seem absorbed in meditation--a meditation
which had nothing in it worthy of the name. In his communications with
Donal, he did not seem in the least aware that he had made him the
holder of a secret by which he could frustrate his plans for his
family. These plans he clung to, partly from paternity, partly from
contempt for society, and partly in the fancy of repairing the wrong he
had done his children's mother. The morally diseased will atone for
wrong by fresh wrong--in its turn to demand like reparation! He would
do anything now to secure his sons in the position of which in law he
had deprived them by the wrong he had done the woman whom all had
believed his wife. Through the marriage of the eldest with the heiress,
he would make him the head of the house in power as in dignity, and
this was now almost the only tie that bound him to the reality of
things. He cared little enough about Forgue, but his conscience was
haunted with his cruelties to the youth's mother. These were often such
as I dare not put on record: they came all of the pride of self-love
and self-worship--as evil demons as ever raged in the fiercest fire of
Moloch. In the madness with which they possessed him, he had inflicted
upon her not only sorest humiliations, but bodily tortures: he would
see, he said, what she would bear for his sake! In the horrible
presentments of his drug-procured dreams they returned upon him in
terrible forms of righteous retaliation. And now, though to himself he
was constantly denying a life beyond, the conviction had begun to visit
and overwhelm him that he must one day meet her again: fain then would
he be armed with something which for her sake he had done for her
children! One of the horrible laws of the false existence he led was
that, for the deadening of the mind to any evil, there was no necessity
it should be done and done again; it had but to be presented in the
form of a thing done, or a thing going to be done, to seem a thing
reasonable and doable. In his being, a world of false appearances had
taken the place of reality; a creation of his own had displaced the
creation of the essential Life, by whose power alone he himself falsely
created; and in this world he was the dupe of his own home-born
phantoms. Out of this conspiracy of marsh and mirage, what vile things
might not issue! Over such a chaos the devil has power all but
creative. He cannot in truth create, but he can with the degenerate
created work mo