“Have you procured me that new drug I spoke
of?” asked the master.
“Here it is,” said the man, putting a
small package on the table.
“Is it effectual?”
“So said the apothecary,” answered the
man; “and I tried it on a dog. He sat quietly
a quarter of an hour; then had a spasm or two, and
was dead. But, your honor, the dead carcass swelled
horribly.”
“Hush, villain! Have there—have
there been inquiries for me,—mention of
me?”
“O, none, sir,—none, sir. Affairs
go on bravely,—the new live. The world
fills up. The gap is not vacant. There is
no mention of you. Marry, at the alehouse I heard
some idle topers talking of a murder that took place
some few years since, and saying that Heaven’s
vengeance would come for it yet.”
“Silence, villain, there is no such thing,”
said the young man; and, with a laugh that seemed
like scorn, he relapsed into his state of sullen indifference;
during which the servant stole away, after looking
at him some time, as if to take all possible note of
his aspect. The man did not seem so much to enjoy
it himself, as he did to do these things in a kind
of formal and matter-of-course way, as if he were
performing a set duty; as if he were a subordinate
fiend, and were doing the duty of a superior one,
without any individual malice of his own, though a
general satisfaction in doing what would accrue to
the agglomeration of deadly mischief. He stole
away, and the master was left to himself.
By and by, by what impulse or cause it is impossible
to say, he started upon his feet in a sudden frenzy
of rage and despair. It seemed as if a consciousness
of some strange, wild miserable fate that had befallen
him had come upon him all at once; how that he was
a prisoner to a devilish influence, to some wizard
might, that bound him hand and foot with spider’s
web. So he stamped; so he half shrieked, yet stopped
himself in the midst, so that his cry was stifled and
smothered. Then he snatched up the poisoned dagger
and looked at it; the noose, and put it about his
neck,—evil instrument of death,—but
laid it down again. And then was a voice at the
door: “Quietly, quietly you know, or they
will hear you.” And at that voice he sank
into sullen indifference again.
A traveller with a knapsack on his shoulders comes
out of the duskiness of vague, unchronicled times,
throwing his shadow before him in the morning sunshine
along a well-trodden, though solitary path.
It was early summer, or perhaps latter spring, and
the most genial weather that either spring or summer
ever brought, possessing a character, indeed, as if
both seasons had done their utmost to create an atmosphere
and temperature most suitable for the enjoyment and
exercise of life. To one accustomed to a climate
where there is seldom a medium between heat too fierce
and cold too deadly, it was a new development in the
