The Lazy Tour of Two Idle ApprenticesDickens, Charles
General
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
Dickens, Charles
Apprentices -- Fiction; Cumbria (England) -- Description and travel -- Fiction; Walking -- England -- Cumbria -- Fiction
I returned to the Inn at eight o’clock, purposely abstaining from waking
Arthur, who was sleeping off the past night’s excitement on one of my
friend’s sofas. A suspicion had occurred to me as soon as I was alone in
my bedroom, which made me resolve that Holliday and the stranger whose
life he had saved should not meet again, if I could prevent it. I have
already alluded to certain reports, or scandals, which I knew of,
relating to the early life of Arthur’s father. While I was thinking, in
my bed, of what had passed at the Inn—of the change in the student’s
pulse when he heard the name of Holliday; of the resemblance of
expression that I had discovered between his face and Arthur’s; of the
emphasis he had laid on those three words, ‘my own brother;’ and of his
incomprehensible acknowledgment of his own illegitimacy—while I was
thinking of these things, the reports I have mentioned suddenly flew into
my mind, and linked themselves fast to the chain of my previous
reflections. Something within me whispered, ‘It is best that those two
young men should not meet again.’ I felt it before I slept; I felt it
when I woke; and I went, as I told you, alone to the Inn the next
morning.
I had missed my only opportunity of seeing my nameless patient again. He
had been gone nearly an hour when I inquired for him.
* * * * *
I have now told you everything that I know for certain, in relation to
the man whom I brought back to life in the double-bedded room of the Inn
at Doncaster. What I have next to add is matter for inference and
surmise, and is not, strictly speaking, matter of fact.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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