University of Virginia Library

20

12. XII.
MORTMAIN.

NOT long Sir Rohan remained inactive. Without
pausing to consider consequences, without
hesitating at destroying such labor, he seized
the little palette-knife lying near and dashed it
madly through the canvas.

A sudden shock, like a stroke of lightning,
smote him; then, for a space, the very silence
seemed to sing in his ears. A vacant space, into
which ebbed a tide of air, a rush, a tumult, and
with all her pristine strength and hate the Ghost
flared forth and enveloped him.

Voluntarily she had entered this prison, to torment
him truly, but yet once there he could flee
from her; he could escape from her and he had
returned, she was bound and he had freed her.

Again the Ghost threw her net over him, again
dragged him captive in her toils. There are no

means to depict, were it desirable, the horror and
darkness that overwhelmed him anew; his fetters
galled the more that he had been free. But in
coping with material objects she had manifested an
incapacity; her usual cunning seemed to have
failed her, her dreadful art served her only for
those of the soul. Wrapping his forehead with
her clammy breath, she stifled him; her cold, long
fingers were upon him, her hideous embrace
around him, that shadow of her hair brushed his
cheek, those fierce eyes searched him through and
through. Did she breathe, he wondered; did those
glances gloom and flash with the current in her
veins; was that heart palpitant above him? Then,
laughing despairingly at his absurdity, he saw that
by her sympathy with the whole free universe its
forces were kept in ebb and flow through her existence,
and that thus drawing after her in infrangible
connection a strength that was almost omnipotent,
she acquired a personal determination,
a deceitful limitation and power infinitely beyond
that to be dreamed of from any mere effort of
breath or blood. Now the air sobbed away from
him, now poured back echoing her horrid laugh.
All voluntary motion left him; the Ghost moved
him hither and thither at her will. Each moment
became a cycle filled with what unutterable pain!
Like a pricked bubble all his dreams fell dead to
the bottom of his heart, and numberless hopes
escaped and swam in her lurid light, a whole
heaven of possibilities and sorrows as they broke.
The morning crawled away, and left him yet in
her vindictive hands. Noon passed; day; evening
drew near. He hoped some human being
might enter and perhaps dissolve the charm; but
no one came, till dusk brought the housekeeper.
He wanted nothing, she heard him say; he was
not ill, she could do nothing for him. He longed
to ask her to remain; the words were on his lips,
he thought them uttered; but the Ghost snatched
them off as they rose, and tore them to shreds of
inarticulate sound, for Mrs. Redruth closed the
door behind her, and again he was alone with the
Ghost. Now once more she stretched vividly before
his aching eyes the scenes of his youth, and
contrasted them with some dim sketch of Miriam
pallid, haggard, miry; and once more shook the
web of fire between them. Now she laid her icy
cheek on his, peered askance with her chatoyant
eyes close beside his own, stained his lips in her
filthy kisses, and then retreating with grimace and
flounce, leered at him from behind a screen of
gathering darkness, or flowed forth brandishing
keener spears than hitherto, before which he cowered
and hid his face only to be drawn up again
and forced to encounter the terrible dualism. She
heaped upon him all the cumulative force of her
hibernation. Sleep forsook him; night crowded
herself with other Essences ready, it seemed, to
assume shape at the Ghost's command. Thought
refused to yield him comfort; he was capable only
of torturing sensation. Morning came at last,
and the unwearied Ghost sung its reveille, but
never left him. If he traversed the house from
room to room, still she sailed by his side, opening
the doors before them by the power of her will; or
if in some long passage he fancied himself alone
an instant, she burst in countless reduplications
from every panel, and swept on with her myriads
to environ him. Burying himself in the forest, all
the air murmured of her; the leaves of the birch
shivered with electric, luminous points, the needles
of the pines whispered her messages. Nature,
who brings the sick wild beasts to medicinal
browse, who heals the gashes of her trees with
slow sweat of crystal tear and fragrant gum, had
no remedy for this man who had wounded her.
Misery had beset him; not dead, he suffered
hell.

