personal enmity, stronger
than personal ambition, _than the love of life itself!_ And now, tell
me, at the time of the occurrence of this mystery, was the whole past
history of the House of Orven fully investigated?'

'Not to my knowledge,' I answered; 'in the papers there were, of
course, sketches of the earl's career, but that I think was all.'

'Yet it cannot be that their past was unknown, but only that it was
ignored. Long, I tell you, long and often, have I pondered on that
history, and sought to trace with what ghastly secret has been pregnant
the destiny, gloomful as Erebus and the murk of black-peplosed Nux,
which for centuries has hung its pall over the men of this ill-fated
house. Now at last I know. Dark, dark, and red with gore and horror is
that history; down the silent corridors of the ages have these
blood-soaked sons of Atreus fled shrieking before the pursuing talons
of the dread Eumenides. The first earl received his patent in 1535 from
the eighth Henry. Two years later, though noted as a rabid "king's
man," he joined the Pilgrimage of Grace against his master, and was
soon after executed, with Darcy and some other lords. His age was then
fifty. His son, meantime, had served in the king's army under Norfolk.
It is remarkable, by the way, that females have all along been rare in
the family, and that in no instance has there been more than one son.
The second earl, under the sixth Edward, suddenly threw up a civil
post, hastened to the army, and fell at the age of forty at the battle
of Pinkie in 1547. He was accompanied by his son. The third in 1557,
under Mary, renounced the Catholic faith, to which, both before and
since, the family have passionately clung, and suffered (at the age of
forty) the last penalty. The fourth earl died naturally, but suddenly,
in his bed at the age of fifty during the winter of 1566. At midnight
_of the same day_ he was laid in the grave by his son. This son was
later on, in 1591, seen by _his_ son to fall from a lofty balcony at
Orven Hall, while walking in his sleep at high noonday. Then for some
time nothing happens; but the eighth earl dies mysteriously in 1651 at
the age of forty-five. A fire occurring in his room, he leapt from a
window to escape the flames. Some of his limbs were thereby fractured,
but he was in a fair way to recovery when there was a sudden relapse,
soon ending in death. He was found to have been poisoned by _radix
aconiti indica_, a rare Arabian