Send
for a clergyman, and a lawyer, Mr. Craven as well as any other. It is
all over now; and better so; life is but a long fever. Perhaps he will
sleep now, and let me sleep too. Yes, I killed him. Why, I will tell
you. Give me some wine.
"What I said at the inquest about owing my worldly prosperity to him was
true. I trace my pecuniary success to Mr. Elmsdale; but I trace also
hours, months, and years of anguish to his agency. My God! the nights
that man has made me spend when he was living, the nights I have spent
in consequence of his death--"
He stopped; he had mentally gone back over a long journey. He was
retracing the road he had travelled, from youth to old age. For he was
old, if not in years, in sorrow. Lying on his death-bed, he understood
for what a game he had burnt his candle to the socket; comprehended how
the agony, and the suspense, and the suffering, and the long, long fever
of life, which with him never knew a remittent moment, had robbed him of
that which every man has a right to expect, some pleasure in the course
of his existence.
"When I first met Elmsdale," he went on, "I was a young man, and an
ambitious one. I was a clerk in the City. I had been married a couple of
years to a wife I loved dearly. She was possessed of only a small dot;
and after furnishing our house, and paying for all the expenses incident
on the coming of a first child, we thought ourselves fortunate in
knowing there was still a deposit standing in our name at the
Joint-Stock Bank, for something over two hundred pounds.
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