Now and then, Sir Rohan indulged himself in a
trifle of extraordinary logic.

It is impossible to imagine a new color; beyond
the three primary ones and their modifications,
the imagination cannot go; the conception of another,
original and creative, exceeds mortal capability.
But one day the Ghost appeared to him
invested in robes of a new color. She floated
finely before him, and trailed their lengthening
splendor after her. For a moment he stood
amazed; then entering his forsaken painting-room,
opened chests and drawers, and proceeded to investigate
the sources of this mystery. The Ghost
followed him, displaying the full field of color with
a mocking apery of vanity, holding it here for
a light, dropping it there for a shade. But he
searched vainly for any tint owning an affinity
with it, following it into shade, or ruling it; nor
could he produce it by any artful mingling of
prime or tertiary. Cinnabar, nor realgar, nor any
brilliant madder, overpowered it; mort d'ore was

in no wise akin to it; no pigment could catch its
life, alien to them all, a monarch of other chromatics
than we possess. He put the things aside,
and still stood gazing on the strange hue which
the Ghost so accommodatingly paraded. It occurred
to him that if he could only prove the color
to be an optical delusion, he might also infer that
the Ghost herself was no more, on this occasion;
and if on this, why not on others? But while
meditating, he could not bring himself to believe
in a power of imagining anything which might
not exist. If the elements of an object's construction
are in the mind, he said, they must also be in
the world; and thus even had he imagined this
color, it might exist, and his Ghost then as well.
But on the other hand, was he able to imagine it?
Could his will reach up into the heavens, and
pluck this secret from God? As well create another
sense. No; he must needs confess his weakness
there. The color was before him, — no illusion;
— he saw it, he had proved it new, he could
not doubt it, and the Ghost must be as real. As
this conclusion forced itself upon him, the novel
drapery forsook the Ghost, and with her old laugh
she soared aloft, swept round the easel, and descending
beside him, lay recumbent on the air,
with one visionary hand upon his shoulder. But
thin and immaterial as was the airy hand, its
weight was that of a mountain.

He had not dared use his pencils before this
day; he did not dare again; the Ghost had
usurped his province; but he felt now that if he
might, his brain in this great heat would strike
off glowing thoughts, to circle, like fresh planets,
in an immortality of their own.

Anon the Ghost took a quieter mood, and hung
beside him only a sorrowful shadow. Then the
memory of Miriam came and poured soft balsams
on his wounds; — he caught it, held it firmly,
turned it in his mind, and clung to it tenaciously.
But at the moment, the Ghost sprang up again,
redoubling all her energies, summoning all her
alien forces, and every day increasing her threatenings
as he refused to resign it, — yet holding her
estates by mortmain.

It became a question with him if there might be
no scheme to evade her, if flight would free him,
or if other chains might be forged for her; — a
question, howbeit, that soon answered itself. Issuing
one morning from a closet that had been partitioned

from his painting-room, he shut the door
hastily, and thought, with the exultation of Macedon
on conquering new worlds, that he had shut
the Ghost within. He said with a chuckle that he
had been too quick for her; perhaps she humored
the supposition, for all that day he enjoyed a quiet
that was rare. A quiet so far as she was concerned;
but after a little, he began to worry himself
with conjectures, where could she be, and
what could she be doing? At last, a curiosity not
to be curbed possessed him. There was a nail in
the partition at some height, and if it were removed
he thought likely he could discover. The
Ghost could not be omniscient. Accordingly, having
darkened his room that no light might enter
the closet through the aperture, — a thing easily
avoidable, especially as the other owned a window,
— he noiselessly drew the nail, and bringing some
steps, cautiously mounted them and applied his
eye to the hole. At first he saw nothing; then
raising his eye he rubbed it vigorously, and again
looked. What did he see? Only another eye at
the opposite side, scanning him as he scanned it,
scintillating with malicious sparks, and laughing
at him in keen mockery and devilish cunning.
There was no deceit for the Ghost, no more prisons
of his making; for him she was, he found,
omniscient and omnipotent. When she had seen
him escaping her by devotion to his easel, she had
entered his work and poisoned his art; but she
was not one on whom he could revenge himself.

