University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.

He came to me in my dungeon—he, my
accuser—my enemy—my friend. In the first
emotions of my wrath, I would have strangled
him, and I shook my chains in his face, and I
muttered savage curses and deep threats in his
ears. He stood patiently and unmoved. His
hands were clasped, and his eyes were dim,
and for a while he had no language, no articulations.

“Think not,” at last he spoke—“think not
I have come to this work with a feeling of satisfaction.
I have suffered more agony in its
progress than I can well describe or you understand—I
will not attempt it. If you cannot,

from what you know of my character,
conceive the grief and sickness of heart which
must have come over me, during the long period
and regular and frequent succession of
hours, in which I was required to play the
hypocrite—I cannot teach it you. I come not
for this. I come to ask your forgiveness—to
implore your better opinion—and that you
may attribute to a necessity which gave me
no other alternatives than death or shame, the
whole of this painful episode in my life!

He was a noble creature, and so I could not
but think at that very moment; but, I was of
the earth, earthy! I was a thing of comprehensive
malignity, and my impulses were perpetually
warring with the suggestions of my
sense.

“My death be upon your head—my ignominy
be yours—the curses of all of mine be
on you—may all things curse you. Talk of
my being a murderer, are you less so? Have
you not hurried me to death—a shameful
death—dishonoring myself, dishonoring my
family, when I might have atoned for the error
of my youth, in the progress and better performances
of my age? Hypocrite, that you
are, begone! Come not falsely now to extenuate
what you may not excuse—your
priestly cant about forgiveness does not deceive
me. Away—I curse you to the last!”—
and his head sunk upon his breast, and his
hands were clasped in agony, and I exulted in
the writhing and gnawing of that heart, whose
over-delicate structure, I well knew, could never
sustain such reproaches.

“Spare me, spare me! As I live you do me
wrong. Be not so merciless—so unforgiving.
Fame, and the world's good opinion, were to
me the breath of life. I could not have done
other than I did and lived—I could not.”

“Looked you then to me to do it? Was
the world's good opinion nothing to me? Had
I nothing to live for? Had I no aim in life?
Oh—away! I sicken but to see you!”

Patiently, amidst all my reproaches, he persisted
in the endeavour to conciliate my fiendish
mood, suggesting a thousand excuses and
reasons, for the obvious duty which I myself
felt he had done to himself and to society—
but I rejected them all, and, in despair, he was
about to retire, when a sudden thought came
over me.

“Stay, Harding—there is one thing—there
is one way in which I can be assured that your
motive was not malicious, and that you have
been stimulated as you say, solely by a belief
in the necessity of what you have done!”

“Speak—say, any thing, but grant me your
forgiveness—give me your good opinion!”

“Ridiculous! the good opinion of a murderer—the
hated, the despised of the community;—of
what good is it to you or to any body?”

“True—true!—but even with the murderer
I would be at peace—I would not have him
die with an ill feeling towards me. But there
is yet another thought which prompts the desire
in his case. It is from my associate
and companion that I would have forgiveness,
for the violation of that confidence which grew

out of that association. For this I would have
your forgiveness!”

“The distinction is somewhat nice, but you
shall have what you ask—cheerfully have it—
upon one condition!”

“What is that, say on—I will gladly serve
you.”

“Justice demands a victim and I must die;
but it is not necessary to justice that I should
die in a particular manner. I would not die
by the rope, in the presence of a gaping multitude—you
must provide me with a dagger—
a knife, any thing by which I may free myself
from the ignominy of such a death.”

“Impossible! that will be wrong—it will
be criminal. Justice, it is true, may not care
whether the rope or the steel shall serve her
purposes, but she requires that her officer, at

least, shall do it; otherwise it is not her act.
It is your will, not hers, that would be performed—her
claim would be defeated.”

“Shallow sophistry!—this then is your
friendship—but I knew it would be so—
away, and may—”

He stopped me in my curse.—

“Stay!”—he exclaimed hurriedly, and with
terror—“any thing but that. I will do as you
require.”