This last train of thinking was not easily dismissed. At length,
however, both mind and body were so overwearied that I fell into an
unusually profound sleep; from which I did not awake till Clarke, who
had risen two hours before, came between nine and ten o'clock and
rouzed me, to inform me that breakfast was waiting, and that our host
expected my company.
While I was dressing, he told me that Mr. Evelyn had been making
many enquiries concerning me; and apologized himself, with marks of
apprehension lest he should have done wrong, while he owned that he
had answered these interrogatories, by relating such particulars as he
knew.
We then went down; and, among other conversation at breakfast, Mr.
Evelyn remarked that he understood, from Clarke, we had no urgent
business which would make a day sooner or a day later of any material
consequence; and he therefore particularly requested we would delay
our departure till the next morning. The reason he gave was a kind
expression of interest, which what he had heard from my companion had
excited; and a desire, not of inquisitive prying but evidently of
benevolence, to be as fully informed of my history as I should think
proper to make him.
There was something soothing both in the request and in his manner,
which induced me to readily comply. Poor Clarke excepted, I seemed as
if no human being took any concern in my fate; and to discover that
there was yet a man who was capable of sympathizing with me was like
filling a painful vacancy of the heart, and afforded something of an
incoherent hope of relief.
Not that I was prepared to ask or even to accept favours. I had rather
entertained a kind of indignant sense of injury, against any one who
should presume to make me his debtor: or to suppose I was incapable
of not rather enduring all extremities than so to subject and
degrade myself as, in my own apprehension, I should do by any such
condescension.
After breakfast, Mr. Evelyn desired me to walk with him; that we might
converse the more freely when alone. He then repeated what Clarke
had told him, gave a strong and affecting picture of the overflowing
kindness and compassion with which my companion had related all he
knew, and proceeded afterward to speak of himself in the following
terms.
'I am a man, Mr. Trevor, engaged in a trust which I find it very
difficult conscientiously to discharge. I have an estate of fifteen
hundred a year, and am a creature whose real wants, like those of
other human creatures, are few. I live here surrounded by some
hundreds of acres; stored with fruits, corn, and cattle; which the
laws and customs of nations call mine. But what is it that these laws
and customs mean? That I am to devour the whole produce of thus much
land? The thing is impossible!'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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