Guy Livingstone; or, 'Thorough'Lawrence, George A. (George Alfred)
General
Guy Livingstone; or, 'Thorough'
Lawrence, George A. (George Alfred)
Fiction
One thing was remarkable--the great eagerness Guy displayed to keep the
party together at night. He would engage us in arguments, and employ all
sorts of ingenious devices to prevent us from going to bed, so that it
became very trying to a weak constitution. I observed this to him one
night when the rest had gone.
The slight flush left by the excitement of conversation was vanishing
rapidly from his cheeks, and a gray tinge was creeping over them like
that which we see on a sick man very near his end.
"It is too bad to keep you up, and too selfish," he said; "but I find
the nights so long!"
I left him without another word; but I lay long awake, haunted by that
haggard face and dreary eyes. I wish I did not see them so often still
in my dreams.
There were changes in other houses besides Kerton Manor, and a vacancy
in the most luxurious set of chambers in the Albany.
Duns, and rheumatic gout, and satiety had proved too much at last for
the patience of Sir Henry Fallowfield; so one night he preached his
farewell sermon in the smoking-room of the ----, in which he was
especially severe and witty on the absurdity and bad taste of a man
condescending to suicide under any circumstances. The next morning they
found him with--"that across his throat that you had scarcely cared to
see." The hand whose tremor used to make him so savage when he was
lifting a glass to his lips, had been strong and steady enough when it
shattered the Golden Bowl and cut the Silver Cord asunder.
Whether he was looking death in the face while he uttered those last
cynicisms, and calculated on heightening the stage effect of the morrow,
or whether a paroxysm of pain drove him mad, as it had done better men,
who can tell? I think and hope the latter was the case, but--I doubt.
Though Sir Henry Fallowfield had never read Aristotle, he had studied,
all his life, the principles of the peripeteia.
Godfrey Parndon no longer ruled over the Pytchley. He had backed his own
opinions and other men's bills once or twice too often, and had retired
temporarily into private life till he could get "his second wind." The
new M.F.H. was his complete contrast--pale-faced, low-voiced, mild-eyed,
and melancholy as a lotus-eater--one of the class of "weak-minded but
gentlemanly young men" that Tom Cradock used to ask his friends to
recommend to him as pupils. The farmers missed sadly Godfrey's bluff
face and stalwart figure at the cover-side, while the "bruisers" from
Leamington, and the "railers" from town, hearing no longer his great
voice, good-naturedly imperative, adjuring them to "hold hard, and not
to spoil their own sport," rode over the hounds rejoicing.
Flora Bellasys was married.
It was just the match I thought she would make. Sir Marmaduke
Dorrillon's possessions were vast enough to satisfy any ambition, and
his years put love out of the question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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