarsely out of his throat. He saw well enough that she was afraid of him, and meant to defend her father; but nothing in the world could have initiated Susan into the horrible meaning of that “too late.” When she thought of it, she supposed her brother to mean too late to be recognized, to ask his father’s pardon – perhaps to gain his father’s blessing, as she had done; and with that idea her feeling changed.
“Not too late, Horace,” said poor Susan – “he is sensible – he knows me. But oh! before you speak to him, call Peggy first, and bid her tell the doctor. The doctor said he was to be called whenever papa moved.”
“The doctor! What doctor? – what does he want with a doctor?” said Horace, in his hoarse, dreadful voice.
“The doctor is in the house – Uncle Edward would not let him go away. He has moved – he has all but spoken! Oh! call the doctor, Horace!” cried Susan, eagerly; “perhaps it may be a sign for the better! Call Peggy – she will tell you where he is!”
But Horace stood still on the threshold of the fatal room, looking round with wild, investigating eyes, as anxious, as desperate, as the sufferer’s own. Where was it? – where was that little medicine-chest, which had dealt a slower death than he expected, but which, if it were found, might snatch the cup from his own lips, and abridge his lifelong punishment? Where was it? The dying man upon that bed, dreadful as was his son’s curiosity about him, and terrible as the shock had been when their eyes met, was less important now than that chest and its tell-tale contents. He gazed around with his wild eyes – so like his father’s – looking at everything but his father, who lay motionless, his dread eyes closed now, and his face turned towards the wall. Susan, in wild impatience, stamped her foot upon the floor, hoping by that means to attract somebody. There was a stir below, as of some one who heard her; and Horace, roused by the sound, approached the bedside cautiously. “He is dead!” her brother whispered in Susan’s ears. It was the middle of the night, dark and still; and the poor girl, standing here between the dying man – who, perhaps, had died in that dreadful moment – and the living man, who looked like a maniac, lost all her self-command. She cried aloud in the extremity of her fear and anguish. Was Horace mad? And in that miserable moment, with his rebel son returned to vex his soul, had her father passed away?
The stamping of Susan’s foot on the floor, the sound of some commotion in the sick-room, and at last her voice calling out in uncontrollable terror, brought all the other inmates of the house to the room – Peggy, the doctor half awake, the nurse, and Uncle Edward, all of whom, at Susan’s earnest instance, had lain down to seek an hour’s sleep. Among all these anxious people Horace looked still more like a spectre – but after another moment spent in inquisitive inspection of the room, he turned to the doctor and overpowered him with questions. As if in braggadocio and daring exhibition of his want of feeling, he urged the surgeon into descriptions of the complaint: what it was – and how it came on – and what were its particular features. While the astonished doctor replied as shortly as possible, and turned his back upon the heartless questioner, Horace hovered more and more closely about his father’s bed. Another fit produced by the sudden appearance of his son had almost completed the mortal work which was going on in the emaciated frame of the recluse. It did not matter to anybody now that those eyes were faintly open, which a little while ago were full of unspeakable things; the force and the life had ebbed out of those windows of the soul, and the patient no longer knew anything of the agitated consultations going on over him, or of the hideous curiosity with which his son thrust into those, asking questions which horrified the hearers. When the doctor said that there were complications in this case, which made it difficult to treat, the young man laughed a short, hoarse, horrible laugh, and asked “how long do you think he will last?” in a tone which made them shudder. They were all afraid of his haggard figure as it swayed to and fro about the bed.
“You’ve been drinking, sir,” said the doctor, in authoritative disgust. “You can’t do any good here – be quiet and go to bed. He distresses the patient; some of you take him away.”
“Mr. Horry, come with me,” said Peggy, laying her hand upon his shoulder. He followed her out of the room without saying anything. He was mad, crazed, intoxicated; but with a deadlier poison than was ever distilled from corn or vine!
The old woman took him into his own room and left him there. She shook her head at him in sad displeasure, but understood nothing of the tragic misery which made him mad.
“I bid ye not to grieve,” she said, reproachfully. “The Lord knows he’s been little of a father to you, that you should break your heart for him; but be dacent, Mr. Horry, be dacent; if it’s no for love’s sake, as is no possible, yet have respect to death.”
