f that day when Cesarini had attempted
De Montaigne's life, evidently mistaking him in his delirium for
another,--and the sullen, cunning, and ferocious character which the
insanity had ever afterwards assumed. He had learned from Howard
that the outer door had been left ajar when Lord Vargrave was with
Maltravers. The writing on the panel, the name of Vargrave, would have
struck Castruccio's eye as he descended the stairs; the servant was
from home, the apartments deserted; he might have won his way into the
bedchamber, concealed himself in the _armoire_, and in the dead of the
night, and in the deep and helpless sleep of his victim, have done the
deed. What need of weapons--the suffocating pillows would stop speech
and life. What so easy as escape,--to pass into the anteroom; to unbolt
the door; to descend into the courtyard; to give the signal to the
porter in his lodge, who, without seeing him, would pull the _cordon_,
and give him egress unobserved?

All this was so possible, so probable.

De Montaigne now withdrew all inquiry for the unfortunate; he trembled
at the thought of discovering him, of verifying his awful suspicions, of
beholding a murderer in the brother of his wife! But he was not doomed
long to entertain fear for Cesarini; he was not fated ever to change
suspicion into certainty. A few days after Lord Vargrave's burial, a
corpse was drawn from the Seine. Some tablets in the pockets, scrawled
over with wild, incoherent verses, gave a clew to the discovery of the
dead man's friends: and, exposed at the Morgue, in that bleached
and altered clay, De Montaigne recognized the remains of Castruccio
Cesarini. "He died and made no sign!"

CHAPTER VII.

SINGULA quaeque locum teneant sortita.*--HORACE: _Ars Poetica_.

* "To each lot its appropriate place."

MALTRAVERS and the lawyers were enabled to save from the insolvent bank
but a very scanty portion of that wealth in which Richard Templeton had
rested so much of pride. The title extinct, the fortune gone--so
does Fate laugh at our posthumous ambition! Meanwhile Mr. Douce, with
considerable plunder, had made his way to America: the bank owed nearly
half a million; the purchase money for Lisle Court, which Mr. Douce had
been so anxious to get into his clutches, had not sufficed to stave off
the ruin,--but a great part of it sufficed to procure competence for
himself. How inferior in wit, in acuteness, in stratagem, was Douce
to Vargrave; and yet