第110章

The health of the earl remained fluctuating. Its condition depended much on the special indulgence. There was hardly any sort of narcotic with which he did not at least make experiment, if he did not indulge in it. He made no pretence even to himself of seeking therein the furtherance of knowledge; he wanted solely to find how this or that, thus or thus modified or combined, would contribute to his living a life such as he would have it, and other quite than that ordered for him by a power which least of all powers he chose to acknowledge. The power of certain drugs he was eager to understand: the living source of him and them and their correlations, he scarcely recognized. This came of no hostility to religion other than the worst hostility of all--that of a life irresponsive to its claims. He believed neither like saint nor devil; he believed and did not obey, he believed and did not yet tremble.

The one day he was better, the other worse, according, as I say, to the character and degree of his indulgence. At one time it much affected his temper, taking from him all mastery of himself; at another made him so dull and stupid, that he resented nothing except any attempt to rouse him from his hebetude. Of these differences he took unfailing note; but the worst influence of all was a constant one, and of it he made no account: however the drugs might vary in their operations upon him, to one thing they all tended--the destruction of his moral nature.

Urged more or less all his life by a sort of innate rebellion against social law, he had done great wrongs--whether also committed what are called crimes, I cannot tell: no repentance had followed the remorse their consequences had sometimes occasioned. And now the possibility of remorse even was gradually forsaking him. Such a man belongs rather to the kind demoniacal than the kind human; yet so long as nothing occurs giving to his possible an occasion to embody itself in the actual, he may live honoured, and die respected. There is always, not the less, the danger of his real nature, or rather unnature, breaking out in this way or that diabolical.

Although he went so little out of the house, and apparently never beyond the grounds, he yet learned a good deal at times of things going on in the neighbourhood: Davie brought him news; so did Simmons; and now and then he would have an interview with his half acknowledged relative, the factor.

One morning before he was up, he sent for Donal, and requested him to give Davie a half-holiday, and do something for him instead.

"You know, or perhaps you don't know, that I have a house in the town," he said, "--the only house, indeed, now belonging to the earldom--a not very attractive house which you must have seen--on the main street, a little before you come to the Morven Arms."

"I believe I know the house, my lord," answered Donal, "with strong iron stanchions to the lower windows, and--?"

"Yes, that is the house; and I daresay you have heard the story of it--I mean how it fell into its present disgrace! The thing happened more than a hundred years ago. But I have spent some nights in it myself notwithstanding."

"I should like to hear it, my lord," said Donal.

"You may as well have it from myself as from another! It does not touch any of us, for the family was not then represented by the same branch as now; I might else be thin-skinned about it. No mere legend, mind you, but a very dreadful fact, which resulted in the abandonment of the house! I think it time, for my part, that it should be forgotten and the house let. It was before the castle and the title parted company: that is a tale worth telling too! there was little fair play in either! but I will not trouble you with it now.

"Into the generation then above ground," the earl began, assuming a book-tone the instant he began to narrate, "by one of those freaks of nature specially strange and more inexplicable than the rest, had been born an original savage. You know that the old type, after so many modifications have been wrought upon it, will sometimes reappear in its ancient crudity amidst the latest development of the race, animal and vegetable too, I suppose!--well, so it was now: I use no figure of speech when I say that the apparition, the phenomenon, was a savage. I do not mean that he was an exceptionally rough man for his position, but for any position in the Scotland of that age. No doubt he was regarded as a madman, and used as a madman; but my opinion is the more philosophical--that, by an arrest of development, into the middle of the ladies and gentlemen of the family came a veritable savage, and one out of no darkest age of history, but from beyond all record--out of the awful prehistoric times."

His lordship visibly and involuntarily shuddered, as at the memory of something he had seen: into that region he had probably wandered in his visions.

"He was a fierce and furious savage--worse than anything you can imagine. The only sign of any influence of civilization upon him was that he was cowed by the eye of his keeper. Never, except by rarest chance, was he left alone and awake: no one could tell what he might not do!

"He was of gigantic size, with coarse black hair--the brawniest fellow and the ugliest, they say--for you may suppose my description is but legendary: there is no portrait of him on our walls!--with a huge, shapeless, cruel, greedy mouth,"--As his lordship said the words, Donal, with involuntary insight, saw both cruelty and greed in the mouth that spoke, though it was neither huge nor shapeless.