When Peggy left him Horace buried his haggard face in those hands which had grown thin and sharp like the claws of a bird of prey. “Have respect to death!” – to the death which he had invoked – to the destruction he had made. He sank down prostrate upon the floor, and lay there in a heap, helpless, overcome by the horror of what he had done. The strength of an army could not have kept him from Marchmain at that terrible crisis and climax of his fate; but now when he was here, he could but lie prostrate in the wildest hopeless misery, or, mad with his guilt, peer like a ghoul about his father’s death-bed. It was easier to do that, noting horribly every slow step of the approaching presence, than it was to lie here in the dismal creeping silence, with that footstep creaking on the stair, and chilling the night, and a hundred deadly sprites of vengeance shouting Murder! murder! all night long, into his miserable ear.
CHAPTER XXII
BEFORE that night was over the terrible visitor whom Horace believed his own act to have brought to Marchmain entered the lonely house; but the unhappy parricide did not hear or see the entrance of that last messenger. While his father sank gradually into the longer and surer quietude, sleep, feverish and painful, fell upon the son. He had not slept for many nights, and his great excitement, added to the fatigue of his journey, had completely exhausted his frame. The confused and painful commotion in the adjoining apartment as the mortal moment approached; the sobs of Susan, who saw Death for the first time, and found the sight of those last agonies intolerable and beyond her strength; the solemn bustle afterwards, when the last offices had to be performed – were all insufficient to awake Horace out of the deep but unquiet slumber, over which phantoms and fever brooded. He lay as Peggy had left him, in his travel-soiled and disordered dress, fatigued, haggard, bearing such weariness and exhaustion in his face, that it would have taken harder hearts than those of his sister and uncle to close themselves against him. But Horace was as unconscious of the visit of Susan and Uncle Edward as of any other incident of the night. They stood over him as he slept, talking in whispers; but those soothing voices did not enter into the fever of his dream. Susan was crying quietly, every word she spoke producing a fresh overflow of tears – natural tears, which she could not help shedding, but soon must wipe away. Nothing less was possible to her tender heart, and it would have been strange if the end of that unloving and unlovely life had produced anything more. “He looks so tired – poor Horace! Oh! Uncle Edward, he is not so hard-hearted as people thought! – he will feel this very much; think how troubled he looked last night,” said Susan.
“Yes, Susan,” said Uncle Edward, with a sigh, “more than troubled; but I do not blame him; it was not his fault – the evil was done before he was born.”
“What evil, uncle?” asked Susan, looking up with wonder through her tears.
“My poor child, it would but horrify you,” said Uncle Edward. “I cannot think but Horace, somehow or other, has found it out. Your brother lying there, Susan, is now one of the richest men in England; your grandfather’s will passed over your poor father, and left everything to Horace. Ah, Susan! nothing but passion, and misery, and black revenge on one side and the other; and look at this young heir – poor Horace! they have heaped up money for him, but they have already robbed him of all the bloom and promise of his life.”
“You don’t think he has done anything very wrong, Uncle Edward?” said Susan, trembling and crying more and more.
For looking down upon that face, all darkly pale in its sleeping passion, with its deep-drawn lines of pain and stealthy curves about the closed eyes, it was hard to think of misery inflicted by other people. Misery self-made, and guilt actual and personal, lay even in the sleep of Horace Scarsdale’s face. Susan’s mind did not take in or comprehend that statement about her grandfather and his wealth, and “one of the richest men in England.” The words had no meaning to her at that melancholy moment. She thought only of the brother of her childhood in that heavy sleep of exhaustion and misery, thrown down in a heap like one who had not even heart enough to stretch himself out in common comfort; and her heart yearned over him, whatever he might have done.
“I think, perhaps,” said the Colonel, with hesitation, “that the journey and the excitement, and, perhaps, taking something he was not used to, overcame him last night. Sleep is the best thing for him; let us leave him quiet – he will be better when he wakes.”
