I shall not
the less retain for you the regard due to one who has certainly
befriended me in very untoward circumstances."
This conversation confirmed the previous idea of Middleton, that some
mystery of a peculiarly dark and evil character was connected with the
family secret with which he was himself entangled; but it perplexed him
to imagine in what way this, after the lapse of so many years, should
continue to be a matter of real importance at the present day. All the
actors in the original guilt--if guilt it were--must have been long ago
in their graves; some in the churchyard of the village, with those
moss-grown letters embossing their names; some in the church itself, with
mural tablets recording their names over the family-pew, and one, it
might be, far over the sea, where his grave was first made under the
forest leaves, though now a city had grown up around it. Yet here was
he, the remote descendant of that family, setting his foot at last in the
country, and as secretly as might be; and all at once his mere presence
seemed to revive the buried secret, almost to awake the dead who partook
of that secret and had acted it. There was a vibration from the other
world, continued and prolonged into this, the instant that he stepped
upon the mysterious and haunted ground.
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