Pelham — Volume 07Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
History
Pelham — Volume 07
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
Adventure stories; English fiction -- 19th century; Great Britain -- History -- 19th century -- Fiction
"What!" I exclaimed, interrupting Glanville, for I could contain myself
no longer, "it was not by you then that Tyrrell fell?" With these words,
I grasped his hand; and, excited as I had been by my painful and
wrought-up interest in his recital, I burst into tears of gratitude and
joy. Reginald Glanville was innocent: Ellen was not the sister of an
assassin!
After a short pause, Glanville continued:
"I gazed upon the upward and distorted face, in a deep and sickening
silence; an awe, dark and undefined, crept over my heart: I stood beneath
the solemn and sacred heavens, and felt that the hand of God was upon me;
that a mysterious and fearful edict had gone forth; that my headlong and
unholy wrath had, in the very midst of its fury, been checked, as if but
the idle anger of a child; that the plan I had laid in the foolish wisdom
of my heart had been traced, step by step, by an all-seeing eye, and
baffled in the moment of its fancied success by an inscrutable and awful
doom. I had wished the death of my enemy: lo! my wish was accomplished,
--how, I neither knew nor guessed; there, a still and senseless clod of
earth, without power of offence or injury, he lay beneath my feet: it
seemed as if, in the moment of my uplifted arm, the Divine Avenger had
asserted His prerogative,--as if the angel which had smitten the Assyrian
had again swept forth, though against a meaner victim; and while he
punished the guilt of a human criminal, had set an eternal barrier to the
vengeance of a human foe!
"I dismounted from my horse, and bent over the murdered man. I drew from
my bosom the miniature, which never forsook me, and bathed the lifeless
resemblance of Gertrude in the blood of her betrayer. Scarcely had I
done so, before my ear caught the sound of steps; hastily I thrust, as I
thought, the miniature in my bosom, remounted, and rode hurriedly away.
At that hour, and for many which succeeded to it, I believe that all
sense was suspended. I was like a man haunted by a dream, and wandering
under its influence! or as one whom a spectre pursues, and for whose eye
the breathing and busy world is but as a land of unreal forms and
flitting shadows, teeming with the monsters of darkness and the terrors
of the tomb.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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