MAMMON, AND CONTENTMENT.

AY, safe enough:  and the murderer went to bed.  To bed?  No.

He tumbled about the clothes, to make it seem that he had lain there:  but he dared neither lie down, nor shut his eyes.  Then, the darkness terrified him:  the out-door darkness he could have borne, and Mrs. Quarles’s chamber always had a night-lamp burning:  but the darkness of his own room, of his own thoughts, pressed him all around, as with a thick, murky, suffocating vapour.  So, he stood close by the window, watching the day-break.

As for sleep, never more did wholesome sleep revisit that atrocious mind:  laudanum, an ever-increasing dose of merciless laudanum, that was the only power which ever seemed to soothe him.  For a horrid vision always accompanied him now:  go where he might, do what he would, from that black morning to eternity, he went a haunted man—­a scared, sleepless, horror-stricken wretch.  That livid face with goggling eyes, stuck to him like a shadow; he always felt its presence, and sometimes, also, could perceive it as if bodily peeping over his shoulder, next his cheek; it dogged him by day, and was his incubus by night; and often he would start and wrestle, for the desperate grasp of the dying appeared to be clutching at his throat:  so, in his ghostly fears, and bloody conscience, he had girded round his neck a piece of thin sheet-iron in his cravat, which he wore continually as armour against those clammy fingers:  no wonder that he held his head so stiff.

O Gold—­accursed Mammon! is this the state of those who love thee deepest? is this their joy, who desire thee with all their heart and soul—­who serve thee with all their might—­who toil for thee—­plot for thee—­live for thee—­dare for thee—­die for thee?  Hast thou no better bliss to give thy martyrs—­no choicer comfort for thy most consistent worshippers, no fairer fate for those, whose waking thoughts, and dreaming hopes, and intricate schemes, and desperate deeds, were only aimed at gold, more gold?  God of this world, if such be thy rewards, let me ever escape them! idol of the knave, false deity of the fool, if this be thy blessing on thy votaries—­come, curse me, Mammon, curse thou me!

For, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”  It groweth up a little plant of coveting; presently the leaves get rank, the branches spread, and feed on petty thefts; then in their early season come the blossoms, black designs, plots, involved and undeveloped yet, of foul conspiracies, extortions on the weak, rich robbings of the wealthy, the threatened slander, the rewarded lie, malice, perjury, sacrilege; then speedily cometh on the climax, the consummate flower, dark-red murder:  and the fruit bearing in itself the seeds that never die, is righteous, wrathful condemnation.

Dyed with all manner of iniquity, tinged with many colours like the Mohawk in his woods, goeth forth in a morning the covetous soul.  His cheek is white with envy, his brow black with jealous rage, his livid lips are full of lust, his thievish hands spotted over with the crimson drops of murder.  “The poison of asps is under his lips; and his feet are swift to shed blood:  destruction and misery are in his ways; and there is no fear of God before his eyes.”