Soon, not alone she came, but swept before his
vision day and night with a train of other ghosts,
all separate, all glaring, all silent. They spoke no
word, but used only that dreadful language of the
ghosts, — the eye, the wild gesture, the tempestuous
rush, the sigh. From the mantling pools of
the heath at noon they gleamed like the faces of
corpses; wading out in the surf at night, they
broke to view in every crest; he never, never was
alone again.

Sir Rohan had at first congratulated himself
that he would no longer be with his single Ghost,
but a short time taught him the difference was
truly that between one sword and twenty. Their
silence, too, exasperated him; he longed for some
thundering denunciation, some taunt, some doom.
Anything but these tacit threats, these multiplied
stings. The eternal wordlessness, solely, was frenzying.
He wandered about without aim or knowledge,

frequently seeing nothing, but hearing the
perpetual rustle of unseen movements, as one
hears the murmur of a conch. But was he not
indeed laying his ear upon a vaster hollow, and
striving to see, painted on the gulfs beyond his
own identity, a face, the reflex perhaps of his
imaginings? He had walked for hours, at one
time, beholding no individual of these milliards,
and hearing only their mysterious susurrus; he
had endured it in a corresponding silence.

“Speak!” he cried at last, and turning, found
himself sitting on a tombstone in the lee of the
little church Miriam had described, — the three
graves, the long slope, and the sea, behind; and
before, — between the gap of the cliffs reddening
with morning, — the cross-roads, and a sunrise
boiling wildly athwart low inland plains. One
region of the heavens was wrapped in the pomp of
crimson brightening vapor that, curling and sailing
higher, put up a golden lip to take the morning
star; through it broad rays blanched the
zenith; in it the thin moon, waning her last quarter,
slowly and more slowly dissolved away. At
his demand, deadlier stillness seemed to hold the
air; but as if they had always been there, he was

aware, on looking again, of a phalanx of motionless
faces clear with metallic brightness, turned,
not at him, but toward the disc of the sun. Before
Sir Rohan might have suffered his glance to follow
theirs, something shot across and led it on till
resting there. It was the tiny blade of a penknife
held in long slender fingers, but increasing and
swelling as it withdrew, — and when it lay on the
shining disc, large and flexible as a Damascus
blade. A moment it remained quiescent, then
waving like a zostera gently from side to side with
rippling undulations, it was grasped more nervously,
and, as if it were a shuttle, tossed to and
fro, bending, slashing, twisting, rising, falling, all
at once, like not one, but a hundred swords, and
with a rapidity that bathed the controlling fingers
in a cloud. Now, like the swift wings of birds
flashing in the prime, it darted darkly across the
light, singing as it went; and now, like a myriad
fish in a sea of aerial brilliance, it swam with
curves and whirls, swaying at graceful pleasure.
But that which always gave distinctness to the
object, and brought it back to its original purport,
was a stain of brown rust upon the edge, — a
stain that had been blood, — the coagulation of a
life. It was the one returning point, that arrested
its swiftest motion, that caught it from the most
fantastic transformation, and shook it terribly before
him. By a peculiar process, Sir Rohan could
not resist the belief that the stain was not so much
on the knife as on his own soul; that it was that in
truth drawn and played with by those ghostly fingers,
black against the radiance of dawn. In a
kind of trance, he stared at the swift glancing of
the blade, till suddenly it leaped toward him from
the sun, like an arrow, but fell short of its mark
and stuck upright and quivering in the ground;
while that old touch, like compressed wind or a
breath from a rarer atmosphere, circled his wrist
again, — spiritual, chill, and melting like snow.

When he looked up again, the morning was advanced,
the faces faded, and the only object before
him was an upright stake driven through the heart
of the suicide who had been buried at the junction
of the four cross roads. It was the speech he had
demanded of the Ghost and her Legion.

