WYLDER'S HAjYD.
387
But he went, on the contrary, rather quietly, threatening
to pay me off, however, though he did not say how.
"He is palpably machinating something to my des-
truction with an influential attorney of whom I keep a
watch, and he has got some fellow named Dutton into the
conspiracy; and not knowing how they mean to act, and
only knowing how utterly wicked, cunning, and bloody-
minded he is, and that he hates me as he probably never
hated anyone before, I must be prepared to meet him,
and, if possible, to blow up that Satanic cabal, which
without money I can't. It was partly a mystification
about the election; of course, it will be expensive, but
nothing like the other. Are you ill, Dorkie?"
He might well ask, for she appeared on the point of
fainting.
Dorcas had read and heard stories of men seemingly no
worse than their neighbors — nay, highly esteemed, and
praised, and liked — who yet were haunted by evil men,
who encountered them in lonely places, or by night, and
controlled them by the knowledge of some dreadful crime.
Was Stanley — her husband — whose character she had
begun to discern, whose habitual mystery was, somehow,
tinged in her mind with a shade of horror, one of this
two-faced, diabolical order of heroes?
Why should he dread this cabal, as he called it, even
though directed by the malignant energy of the absent
and shadowy Mark Wylder? Why should it be necessary
to buy off the conspirators whom a guiltless man would
defy and punish?
The doubt did not come in these defined shapes. As a
halo surrounds a saint, a shadow rose suddenly, and en-
veloped pale, scented, smiling Stanley, with the yellow
eyes. He stood in the centre of a dreadful medium,
through which she saw him, ambiguous and awful; and
she sickened.