And so they left him; Colonel Sutherland really believing that to brave himself for a scene which must excite him painfully, but where real grief was not to be expected from him, Horace had come intoxicated to his father’s death-bed, and Susan half-disgusted, half-comforted to believe that his maniac looks of last night might be attributed to such a cause. They went away, the Colonel to take an hour’s sleep after his long visit, and Susan to weep out her heart, thinking over that one touch of natural sympathy, which, beyond death and the grave, gave her more hold of love upon her father, than she had ever before felt herself to possess. The morning was kindling over the moor, brightening the golden-blossomed gorse, and glowing over the purple beds of heather; but the blinds were drawn down and the shutters closed in Marchmain; the obscure and gloomy atmosphere of death reigned in the house. Peggy sat by the kitchen-fire, with her white apron thrown over her head – her mind lost in long trains of recollection, sometimes her wearied frame yielding to a half-hour’s sleep, sometimes her troubled thoughts overflowing in a few natural tears. The woman who had come to be nurse and household assistant dozed on the other side of the fire. Colonel Sutherland, very grave, and full of the thoughts which death brings in his train, sat alone in the darkened dining-room, taking an hour’s sleep as he said – though in reality the old soldier had only read his morning chapter in his old Bible, and was composing himself with the tender strength of these words of God; while Susan, withdrawn in her own room, gave the dead man his dues, and paid that duty of nature, a woman’s lamentations, to the concluded life.
In this languor and stillness of the death-consecrated house, where no agony of living grief reigned, but only the natural pathos and the natural rest, Horace awoke at bright mid-day from his unnatural sleep. Accustomed to the noises of a town, and to the perpetual wasting of his own burning thoughts, the stillness struck him strangely, with a chill calm which he could not explain. He sat up mechanically, and put the lank disordered hair from his face, trying to recollect where he was and what had happened. Looking round at that room, strange yet familiar, the shelter of all his youthful years, he could almost have supposed that everything else was but a hideous dream, and that he himself was nothing worse or guiltier than the rebellious lad who once slept and dreamt within these homely walls. But then bit by bit the light brightened upon him; he traced out the whole black history line by line; the first suggestion of this guilt at which he had shuddered – the returning thoughts which grew familiar to him – the deed itself, black and breathless in its stealthy and secret crime; and now the consummation had come! At that thought he started from his bed, all his pulses beating with the strength of fear. What was he thinking of? – the great stakes he had played for and won? the big inaccessible fortune which made him this day, in this obscure house, as Uncle Edward said, one of the richest men in England? the wealthy inheritance, which was all his own? He thought of no such thing, poor madman, in his frightful success and triumph; far from that ruined soul and miserable house were now the delusions of love and fortune which had wiled him into crime; no exultant thought of fortune gained – no lover’s fancy of Amelia won, warmed him in the first sharp access of misery. He thought of one thing, and one only, in the abject horror of that guilt, which he himself knew, though no one else did. The fatal box in which he had laid his train of destruction – the medicine chest where his father had gone to seek healing and had found death. Where was it? He saw it in his burning imagination a far more dread obstacle than had been that life which he had destroyed, standing between him and all the objects of his ambition; he could not look anywhere but that fatal vision glided before him, clear with its brass-bound corners, its tiny phials, and the lock which closed with such a horrible jar. It haunted his miserable eyes, a guilty spectrum – where was it? – had the doctor perhaps taken possession of if already to detect the secret felon, lurking murderous under its seeming innocence? – had the vindictive victim of that snare given it over into some one’s hand, a witness not to be intimidated against the parricide? The heavy drops rained from his white face, his limbs trembled like palsy, his very youth and strength forsook him in that dread emergency. By a dark intuition he knew that his father was dead, that all was over; that, so far as superficial appearances went, the fortune and the triumph were his own; and so got up – God help him! – in a fever of hopeless misery, to look for that fatal token which might, his excited fancy supposed, turn all the tide against him, and take his very life. He went out trembling and feeble, out of the shelter of his room – afraid of the daylight, of the stillness, of everything about and around him – trembling, like a felon as he was, at his own dreary and hideous success. This was how Horace Scarsdale came into his fortune, in faithful fulfilment of his grandfather’s wicked will!