When Sir Rohan trusted himself to look upon
his life, he saw it as one who has ascended an
apparently extinct volcano. The old lava-streams
are gay with wild-flowers that have bedded their

roots among them; the blackened channels overgrown
with vines; and bending down the savage
rifts whose deserted margins are green with moss,
nothing but everlasting quiet and sombre shadow
meet the eye. Suddenly, the earth trembles, thick
vapors, rising, assume wild shapes and darken the
lift; sulphureous flames follow in broad columns;
the old craters yawn and rock the hills, and new
mouths belch forth fiery rivers; while all the demons
and spirits of fire, who have slept so long in
their caverns, start into activity, and forward the
work with diabolic glee. And yet as often Sir
Rohan wondered if he were not as responsible for
these fierce imps that haunted him, as the Ghost;
and such gleams of recognition broke upon him,
that he half fancied them the creations of evil
thought, or the informing life of all his vicious
deeds, now first surrounded with shape.

He climbed among the gables of the old house,
ivy above, within, beneath his nook; owls staring
at him with great horny moons; bats wheeling
around him; but there too they came. Unimagined
revolting phantasms roaming the dark firmament,
travelling the winds, dropping on long
threads and swinging before him; silent all, but

restless, capricious, malevolent. Abolishing distance
till they showed him a false Miriam in Arundel's
arms, or haled her by the hair across his sight,
dead and freshly bleeding; or while the white bush
at the foot of the lawn glowed into the shape
of the Ghost, surrounding it with wreaths and
arabesques of head and limb and mop and mow,
horns, wings, tusks, till rising in a cloud, the
Ghost at their head, they charged valiantly and
drove him from the lair that seemed instinct with
life and stinging in every spray, still pursuing, as
he fled, with fresh dismays.

Strange to say, the most frequent of all these
extramundane faces was one resembling Arundel's,
pale and shuddering as when taking aim at St.
Denys.

He walked mile after mile on the endless moors
by night, and with the empty shell of the sky
above, cheated himself into a whim of freedom,
till the momentary transport checked his pace, and
the rising moon confronted him. It cast long
shadows from the margin of the moor toward
him, it cast also his own shadow behind him; what
then cast that same shadow, pale and varying, in
the path before him? Turning with frightened

eyes, again his Ghost in her dim red aspect of
triumph was at his shoulder, and each time the
shock was no less intense.

In the excruciating pains given by the noxious
vapors creeping treacherously into his bones during
these nightly wanderings he hoped that he
might merge his mental distress; but as if his soul
were fed by corresponding pulses, every physical
pang merely aggravated the wild throbs of anguish
there.

By day again, let him go where he would, a
blinding heat and light crowned and dazed him,
refulgent atoms of lightning flitted through his
vision in clouds, and every actual object wavered
as when seen through a veil of fervid air. He
felt it impossible to give any material its relative
value.

He never looked in a glass now, for there the
Ghost was most clearly to be found, as if it needed
the substanceless depth of the mirror to paint this
essence and evolve her from her shadowy sphere.
Yet at horrid times she burned away the awful
nimbus that surrounded her like a personal atmosphere
and separated them as the glass seems
to separate you from your reflection, — but which

was, indeed, the impassable barrier of worlds, that
interposed between her and corporeal things infinitely
more effectually than rushing leagues of
tempestuous sea-foam or ranges of heaven-kissing
hills, — burned this veil away with a subtile interpenetration
of light, and stepped from her sphere
to the shore of his, or rapt him into the bosom of
that, till his flesh lay chiller than snow upon his
bones, heavier and more lifeless than lead.

Not infrequently a great horror and darkness
fell upon him, wrapping him completely from all
outer objects; and when, after a while, it withdrew
and he became conscious of his Ghost, he demanded
if she were not the image of that thrown
out bodily, more especially as his mind was of the
class prone to individualize and assign every ideal
thing its equivalent of personality.

