Ralph spent his morning in a semi-invalid fashion strange to one of his habits. "What was the matter with him?" he asked himself, "and what was he afraid of?" To both queries he answered positively "nothing." Yet the oppression on his spirits would not lift, and there was a tremor or dismay at his heart which would not be calmed or reassured. Why would not the man roll over and have done, and let there be an end, as there was with the squirrel and the bear he recollected?
Of moral sense Ralph may be said to have had as little as any one living in the civilized state. He certainly had not enough to trouble sleep or digestion, and might have been warranted impervious to remorse. With little benevolence, and without imagination, he was insensible to pain or misery beyond the circumference of his own cherished hide, as had been shown by his pleasure in the torture and ill-usage of his uncle's slaves. He had even prided himself on being proof to such phantasies as limit other men in working out their will; and if not brave, he had at least the judgment which reduces danger to its true dimensions. He surveyed his position now, The probabilities were in his favour. Who could have seen him? Who suspect him? It was unlikely at that hour that any one had, seeing he had fired but once. In his position nobody would suspect him, even if he had been seen and were accused. He need only say he had seen a bird on the water, and, having the gun in his hand, after frightening the sparrows from his cherry trees hard by, he had let fly. Jordan could testify to his spending the previous evening amicably with the deceased, and no one could suggest a reason for the deed. Possibly, too, the body being in mid-stream would be carried down. Once in the St. Laurence it was safe to be carried over the Lachine Rapids, or rendered unrecognizable by mere lapse of time. Danger, he told himself, there was none, and yet the gloom upon his spirits would not lift. Not all the brandy and soda he could swallow availed to cheer him.
There is a social atmosphere in which we live, a subtile sense of the general sentiment of our fellows, which no obtuseness of the nerves, no clearness of the understanding, can be wholly proof against. We breathe it, and live in it, and are of it, exceptional endowment counting for but little in opposition. The sanctity of human life, and the solidarity of each member with the rest of the community as far as mere existence goes, are sentiments so derived--foregone conclusions which nobody disputes, and nobody finds it necessary to assert. They go without saying, and are in the basis of our notions. And now, as a murderer, Ralph felt himself in the position of a lurking wolf, liable to be found out at any moment, and hooted from the company of men. He was already of a different kind from his fellows--a man apart and outside of human sympathy. If it were known, whom would he have to depend on? Would not his closest intimates be ready to assist the sheriff in bringing him to punishment? The loneliness weighed on him. Brandy would not lighten it. The rush of that detestable river was in his ears, and would not be expelled, nor the swift glassy sweeping of the tide be obliterated from his view, use his eyes or close them as he might.