Neither spoke a word; but after the shaking of hands
and farewells were over, both turned together to the railway station. The carriage was crowded, and so Ernest still held his tongue. At last, when they reached home and stood in the passage together,
Ernest looked at his brother with a look of withering scorn, and, livid
with anger, found his voice at last. "Harold Carnegie," he said, in a low husky tone, "you are a mean
intercepter of other men's letters; a sneaking supplanter of other men's
appointments; a cur and a traitor whom I don't wish any longer to
associate with. I know what you have done, and I know how you have done
it. You have kept my engagement with Isabel Walters by reading the
impression of my notes on the blotting-book. You are unfit for a
gentleman to speak to, and I cast you off, now and for ever." Harold looked at him defiantly, but said never a word. "Harold Carnegie," Ernest said again, "I could hardly believe your
treachery until it was forced upon me. This is the last time I shall
ever speak to you." Harold looked at him again, this time perhaps with a tinge of remorse in
his expression, and said nothing but, "Oh, Ernest." Ernest made a gesture with his hands as though he would repel him. "Don't come near me," he said; "Harold Carnegie, don't touch me! Don't
call me by my name! I will have nothing more to say or do with you." Harold turned away in dead silence, and went to his own room, trembling
with conscious humiliation and self-reproach. But he did not attempt to
make the only atonement in his power by giving up Isabel Walters. That
would have been too much for human nature. VI. When Harold Carnegie was finally married to Isabel Walters, Ernest
stopped away from the wedding, and would have nothing whatever to say
either to bride or bridegroom. He would leave his unnatural brother, he
said, solely and entirely to the punishment of his own guilty
conscience. Still, he couldn't rest quiet in his father's house after Harold was
gone, so he took himself small rooms near the hospital, and there he
lived his lonely life entirely by himself, a solitary man, brooding
miserably over his own wrongs and Harold's treachery. There was only one
single woman in the world, he said, with whom he could ever have been
really happy--Isabel Walters: and Harold had stolen Isabel Walters away
from him by the basest treason. Once he could have loved Isabel, and her
only; now, because she was Harold's wife, he bitterly hated her. Yes,
hated her! With a deadly hatred he hated both of them. Months went by slowly for Ernest Carnegie, in the dull drudgery of his
hopeless professional life, for he cared nothing now for ambition or
advancement; he lived wholly in the past, nursing his wrath, and
devouring his own soul in angry regretfulness. Months went by, and at
last Harold's wife gave birth to a baby--a boy, the exact image of his
father and his uncle. Harold looked at the child in the nurse's arms,
and said remorsefully, "We will call him Ernest. It is all we can do
now, Isabel. We will call him Ernest, after my dear lost brother." So
they called him Ernest, in the faint hope that his uncle's heart might
relent a little; and Harold wrote a letter full of deep and bitter
penitence to his brother, piteously begging his forgiveness for the
grievous wrong he had wickedly and deliberately done him. But Ernest
still nursed his righteous wrath silently in his own bosom, and tore up
the letter into a thousand fragments, unanswered. When the baby was five months old, Edie Carnegie came round hurriedly
one morning to Ernest's lodgings near the hospital. "Ernest, Ernest,"
she cried, running up the stairs in great haste, "we want you to come
round and see Harold. We're afraid he's very ill. Don't say you won't
come and see him!" Ernest Carnegie listened and smiled grimly. "Very ill," he muttered,
with a dreadful gleam in his eyes. "Very ill, is he? and I have had
nothing the matter with me! How curious! Very ill! I ought to have had
the same illness a fortnight ago. Ha, ha! The cycle is broken! The
clocks have ceased to strike together! His marriage has altered the run
of his constitution--mine remains the same steady striker as ever. I
thought it would! I thought it would! Perhaps he'll die, now, the mean,
miserable traitor!" Edie Carnegie looked at him in undisguised horror. "Oh, Ernest," she
cried, with the utmost dismay; "your own brother! Your own brother! Surely you'll come and see him, and tell us what's the matter." "Yes, I'll come and see him," Ernest answered, unmoved, taking up his
hat. "I'll come and see him, and find out what's the matter." But there
was an awful air of malicious triumph in his tone, which perfectly
horrified his trembling sister. When Ernest reached his brother's house, he went at once to Harold's
bedside, and without a word of introduction or recognition he began
inquiring into the nature of his symptoms, exactly as he would have done
with any unknown and ordinary patient. Harold told him them all, simply
and straightforwardly, without any more preface than he would have used
with any other doctor. When Ernest had finished his diagnosis, he leaned
back carelessly in his easy chair, folded his arms sternly, and said in
a perfectly cold, clear, remorseless voice, "Ah, I thought so; yes, yes,
I thought so. It's a serious functional disorder of the heart; and
there's very little hope indeed that you'll ever recover from it. No
hope at all, I may say; no hope at all, I'm certain. The thing has been
creeping upon you, creeping upon you, evidently, for a year past, and it
has gone too far now to leave the faintest hope of ultimate recovery." Isabel burst into tears at the words--calmly spoken as though they were
perfectly indifferent to both speaker and hearers; but Harold only rose
up fiercely in the bed, and cried in a tone of the most imploring agony,
"Oh, Ernest, Ernest, if I must die, for Heaven's sake, before I die, say
you forgive me, do say, do say you forgive me. Oh, Ernest, dear Ernest,
dear brother Ernest, for the sake of our long, happy friendship, for the
sake of the days when we loved one another with a love passing the love
of women, do, do say you will at last forgive me." Ernest rose and fumbled nervously for a second with the edge of his hat. "Harold Carnegie," he said at last, in a voice trembling with
excitement, "I can never forgive you. You acted a mean, dirty part, and
I can never forgive you. Heaven may, perhaps it will; but as for me, I
can never, never, never forgive you!" Harold fell back feebly and wearily upon the pillows. "Ernest, Ernest,"
he cried, gasping, "you might forgive me! you ought to forgive me! you
must forgive me! and I'll tell you why. I didn't want to say it, but now
you force me. I know it as well as if I'd seen you do it. In my place, I
know to a certainty, Ernest, you'd have done exactly as I did.