The Gipsy: A Tale (Vols I & II)James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
General
The Gipsy: A Tale (Vols I & II)
James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
Romanies -- Fiction
There, too, he had himself been educated from infancy to manhood; over
those lawns and walks he had played in the guileless innocence of
youth; under those trees he had sat a thousand times with the dead, in
the sweet and hopeful summer-days of boyhood. Their arms clasped round
each other's necks, or their hands locked in each other, they had
wandered in their hours of play through the calm green shades of the
park, or sat beneath the stately oak, reading some lighter book than
that appointed for their daily studies. He remembered it all well; and
many an individual day, too, would come forward from the crowd of
early memories, and stand before his eyes bright and distinct as if it
were hardly yet numbered with the past. He could call back even the
feelings of those times, the noble and enthusiastic glow of their
bosoms when they had read together some great actions, some generous
self-devotion, some pious act of friendship, some deed of mighty
patriotism; and now, what had those feelings become? In his brother
they were extinct in death, or, rather, glorifying him in a brighter
world; and with him himself they were but memories; with him it was
the feelings that were dead, while he himself lived but to remember
them. Nor was his a heart to scoff at their memory as some men might
have done. Perhaps, indeed, had his crimes been lighter--had they but
reached the grade of vices--had they been of that character which
man's blind selfishness can dress up in other garbs, and cover beneath
a light robe of wit, or of what we call philosophy, he might have
sneered at the sweet and innocent days that forced themselves upon his
recollection, and have parried all that was painful in them by a jest.
But the terrible, irrevocable, awful deed that he had committed had
been weighty enough, not only to break the elastic spring of gayety in
his heart for ever, but to leave those sweet early hours of guileless
happiness and noble feeling which still flattered him with the thought
that he had not always been base, or cruel, or depraved, the least
painful of all that series of painful things whereof his memory was
alone composed. And yet remorse mingled its poison even with them, and
perhaps rendered the agony they produced on the present occasion more
poignant, because on that point his heart was not hardened to the
lash.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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