His last hours in Tubbermore were spent in arrangements that showed he
never intended to return there. His household was all discharged; his
equipages and horses despatched to the capital to be sold; his books,
his plate, and all that was valuable in furniture, were ordered to
be packed up, and transmitted to Dublin. He felt a kind of malicious
pleasure in erasing and effacing, as it were, every trace of the last
few months.
“I will leave it,” muttered he, “to become the wreck I found it--would
that I could be what I was ere I knew it!”
The following day he left Tubbermore forever, and set out for Dublin.
CHAPTER XXXII. ON THE TRACK
“And with a sleuth-hound's scent,
Smells blood afar!”
It was nightfall when Roland Cashel entered Dublin. The stir and
movement of the day were over, and that brief interval which separates
the life of business from that of pleasure had succeeded. Few were
stirring in the streets, and they were hastening to the dinner-parties
whose hour had now arrived. It was little more than a year since Cashel
had entered that same capital, and what a change had come over him
within that period! Then he was buoyant in all the enjoyment of youth,
health, and affluence; now, although still young, sorrow and care had
worn him into premature age. His native frankness had become distrust;
his generous reliance on the world's good faith had changed into a cold
and cautious reserve which made him detestable to himself.
Although he passed several of his former acquaintance without being
recognized, he could not persuade himself but that their avoidance of
him was intentional, and he thought he saw a purpose-like insolence in
the pressing entreaties with which the news-vendors persecuted him to
buy “The Full and True Report of the Trial of Roland Cashel for Murder.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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