Mrs. Oliphant

“ His hair, which, to his great wonder, came out in handfuls when he dressed it, fell lank, like that of the recluse at Marchmain; and even his dress took the same resemblance, and flew back from his figure, as he went, with his restless haste of motion, from street to street. But the sneer and the disdain had almost gone out of Horace’s face: he could no longer afford these light emotions. His whole soul was burnt up with passions more intense—self-horror—anxiety, more acute and devouring than ever was the anxiety of love, to know his father’s fate ”

“ Without discovering what was in it, he plunged back into his own novel passion and excitement, in which, as was sufficiently natural, the young man passed that night and the remainder of his week in Harliflax as in a rapid and exciting dream. Falling in love was no softening enchantment for Horace; it did not involve affection, or respect, or tenderness, those sentiments and principles which act upon a man’s whole nature. It made no difference on his opinion of other people, or his dealings with other people, that he had fallen in love with Amelia Stenhouse. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am not afraid to ask for him. I’ve sat up on purpose. I want to hear all about Roger. How much is he bigger than you?”
“Oh, my darling child, the gentleman will be angry! He’s a sad invalid, Mr. Scarsdale; everybody indulges him,” cried poor Mrs. Stenhouse. “Pray, pray, don’t be displeased!”
“He’s a good deal bigger than me,” said Horace, half amused, and half spiteful, answering the question with an involuntary grudge, and increased impulse of dislike to poor Roger, whose additional inches—poor advantage though that was—it galled him for the moment to remember. ”

“ He knew well enough that there was nothing soft or sentimental, and not very much of human impressionable stuff in his own nature, but he did not know that a mind inaccessible to compassion or sympathy may still be desperately alive to all the selfish horrors of remorse and guilt, and that not even the promised income of a thousand a-year which he had forced from Mr. Pouncet’s fears and hopes, or the expectation which he entertained of being able to persuade Amelia Stenhouse into an immediate marriage, could make him insensible to that dread horror of suspense in which he lived. ”

“ Susan was not discouraged in her own undiscourageable hope and happiness even by these melancholy words; but she was grieved for Peggy, who, broken and nervous with her long solitude, was no longer like herself. She came round to the old woman’s side, and put her young arms, which had clung there so often, round Peggy’s neck.
“Do you know Horace is going to give me a fortune, Peggy?” said Susan. “Horace is different, don’t you think, since he has been ill? I thought it would have turned his head to be so rich—but he does not seem to care; he is so much quieter, older than he used to be. ”

“ It roused Susan’s spirits and her heart—it was to her like the reading of a possible future, instead of a certain past. She did not think of the things dolorous and heavy which cheerful Mrs. Melrose dwelt on little. She did not pause to remember that the heroine of all that active existence was now an infirm old lady, dwelling alone. Susan only thought of the life, and the love, and the labour; the capable hands, the cheerful heart, the years and hours so well filled and liberal. ”

“ Scarsdale’s chair, which stood in its usual place by the table. He could neither cry nor help himself; he fell heavily, like a man stunned by a sudden blow—voice, strength, consciousness went out of him; he lay prostrate, with his head upon the fleecy lambskin where his father’s feet had been accustomed to rest, no longer a self-defending, self-torturing, conscious parricide, with a brand upon his soul worse than that of Cain; a figure blind and helpless, an insensible, inanimate mass of dull flesh and blood, conscious of nothing in the world, not even that he lived and was a man. ”

“ Whenever she was gone, Horace stole noiselessly as a ghost into his father’s apartment. It was not a murderous light that shone from the May skies into that room, the most comfortable in the house—but the young felon had night and darkness in his face. The box stood on the dressing-table, beside that chair of Mr. Scarsdale’s, in which some malicious ghost might have sat, it looked so occupied and observant. With a trembling yet rapid hand, Horace opened the box, and took out of it the little phial which he had seen his father use. ”

“ He could not help guessing what had been going on in the troubled spirit beside him, of which he knew so little; he could not help shuddering at the thought of the horrible guilt from which, by accident, as it appeared, and interposition of God, the young man had been unwittingly preserved. God help him!—so young, so wretched, to drag the hideous burden of that remembrance through all his days of life! The deepest pity, even amid his horror, struck the old soldier’s noble, innocent heart. He could not comprehend the guilt—but he felt the remorse, with a compassion that was half divine. ”

“ And now, while that happy evening party gathered in Colonel Sutherland’s drawing-room, the widow and her little boy were spending the slow hours together in the warm parlour, where Edmund spent his invalid childhood. His father’s death had given a shock more than it could bear to the nervous and weakly frame of the ailing child; his father was dead, and he was the heir. An unnatural excitement stimulated the precocious little mind, and rose to fever in the throbbing pulse and little pinched cheeks, now flushed with a hectic brightness. ”

“ Not for the last injunction of Edmund’s father—not because that worldly man, without repenting of the wrong, would have suffered another death rather than allow this secret to be known to his child. Horace had given no promise, and thought no more of that last adjuration; but what was to become of the secret if he shared it with a woman and a child?—the woman Roger’s mother, the child his earnest champion. And they already knew so much of it, without any aid of his. He faced round upon them, ready to defend this fancied talisman of his power. ”

“ She no longer wanted to be amused—she was independent of him: he might come or he might go, and Amelia did not care. A new life had visited Mrs. Stenhouse’s roof and family. Roger, the unknown brother, was there like a son at home, charming the little invalid, who had left all his wealth to him, out of the feverish excitement and unwholesome primary place, which were killing Edmund; warming his mother’s heart into a late summer of peace and thankfulness; making himself acceptable even to the pretty sisters who admired him, and whom he admired. ”