Hardest of all to bear was the hopelessness of
release, the fact of her perpetuity, the knowledge
that it was she, and that she was always there.
If by any chance tired habit snatched him into
sleep awhile, it was only to wake pricked through
the eyeballs, and meet the baleful face hanging
within an inch of his own. The breath of life
itself had now become fear to Sir Rohan; apathy

kindled to anger, and one trepidation built itself
upon another. A month passed, and still the
Ghost was his second self, and still as he turned
to the thought of Miriam she called her awful
legions to destroy it.

A perpetual distress of this period was the total
loss of all privacy. His mind, like some fair cathedral
nave with pillared aisles withdrawing to
lofty twilight, rich in antiquity, experience, the
beauty of genius and aspiration, instead of being
swept and garnished by pious and orderly hands,
and with closed portals repeating the quiet footfall
of silent worshippers, was set open to the gaping
view of all passers, thronged at the vestibules with
hosts of curious intruders, clanging to the fierce
tread of haughty scoffers. Rude iconoclasts shivered
the shrines, tore up the mosaics, splintered
the tracery that crusted mullion and arch like the
moss of centuries; while the air that had wafted
only blue-rolling incense, harmony, and prayer,
was now scattered by explosive laughter, and
silence fled shuddering to far monastic cloisters,
still to be caught and destroyed by the ribald profanity
that chased it.

There are few of us, even the most candid, that

do not keep some inner niche, where we retire
alone with our chosen oracle, our single memory,
or our hidden hope, — but this was denied to Sir
Rohan; and since so few hold their thoughts to the
gaze of a friend, who would choose an enemy for
their revelator, and that one whose enmity was to
be measured, if at all, by the strength of a former
love! Yet at such mercy he lay. Again, though
we commonly shrink from investigation of our least
wish, and do not desire intrusion on our sorrow,
the delicate and fastidious hold their joys in a far
greater degree sacred to themselves, and scarcely
in their confessions to God pray all that is in their
hearts. How, then, could they bear the prying
search of an indifferent eye, and what desecration
would their holy of holies meet at such insolent
touch as this man experienced!

One of the most fearful circumstances with
which the popular idea has chosen to invest the
Day of Judgment is that on that day all secrets
shall be revealed; but this Sir Rohan suffered
instantly, already. His thoughts were known in
their conception; there was no ward in his heart
of which the Ghost had not the freedom, every
nerve of pain or pleasure quivered at her presence,

she exposed the flimsy texture of every
dream, every fancy she scanned, every desire she
held up and shook derisively. And if such scrutiny
be painful from those who, by the kindred of
a race, share our frailties and aims, how must it
exceed itself from beings who have not one attribute
in common with us, who do not even breathe
our air, and own not a single human sympathy?
Whether the allies of the Ghost followed her
insulting march, or she communicated with them
without by some more than electric celerity, Sir
Rohan could hardly discriminate, or if their intelligent
torture would be keener than that effected
by unwitting malice. It was enough to feel all
hidden things brought to light, each recess rifled,
all sanctity violated, and his soul alive and resonant
with foreign and malign manœuvres.

Contemplation of any object is apt to impart to
ourselves a tinge of that object's archeus. Thus I
should not care to have, too often, the inspection
of an elephantiasis, amaurosis, or leprosy, lest the
drop serene should be grafted on the mind's eye,
or a more dangerous mental leprosy be induced;
and thus Sir Rohan, who at first may have seen his
Ghost simply because he knew she was to be seen,

at last felt himself in jeopardy of partaking her
nature. But hideous as this nature was, had he
not made it so?

