Delaware; or, The Ruined Family. Vol. 3James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
General
Delaware; or, The Ruined Family. Vol. 3
James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
Fiction
The man then assured him that, if he would let him try, he would put
it in in a minute; and, after a laborious explanation, Beauchamp
consented. The old man pulled his foot as if he would have pulled it
off: the old woman squeezed his ancle as if she would have broken it
through the middle; but at length, with a sudden snap, the bone
started back into its place, and the patient found instant relief.
Every attempt to stand, however, was still quite out of the question;
and Beauchamp, giving himself entirely up into the hands of such
skilful chirurgeons, suffered his ancle to be bandaged up with clothes
steeped in vinegar and brandy, and himself to be carried to bed, where
the smuggler assured him he ought to lie for at least four days, in
order to perfect his recovery. When all was completed, and his host
and hostess were retiring, Beauchamp listened for a moment, and heard
the key of the door turned with greater satisfaction than he had
imagined the fact of being locked into his own room would ever afford
him.
CHAPTER II.
Now, Henry Burrel was a great deal too sincere a man, even in his
commune with himself, to endeavour by any means to cheat himself into
the belief that he was a hero. In short, he had quite sufficient real
enthusiasm in his disposition, and quite sufficient contempt for those
who affected it without having any, to make him very jealous of
letting the portion he did possess appear openly, even before his own
eyes; and, in order to correct such propensities, he had got up, as we
have shown before, a system of apathetic indifference to every thing
that did not affect himself, which, though sometimes run away with by
his zeal or his affections, contrived generally to bridle feelings
that would otherwise have been somewhat headstrong.
Left alone in a little bed, in a little room in a smuggler's cottage,
on the loneliest part of the sea-shore--locked in without being able to
set a foot to the ground--without a light----and with a confounded
smell of fish pervading the whole atmosphere--his first impulse, as
all these minor miseries tickled his imagination one after the other,
was to laugh heartily. But the impression lasted but a moment; and,
when he thought of the more remote, but more dreadful, circumstances
connected by an inseparable link with his temporary situation--the
murder of a helpless old man, which he doubted not had been
committed--the fearful moral offence which three of his
fellow-creatures had perpetrated; and the miserable fate of a youth,
in whom he had taken considerable interest--for he had recognized, as
we have before hinted, the voice of poor Wat Harrison--when he thought
of all these circumstances, his heart smote him for the moment of
levity in which he had indulged; and poured out the full tide of its
generous and kindly feelings to wash away the fault of that one
instant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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