He, on the contrary, was strangely excited. Every time the door opened, he turned round with a start, and looked with straining eyes behind him. When the butler asked in a whisper of Mr. Tracy, what wines he should set upon the table after dinner--a question he had forgotten to put before--Sir William Winslow listened with all his ears to catch the sounds, as if they bore matter of life and death to him; and when Mr. Tracy answered aloud, "Some red hermitage and claret," he applied himself to talk again with exceeding vehemence.
The shadow of the dead haunted him. The gaunt spectre of Remorse was ever before his eyes.
Doubt too--terrible, vague, cloudy, indefinite doubt, the most oppressive of all states of mind, the most fearful form of Nemesis--hung over him like a brooding fury. "Was he really dead?" he asked himself; "Was the man slain?" He had fallen very heavily. That last blow had been followed by a sound strange and frightful: the cracking of solid bone mingled with a deathly groan. The eyes--he had seen them even in the dim twilight--had swum mortally in the sinking head. There had been a gasp which he did not like to think of, a dire clutching after breath of lungs that would receive it no more. What he would have given to creep quietly and silently down those wintry walls, and look at the spot where he had left him! to feel about with his hands in the darkness, and ascertain if the body was still there! But he sat chained to his seat in marble terror. He dared not turn his eyes towards the side where the deed had been done; he hardly dared to think of it, lest his thoughts unwittingly should find a tongue to bear witness against him. Yet he remembered that no one had seen the deed, as far as he knew; that he had met the object of his crime by accident, as he was returning to the house after a short walk in the grounds; that he had encountered no one by the way, either going or coming; that he had even gone out of the house by one of the conservatories, which led directly to a close and narrow walk, so that none could tell he had ever set his foot across the threshold. All these seemed comfortable reflections; but yet, strange to say, they brought neither comfort nor assurance. There is a consciousness that murder has its mysterious witnesses, which ever sits heavily on the felon's spirit. Why, he knew not, but he felt detected, even while he strove to prove to himself that detection was impossible. Oh, crime is a terrible thing!