Chapter 32

While these thoughts, founded on a natural piety, pure and gentle as herself, occupied Elizabeth, Falkner indulged in far other speculations. He triumphed. It is strange, that although perpetually deceived and led astray by our imagination, we always fancy that we can foresee, and in some sort command, the consequences of our actions. Falkner, while he deplored his beloved victim with the most heartfelt grief, yet at no time experienced a qualm of fear, because he believed that he held the means of escape in his own hands, and could always shelter himself from the obloquy that he now incurred, in an unapproachable tomb. Through strange accidents, that resource had failed him; he was alive, and his secret was in the hands of his enemies. But as he confronted the injured son of a more injured mother, another thought, dearer to his lawless yet heroic imagination, presented itself. There was one reparation he could make, and doubtless it would be demanded of him. The law of honour would be resorted to, to avenge the death of Alithea. He did not for a moment doubt but that Neville would challenge him. His care must be to fall by the young man’s hand. There was a sort of poetical justice in this idea, a noble and fitting ending to his disastrous story, that solaced his pride, and filled him, as it has been said, with triumph.

Having arrived at this conclusion, he felt sure also that the consummation would follow immediately on Neville’s perusal of the narration put into his hands, This very day might be his last, and it was necessary to make every preliminary arrangement. Leaving Elizabeth occupied with his fatal papers, he drove to town to seek Mr. Raby’s solicitor, to place in his hands the proofs of his adopted child’s birth, so to secure her future acknowledgment by her father’s family. She was not his child; no drop of his blood flowed in her veins; his name did not belong to her. As Miss Raby, Neville would gladly seek her, while as Miss Falkner, an insuperable barrier existed between them; and though he fell by Gerard’s hand, yet he meant to leave a letter to convince her that this was but a sort of cunning suicide, and that it need place no obstacle between two persons whom he believed were formed for each other. What more delightful than that his own Elizabeth should love the son of Alithea? If he survived, indeed, this mutual attachment would be beset by difficulties; his death was like the levelling of a mountain—all was plain, easy, happy, when he no longer deformed the scene.