A Strange Story — CompleteLytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
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A Strange Story — Complete
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
But his main moral defect seemed to me in a want of sympathy, even where
he professed attachment. He who could feel so acutely for himself,
be unmanned by the bite of a squirrel, and sob at the thought that he
should one day die, was as callous to the sufferings of another as a
deer who deserts and butts from him a wounded comrade.
I give an instance of this hardness of heart where I should have least
expected to find it in him.
He had met and joined me as I was walking to visit a patient on the
outskirts of the town, when we fell in with a group of children, just
let loose for an hour or two from their day-school. Some of these
children joyously recognized him as having played with them at their
homes; they ran up to him, and he seemed as glad as themselves at the
meeting.
He suffered them to drag him along with them, and became as merry and
sportive as the youngest of the troop.
“Well,” said I, laughing, “if you are going to play at leap-frog, pray
don’t let it be on the high road, or you will be run over by carts
and draymen; see that meadow just in front to the left,--off with you
there!”
“With all my heart,” cried Margrave, “while you pay your visit. Come
along, boys.”
A little urchin, not above six years old, but who was lame, began to
cry; he could not run,--he should be left behind.
Margrave stooped. “Climb on my shoulder, little one, and I’ll be your
horse.”
The child dried its tears, and delightedly obeyed. “Certainly,” said I
to myself, “Margrave, after all, must have a nature as gentle as it is
simple. What other young man, so courted by all the allurements that
steal innocence from pleasure, would stop in the thoroughfares to play
with children?”
The thought had scarcely passed through my mind when I heard a scream of
agony. Margrave had leaped the railing that divided the meadow from the
road, and, in so doing, the poor child, perched on his shoulder, had,
perhaps from surprise or fright, loosened its hold and fallen heavily;
its cries were piteous. Margrave clapped his hands to his ears, uttered
an exclamation of anger, and not even stopping to lift up the boy, or
examine what the hurt was, called to the other children to come on, and
was soon rolling with them on the grass, and pelting them with daisies.
When I came up, only one child remained by the sufferer,-his little
brother, a year older than himself. The child had fallen on his arm,
which was not broken, but violently contused. The pain must have been
intense. I carried the child to his home, and had to remain there some
time. I did not see Margrave till the next morning. When he then called,
I felt so indignant that I could scarcely speak to him. When at last
I rebuked him for his inhumanity, he seemed surprised; with difficulty
remembered the circumstance, and then merely said, as if it were the
most natural confession in the world,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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