"To the _what?_" returned Ralph with a savage laugh. "To her _heart_, did you say? Why, the thing doesn't exist, wench! If, however, there does still cling to her anything of the sort, when I tell them that Sir Richard's a bastard, that'll wring it."
"Blessed are the Merciful, for they shall receive mercy," cried Mistress Forest, terrified at the deadly menace of his tone, and uttering her words as though they were a charm against an evil spirit.
"Blessed are the merciful!" echoed Ralph bitterly. "That may be so, for I have never known them; but cursed are the treacherous and the false! You have heard of the avenging angel--well, though my wings are so tattered and torn just now, that's me. Do you see the mimic lightning yonder over the Abbey? It will be stricken to-morrow from turret to basement by a forked shaft. Down with the Lisgards, and down they shall come!"
Shrieking this to a sort of frenzied measure, he suddenly broke away, and took the Dalwynch road, up Mirkland Hill. Mary listened with some feeling of relief to his fading strains, then sighed, and wiped from her eyes a few honest tears.
"He was not always a bad man, I am sure," soliloquised she pitifully, "and now God forgive him--he knows not what he's doing! He is mad."
|THE day after a great festivity in a great house is generally a dull one. It begins late; for both servants and guests are wearied, and there is nothing about it which is not inferior to other days except the luncheon, which in the way of "sweets," at all events, is always exceptionally good. Sir Richard, however, who went through life as nearly as could be to an automaton, was up at his usual time; and descending to the empty breakfast-room, beheld, seated in an arm-chair which he had wheeled to the window, a little wizzened old man, in brightest Hessian boots, drab breeches, and a cut-away coat with flap-pockets of the fashion of half a century ago.
"Dr Haldane!" exclaimed the young man in extreme amazement. "God bless my soul _and_ body!"
"I hope he will, sir," rejoined the visitor drily, extending three fingers somewhat stiffly.
"No, sir; surely your whole hand!" cried the baronet warmly. "Your face is the pleasantest sight--save that of my dear mother's--that I could hope to set eyes on in Mirk Abbey; and I am not going to be fobbed off with such a salutation as that."