Make the two men change names and places--and the deed is done!
Where are the obstacles? Remove my Lord (by fair means or foul)
from his room; and keep him secretly prisoner in the palace,
to live or die as future necessity may determine. Place the Courier
in the vacant bed, and call in the doctor to see him--ill, in my
Lord's character, and (if he dies) dying under my Lord's name!'
The manuscript dropped from Henry's hands. A sickening sense of
horror overpowered him. The question which had occurred to his mind
at the close of the First Act of the Play assumed a new and terrible
interest now. As far as the scene of the Countess's soliloquy,
the incidents of the Second Act had reflected the events of his late
brother's life as faithfully as the incidents of the First Act.
Was the monstrous plot, revealed in the lines which he had just read,
the offspring of the Countess's morbid imagination? or had she,
in this case also, deluded herself with the idea that she was
inventing when she was really writing under the influence of her own
guilty remembrances of the past? If the latter interpretation were
the true one, he had just read the narrative of the contemplated
murder of his brother, planned in cold blood by a woman who was at
that moment inhabiting the same house with him.
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