第3章

"Searching," continued Leonard, "into the breast of Walter Brome, Iat length found a cause why Alice must inevitably love him. For he wasmy very counterpart! I compared his mind by each individual portion,and as a whole, with mine. There was a resemblance from which I shrunkwith sickness, and loathing, and horror, as if my own features hadcome and stared upon me in a solitary place, or had met me instruggling through a crowd. Nay! the very same thoughts would oftenexpress themselves in the same words from our lips, proving ahateful sympathy in our secret souls. His education, indeed, in thecities of the old world, and mine in this rude wilderness, had wroughta superficial difference. The evil of his character, also, had beenstrengthened and rendered prominent by a reckless and ungoverned life,while mine had been softened and purified by the gentle and holynature of Alice. But my soul had been conscious of the germ of all thefierce and deep passions, and of all the many varieties of wickedness,which accident had brought to their full maturity in him. Nor will Ideny that, in the accursed one, I could see the withered blossom ofevery virtue, which, by a happier culture, had been made to bringforth fruit in me. Now, here was a man whom Alice might love withall the strength of sisterly affection, added to that impure passionwhich alone engrosses all the heart. The stranger would have more thanthe love which had been gathered to me from the many graves of ourhousehold- and I be desolate!"Leonard Doane went on to describe the insane hatred that hadkindled his heart into a volume of hellish flame. It appeared, indeed,that his jealousy had grounds, so far as that Walter Brome hadactually sought the love of Alice, who also had betrayed anundefinable, but powerful interest in the unknown youth. The latter,in spite of his passion for Alice, seemed to return the loathfulantipathy of her brother; the similarity of their dispositions madethem like joint possessors of an individual nature, which could notbecome wholly the property of one, unless by the extinction of theother. At last, with the same devil in each bosom, they chanced tomeet, they two on a lonely road. While Leonard spoke, the wizard hadsat listening to what he already knew, yet with tokens ofpleasurable interest, manifested by flashes of expression across hisvacant features, by grisly smiles and by a word here and there,mysteriously filling up some void in the narrative. But when the youngman told how Walter Brome had taunted him with indubitable proofs ofthe shame of Alice, and, before the triumphant sneer could vanish fromhis face, had died by her brother's hand, the wizard laughed aloud.

Leonard started, but just then a gust of wind came down the chimney,forming itself into a close resemblance of the slow, unvariedlaughter, by which he had been interrupted. "I was deceived,"thought he; and thus pursued his fearful story.

"I trod out his accursed soul, and knew that he was dead; for myspirit bounded as if a chain had fallen from it and left me free.

But the burst of exulting certainty soon fled, and was succeeded bya torpor over my brain and a dimness before my eyes, with thesensation of one who struggles through a dream. So I bent down overthe body of Walter Brome, gazing into his face, and striving to makemy soul glad with the thought, that he, in very truth, lay dead beforeme. I know not what space of time I had thus stood, nor how the visioncame. But it seemed to me that the irrevocable years since childhoodhad rolled back, and a scene, that had long been confused and brokenin my memory, arrayed itself with all its first distinctness.

Methought I stood a weeping infant by my father's hearth; by thecold and blood-stained hearth where he lay dead. I heard thechildish wail of Alice, and my own cry arose with hers, as we beheldthe features of our parent, fierce with the strife and distortedwith the pain, in which his spirit had passed away. As I gazed, a coldwind whistled by, and waved my father's hair. Immediately I stoodagain in the lonesome 91 road, no more a sinless child, but a man ofblood, whose tears were falling fast over the face of his deadenemy. But the delusion was not wholly gone; that face still wore alikeness of my father; and because my soul shrank from the fixed glareof the eyes, I bore the body to the lake, and would have buried itthere. But before his icy sepulchre was hewn, I heard the voice of twotravellers and fled."Such was the dreadful confession of Leonard Doane. And now torturedby the idea of his sister's guilt, yet sometimes yielding to aconviction of her purity; stung with remorse for the death of WalterBrome, and shuddering with a deeper sense of some unutterable crime,perpetrated, as he imagined, in madness or a dream; moved also by darkimpulses, as if a fiend were whispering him to meditate violenceagainst the life of Alice; he had sought this interview with thewizard, who, on certain conditions, had no power to withhold his aidin unravelling the mystery. The tale drew near its close.