Modern literature: a novel, Volume 3 (of 3)Bisset, Robert
General
Modern literature: a novel, Volume 3 (of 3)
Bisset, Robert
England -- Social life and customs -- 18th century -- Fiction
Having conducted the husband to his end, we must now pass over to
Scotland to visit his wife. Ever since her return from England, the
daughter of Etterick had been in a state of dejection and despondency,
from the absence and misconduct of her husband, which last did not
fail to reach her ears down to his adventures at Tetbury. Several
months after her arrival at her father’s house, she lost her only
child; and the addition of this new grief, joined with the former in
throwing her into a consumption, from which it was soon foreseen she
would never recover. A person from Selkirk was in Dublin, between the
trial and execution of O’Rourke, and found means to see him in the
condemned hold, and thereby to be assured that he was the identical
son-in-law of the laird of Etterick; he also learned many particulars
of his late history, from his fellow-convicts and the turnkeys, to
whom the preacher most frankly communicated his principal exploits.
In too great eagerness to communicate dismal news, the Selkirk man
wrote to the laird a minute and circumstantial account of O’Rourke’s
last adventures; not forgetting the impenitent obduracy with which
he braved eternity. When this letter arrived, the old gentleman was
taking his afternoon glass, in his daughter’s apartment, while she,
in the last stage of weakness, sought some relief from the uniformity
of the sick bed, by reclining in an easy chair. Her father read the
letter, and having seen its result, fell back on his seat without
sense or motion. Having rung for servants, to afford her parent that
assistance which she was unable to give herself, she snatched up the
letter by which he was so grievously affected, and soon found that she
was much more intimately and fatally concerned. Profligate ruffian
as he was, she deplored him not as an abandoned miscreant, but as
the husband whom she had so tenderly loved. On her deeper grief, the
shock was less instantaneously violent than on her father. She, with
determined calmness, desired to be carried to bed; the physician not
to be sent for, but the clergyman to be fetched immediately. The first
order was disobeyed, but the second was directly executed. The Doctor
announced to the father, now recovered to sorrow, that the dissolution
of his child was inevitable; that he, and with him the whole faculty,
could do no more. The clergyman, whom she had daily consulted during
the progress of her malady, on what now concerned her much nearer
than life, declared to her father, that since it was evidently the
will of Providence she should be withdrawn from this vale of tears,
never did he find a woman or man more thoroughly prepared by genuine
christianity, for undergoing the aweful change. She languished out that
evening, and a part of the following day, and, without a struggle, at
three in the afternoon, she breathed her last; a premature and fatal
victim to the excess of parental indulgence, which at so youthful an
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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