Chapter 62 - Page 2

mirth, and echoed the laugh of one who stood near and who
looked round in his face. When they had passed on, and he was left
alone again, he resumed his speculation with a new kind of interest;
for he recollected that the last person who had seen the suicide
alive, had left him very merry, and he remembered how strange he and
the other jurors had thought that at the time.

He could not fix upon the spot among such a heap of graves, but he
conjured up a strong and vivid idea of the man himself, and how he
looked, and what had led him to do it; all of which he recalled with
ease. By dint of dwelling upon this theme, he carried the
impression with him when he went away; as he remembered, when a
child, to have had frequently before him the figure of some goblin
he had once seen chalked upon a door. But as he drew nearer and
nearer home he forgot it again, and began to think how very dull and
solitary the house would be inside.

This feeling became so strong at last, that when he reached his own
door, he could hardly make up his mind to turn the key and open it.
When he had done that, and gone into the passage, he felt as though
to shut it again would be to shut out the world. But he let it go,
and it closed with a loud noise. There was no light. How very
dreary, cold, and still it was!

Shivering from head to foot, he made his way upstairs into the room
where he had been last disturbed. He had made a kind of compact
with himself that he would not think of what had happened until he
got home. He was at home now, and suffered himself to consider it.

His own child, his own child! He never doubted the tale; he felt it
was true; knew it as well, now, as if he had been privy to it all
along. His own child! And dead too. Dying beside Nicholas, loving
him, and looking upon him as something like an angel. That was the
worst!

They had all turned from him and deserted him in his very first
need. Even money could not buy them now; everything must come out,
and everybody must know all. Here was the young lord dead, his
companion abroad and beyond his reach, ten thousand pounds gone at
one blow, his plot with Gride overset at the very moment of triumph,
his after-schemes discovered, himself in danger, the object of his
persecution and Nicholas's love, his own wretched boy; everything
crumbled and fallen upon him, and he beaten down beneath the ruins
and grovelling in the dust.

If he had known his child to be alive; if no deceit had been ever
practised, and he had grown up beneath his eye; he might have been a
careless, indifferent, rough, harsh father--like enough--he felt
that; but the thought would come that he might have been otherwise,
and that his son might have been a comfort to