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.
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