“ Pouncet. He had pled his cause warmly with herself, and his love had blazed about her not so many days ago when he was at Harliflax; but he could not turn his thoughts to her now; he could not warm his torpid mind with remembering her beauty; he could not rouse his fierce animal passion. Something black and cold stood first in his mind between him and his fortune—between him and what he called happiness. Murder had overshadowed love, and killed it. ”

“ Pouncet consented at last, with many a grudge and inward compunction, to pay Horace the large stipend he claimed, on the tacit understanding that one-half of it was to be repaid to him when the young man came to his fortune; and the lawyer, though he had guessed rightly when he judged Mr. Scarsdale to be about his own age, notwithstanding, with the reckless boldness of humanity, began to reckon in his mind all the chances against the recluse’s life. The wonder seemed to be that such a man, in such circumstances, could last so long: there could not be much vigour of existence left in him. ”

“ Ten years, twenty years—who could prophesy how long that dreary life might hang and linger out yonder on the dreary moor? The good, the just, the lives most loved and prized, fade out of human ways; but the man accursed and excommunicated lives on. This man, perhaps, whose death would scarcely call a tear to any eye, would die most likely a very patriarch of disappointment, hatred, and misery; while his son, the heir, lingered out the blossom of his life in daily drudgery, unconsidered and poor.
This idea pertinaciously clinging to his mind might have crazed a better heart than that of Horace ”

“ Horace made no reply—he shrank, in spite of himself, as though he would have crept away morally out of his uncle’s presence; for the instant the young man realized, with a desperate force of conviction, the “gulf fixed” between heaven and hell which none can pass over; he felt it in his guilt a thousand times more deeply than the pure heart beside him did, in its tender depths of pity. He lay still in his weakness, with a mortified consciousness of humiliation and inferiority, insufferable to his arrogant spirit. ”

“ He was not dying yet—he had still force enough to retain the dismal, anxious look into which that malady writhes and puckers the suffering face; but he had reached to that condition of entire occupation with his own pangs, which sometimes happily, sometimes miserably, beguiles the departing soul out of the shrinkings of nature on the verge of death. The appearance of Horace, recalling him from that absorbing consciousness of pain, he perceived with all a sick man’s impatience. ”

“ Horace came upon Marchmain from behind, on an afternoon of May. The moor was no wilderness at that season. The whins were burning under the sunshine, the heather blooming purple and fragrant, thrusting its flowery spires against the foot that disturbed their growth; and the young seedlings, sown here and there in little clumps, waved their delicate young leaves to the soft air, and glittered in the light with a genial spring triumph over the intractable soil. ”

“ CHAPTER VII. WITHOUT any awe, or indeed much interest—with the indifference of a man absorbed in his own affairs, and the still more revolting carelessness of one who had begun to play in his dark thoughts with other human lives, and to find them obstacles in his way—Horace Scarsdale entered the sick room of his employer. Mr. Stenhouse lay, huddled among his pillows, in all the exhaustion of his terrible disease, shivering and blue beneath the load of coverings with which his attendants vainly endeavoured to restore vital warmth to his frame. ”

“ 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? ”

“ The will was still incomplete, when sleep stole over the would-be testator. He drooped back among the cushions, and could no longer keep his fiery little eyes open. Was he dying with that last flutter of words, “my brother Roger,” about his lips? No, only falling safe into the restless sleep of a sick child. When his sharp little voice had died away, and all was silent in the room, the two by his bedside looked strangely into each other’s faces. What brought you here with your black thoughts, oh! dangerous, guilty man? ”

“ Melrose, after a long chapter of that history, which she meant to make an end of as soon as the gentlemen entered the room, “you see, Susan, we were poor then, the General and me.”
“But you were happy all the same, happier than if you had waited till you were rich,” cried Roger Musgrave, suddenly, in her ear.
“Happy!” cried the old lady, turning round upon him with an echo not to be described by words in her voice. Then she paused, with a humorous smile on her face; “I’m an old woman, and should be a good adviser; but I never was a good adviser, as your Uncle Edward will tell you. ”

“ Death, whom he had invoked, was coming—his fortune would soon be all his own; but there was never spectator at a tragedy who held his breath for its consummation as Horace Scarsdale did, rushing out of his own black, unrepentant remorse and misery to Marchmain. ”

“ It seemed scarcely right to feel so happy when she could still return by a thought to that dreary moor and melancholy house, and remember how her father lived miserably by himself in his austere solitude, and that she was an outcast, banished from her natural home. But it was difficult to give importance to the passion of Mr. Scarsdale, and the contempt of Horace, in the sunshiny presence of Uncle Edward. The old man inclining his deaf ear towards her with that smile upon his face, put Susan’s troubles to flight in spite of herself ”

“ With all the cold blood of age, totally careless and indifferent to any results which did not affect himself, he leapt at the rapid conclusion of youth, and found wealth, love, and luxury in a sudden windfall of extraordinary fortune. So, happily unaware of his own inconsistency, Horace lived in a fever through the few tedious days which he was obliged to spend in Harliflax, in the monotonous occupations of Mr. Stenhouse’s office, with only one other glimpse of Amelia before he could start on his important journey. ”

“ The wife and her assistants came back, and Horace stood aside from the bed, without the sufferer being aware of it. “Remember, Scarsdale, the boy is not to know!” he shouted out in the height of his sufferings. Horace remained in the room with a morbid curiosity strange to himself, though his eager thoughts were with Amelia below. He was not aware that few men depart in a paroxysm of pain, and he stood there with a strange excitement, almost thinking that, for the first time, he should see a fellow-creature die. ”