A stranger looking upon St. Elmo Murray for the first time, as he paced the floor, would have found it difficult to realize that only thirty-four years had plowed those deep, rugged lines in his swarthy and colorless but still handsome face; where midnight orgies and habitual excesses had left their unmistakable plague-spot, and Mephistopheles had stamped his signet. Blase, cynical, scoffing, and hopeless, he had stranded his life, and was recklessly striding to his grave, trampling upon the feelings of all with whom he associated, and at war with a world, in which his lordly brilliant intellect would have lifted him to any eminence he desired, and which, properly directed, would have made him the benefactor and ornament of the society he snubbed and derided. Like all strong though misguided natures, the power and activity of his mind enhanced his wretchedness, and drove him farther and farther from the path of rectitude; while the consciousness that he was originally capable of loftier, purer aims, and nobler pursuits than those that now engrossed his perverted thoughts, rendered him savagely morose.
For nearly fifteen dreary years, nothing but jeers and oaths and sarcasms had crossed his finely sculptured lips, which had forgotten how to smile; and it was only when the mocking demon of the wine-cup looked out from his gloomy gray eyes that his ringing, sneering laugh struck like a dagger to the heart that loved him, that of his proud but anxious and miserable mother. To-night, for the first time since his desperate plunge into the abyss of vice, conscience, which he had believed effectually strangled, stirred feebly, startling him with a faint moan, as unexpected as the echo from Morella's tomb, or the resurrection of Ligeia; and down the murdered years came wailing ghostly memories, which even his iron will could no longer scourge to silence. Clamorous as the avenging Erinnys, they refused to be exorcised, and goaded him almost to frenzy.
Those sweet, low, timid tones, "I am sorry for you," had astonished and mortified him. To be hated and dreaded was not at all unusual or surprising, but to be pitied and despised was a sensation as novel as humiliating; and the fact that all his ferocity failed to intimidate the "little vagrant" was unpleasantly puzzling.
For some time after Edna's departure he pondered all that had passed between them, and at length he muttered: "How thoroughly she abhors me! If I touch her, the flesh absolutely writhes away from my hand, as if I were plague-stricken or a leper. Her very eyelids shudder when she looks at me--and I believe she would more willingly confront Apollyon himself. Strange! how she detests me. I have half a mind to make her love me, even despite herself. What a steady, brave look of scorn there was in her splendid eyes when she told me to my face I was sinful and cruel!"