What Will He Do with It — Volume 08 eBook

But send this letter to Lady Montfort?  A letter so wholly at variance with Darrell’s dignity of character—­a letter in which rage seemed lashed to unreasoning frenzy.  Such bitter language of hate and scorn, and even insult to a woman, and to the very woman who had seemed to Lionel so reverently to cherish the writer’s name—­so tenderly to scheme for the writer’s happiness!  Could he obey a command that seemed to lower Darrell even more than it could humble her to whom it was sent?

Yet disobey!  What but the letter itself could explain?  Ah—­and was there not some strange misunderstanding with respect to Lady Montfort, which the letter itself, and nothing but the letter, would enable her to dispel; and if dispelled, might not Darrell’s whole mind undergo a change?  A flash of joy suddenly broke on his agitated, tempestuous thoughts.  He forced himself again to read those blotted impetuous lines.  Evidently—­evidently, while writing to Lionel—­the subject Sophy—­the man’s wrathful heart had been addressing itself to neither.  A suspicion seized him; with that suspicion, hope.  He would send the letter, and with but few words from himself—­words that revealed his immense despair at the thought of relinquishing Sophy—­intimated his belief that Darrell here was, from some error of judgment which Lionel could not comprehend, avenging himself on Lady Montfort; and closed with his prayer to her, if so, to forgive lines coloured by hasty passion, and, for the sake of all, not to disdain that self-vindication which might perhaps yet soften a nature possessed of such depths of sweetness as that which appeared now so cruel and so bitter.  He would not yet despond—­not yet commission her to give his last farewell to Sophy.

CHAPTER VII.

     The man-eater continues to take his quiet steak out of Dolly Poole;
     and is in turn subjected to the anatomical knife of the dissecting
     author.  Two traps are laid for him—­one by his fellow man-eaters—­
     one by that deadly PERSECUTRIX, the woman who tries to save him in
     spite of all he can do to be hanged.

Meanwhile the unhappy Adolphus Poole had been the reluctant but unfailing source from which Jasper Losely had weekly drawn the supplies to his worthless and workless existence.  Never was a man more constrainedly benevolent, and less recompensed for pecuniary sacrifice by applauding conscience, than the doomed inhabitant of Alhambra Villa.  In the utter failure of his attempts to discover Sophy, or to induce Jasper to accept Colonel Morley’s proposals, he saw this parasitical monster fixed upon his entrails, like the vulture on those of the classic sufferer in mythological tales.  Jasper, indeed, had accommodated himself to this regular and unlaborious mode of gaining “sa pauvre vie.”  To call once a week upon