Previously he had dreaded death, and driven all
his thoughts from it; he had feared, indeed, worse
than he was suffering; feared too, that he should
become of like substance, part and parcel of his
Ghost, able to endure finer inflictions. But if
he too had laid aside the flesh, would not some
ghostly poniard be his? No, no, he interpreted
her look, anew; he had had his turn. At least
some foil for defence, he persisted, then it would be
impossible for her to bring him such pain as now;
and truly he desired this release. But whom
should he ask? He dared not take it, and to
those who demand him Death never comes. Once,
in the evening, as he crossed the dark drawing-room,
the light from the hall streamed in at the
open door and lay upon the carpet; the long
mirror, nearly opposite, caught this light and shed
a brighter air round itself, and a parallelogram of
fainter clearness on the floor beside the other. As
Sir Rohan entered, his own shadow fell in the
first, and he had seen the image of that shadow
dimly in the glass, together with the white mistiness

that, swaying at every breath of air, still unfalteringly
served him; and now returning, before
he reached the mirror, he saw again his own approaching
shadow, with the Ghost's, not in the
glass, but thrown from its bosom upon the floor.
Uncertain enough, surely, was the double reflex of
his material form; but how utterly impalpable,
ethereal, and evanescent, this accompanying film!
It was as if the freak of light had stripped her of
the medium in which she clothed herself for visibility,
so that naked to the core, her true substance
lay in that representation hovering over the
carpet; so that he saw, not her mere refinement,
but the reflection of the reflection of the shadow of
a shadow. He no longer desired Death to endue
him with a similar ghastliness, and abandoned all
thoughts of conquering the Ghost by becoming of
like stuff. The intangibility and nothingness were
awful. He felt that she would embrace him more
completely were he free from the flesh; that in the
body, with all its infirmities and susceptibilities,
lay his peace or his salvation. He was like those
who, having bargained with the fiend for the next
world, fix themselves resolutely on the swinging
blossom of this, and pierce it for its lingering drop
of bitter honey. He half fancied that since Nature
had made one such exception for him, in the
case of his Ghost, she might also make another,
and decree that he should never die.

But time fleeting, the fitful darts of pain became
the heavy pressure of aching. Again his
fancy flew to Miriam.

He forgot that the Ghost had been growing
feebler before she came. Faint enough, he said,
had been that influence in her presence; had she
not finally banished it all? And he suddenly believed
it possible that having encountered the vigorous
nature of this joyous girl, the grave-soiled
weapons of the other had been found of no avail.
He had resolved for Miriam's sake, not to involve
her in his own sphere of pain. But had she been
miserable while here? In saving him had she lost
herself? Doubtless she was happy now: would she
be less so when vanquishing, by her calm virtue
and that voice like a sance-bell, these ghouls and
vampires that preyed upon him?

There are many who have the magnanimity to
resign that which costs others too precious a price;
few who have the courage to think, as Sir Rohan
did, of the greater price of their accepted resignation,

to weigh with careful poise their benefit and
the other's loss.

Not immediately did Sir Rohan collect his argument;
he had chance in the ceaseless operations
of his foe for thought but in jets; yet finally the
one conclusion held him, — he would seek Miriam,
he would never return without her.

Great need was there now for the Ghost to
thrust on her blows with violence, to exert all her
sovereignty, and sway her sceptre over the farthest
of her winged auxiliaries, investing them with a
new power; and when she resorted to the boldest
of her expedients, the danger must have been imminent.
She had ruled a passive victim, now it
was an enemy resisting her. Out of his sudden
hope night shut down upon Sir Rohan. These
wings blackened the sky. That was a fierce time
of joy to the Ghost, of agony to him. He yielded
to it like one in the centre of a hostile battalion,
crushed, torn, and bleeding. You, with your
healthy organization, laugh at it. To him, diseased,
sensitive, and replete with consciousness,
swords could not have been sharper; and not the
least piercing thorn was that his own hand had
loosened the horror, as the fisherman opened the
jar for the Genius.

I have asked myself if this man were mad.
But when, if he were, the madness became infectious,
when these phantoms became apparent to
others, I am forced to deny him that relief.

