’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 poison not known in Europe at that time except to savants, and first mentioned by Acosta some months before.  An attendant was accused and tried, but acquitted.  The then son of the House was a Fellow of the newly-founded Royal Society, and author of a now-forgotten work on Toxicology, which, however, I have read.  No suspicion, of course, fell on him.’

As Zaleski proceeded with this retrospect, I could not but ask myself with stirrings of the most genuine wonder, whether he could possess this intimate knowledge of all the great families of Europe!  It was as if he had spent a part of his life in making special study of the history of the Orvens.