being. (Such infatuation is by no means rare, nor confined
to despots and brigands, and when it exists in a poor man it is always
fatal to himself.) His education, if it could be called such, had
doubtless fostered this delusion; but Mr. Dodge was right; the Carew
blood had been as poison in his veins, and had destroyed him.
All this might be true; but such philosophy could scarcely now obtain a
hearing, while his enemy was dying of starvation in his living tomb. It
was in vain for him to repeat mechanically that he had also suffered a
sort of lingering death for twenty years. The present picture of his
rival's torments presented itself in colors so lively and terrible that
it blotted out the reminiscence of his own. The recollection of his
wrongs was no longer sufficient for his vindication. He therefore strove
to behold his victim in another light than as his private foe--as the
murderer of his friend Balfour, the history of whose end may here be
told.
On the night that Richard escaped from Lingmoor, it was Balfour, of
course, who assisted him, and who was awaiting him in person at the foot
of the prison wall. The old man's arms had received him as he slipped
down the rope; and the object at which the sentry had fired had been two
men, though in the misty night they had seemed but one. Balfour had been
mortally wounded, and it was with the utmost difficulty that, laden
with the burden of his dying friend, Richard had contrived to reach
Bergen Wood. As his own footsteps were alone to be traced along the
moor, the idea of another having accompanied his flight--though they
knew there was complicity--had not occurred to the authorities. Balfour
had hardly reached that wretched asylum when he expired, pressing
Richard's hand, and bidding him remember Earl Street, Spitalfields.
"What you find there is all yours, lad," was his dying testament and
last words of farewell. And over his dead body Richard swore anew his
vow of vengeance against the man that had thus, though indirectly,
deprived him of his only friend. He had watched by the dead body, on its
bed of rotten leaves, through that night and the whole of the next day;
then, changing clothes with it, he had fled under cover of the ensuing
darkness, and got away eventually to town.
He had found the house in Earl Street a wretched hovel, tenanted by a
few abjects, whom the money found on Balfour--which he had received on
leaving prison--was amply sufficient to buy ou
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