For now the servants knew of his approach before
they heard a footfall. If they met him at
dusk, they averred his eyes were burning coals; if
at noon, they unconsciously made way for two.
Enormous shadows, they said, danced as though
one tossed flambeaux in his path. The maids fled
like frightened doves among themselves, and told
with sharp whispers of the cloud in which their
fancies girt him, as if it held some half-guessed
monster to crouch above as he came down the
stairs, some form to sweep on either side, some
dimmest semblance of a weeping woman always to
be seen floating before his eyes: eyes like a sleepwalker,
they said, though he so often raising his
hand to brush it away; eyes wide with confusion,
oppression, and fright. He looked, they said, as
if he walked towards hell, and its shooting flames
already threw their expectant shadows across his
lurid visage. His old and gentle condescension,
his suffering, and kindly patience, availed no jot in
the regard of these people, who beheld in him the

victim of unknown, and thence the more terrific
agencies. Redruth also, they declared, saw such
images, though he said nothing, and one, indeed,
was always whispering by his ear.

But Redruth soon was not alone. These fantastic
creations filled the house, darted from every
closet, lurked in every corner, chased them till
their haunted work lay unperformed and they
dared not leave one another. Could I ascribe all
this to that power in Sir Rohan of stamping his
own sensations on the nerves of others?

Fearful legends now were rife in the place; the
story of Fanchon was bandied about with additions,
and it was even circulated that some ancient
Knight of the Belvideres had agreed upon a day
with the Powers of darkness wherein the whole
house should fall with a crash, and the dust of its
ruin choke the welkin; this day they believed to
be near, and with the superstition of their class
they rose to meet it.

In people of no high grade of intellect, we often
find a material perception, so to speak, a species of
instinct, that serves them in these emergencies;
and thus they may have felt rather than seen
what they described, and receiving impressions so

more strongly through the senses, these emotions
may have acted upon them in that direction, and
taught them to appreciate their master's condition
more quickly than by other means.

Of all this Sir Rohan was aware. He was worn,
thin, exhausted, and racked with perpetual pain.
But the hour his determination was fully made, he
descended heedless, a moment, of the crew that
followed. His head throbbed, his cheeks flushed,
his eyes burned with the fire in his veins; a fever
boiled his blood; he ordered his horse in a rage,
and mounting, dashed down the lawn with the
Ghost, and turned into the path through the park
that led to the highway traversing the county on
his road to Kent.

At hurried instants when this whirlwind of
flame broke and flashed away from him, his
thoughts vaulted buoyantly, and travelled along
the track of memory, drawn by unseen but invincible
chains, over the waste of years, to the pleasurable
scenes of youth; so that he remembered
the beauty and joy of that phase, the hot passion,
the indifference, the regret, till out of them leaped
a wild hasty deed like a crease from its sheath,
and then Remorse chased him; Remorse that

begat a feverish longing for the restoration of
what he had destroyed; a longing which assumed
the semblance of love, and led grief by the hand;
while the first foe still followed, never flagging with
his whips, and chasing him into madness. There
his thoughts wallowed through a miry flood, till
the longing became loathing, the love hatred;
and struggling to free himself he slipped in viler
sloughs, where successive horrors encompassed
him, receding and advancing like the waves of
a sea, till on their long rolls they tossed up the
Ghost. And these same thoughts dimly perceived
himself now, with the great darkness falling again
upon him, that, as he peeled it in broad flakes
from one place, fell upon another.

His frenzied violence at departure was not unnoticed
by Redruth, who followed at a distance
through the wilderness of neglected growth.
Toward nightfall, while he still wandered hardly
knowing why, crackling boughs and an intermittent
trampling drew him from the path, and in
the thickest of the woods he found his master
thrown senseless at the trunk of a tree, the snorting
horse not far off. There was a wood-cutter
within hail, the sound of whose cutting fell with

clear echoes, a ringing musical chopping; and
having secured his aid, they exerted all their
strength, raised the senseless man to the saddle,
and led him home.

Physicians were soon summoned, but Redruth
bethought himself of a nurse tenderer than the
others, though so far away, and wrote that night
to St. Denys, directing his letter by the one he had
found on the clavichord. Scarcely had the mail
time to reach the Castle and return, when Miriam
and St. Denys stood by the sick man's bedside.