The four-and-twenty steps
to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.
On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three
ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never
again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's
observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among
bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he
wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear
they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at
least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous
and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of
his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror,
some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful
illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the
rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the
defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mould of
their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when
the winter changed the time of its appearance.
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