The Purcell Papers — Volume 2Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
Science
The Purcell Papers — Volume 2
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
Fantasy fiction, English; Ireland -- Fiction
With the particulars of Sir Arthur's and his son's escape, as far as
they are known, you are acquainted. You are also in possession of their
after fate--the terrible, the tremendous retribution which, after long
delays of many years, finally overtook and crushed them. Wonderful and
inscrutable are the dealings of God with His creatures.
Deep and fervent as must always be my gratitude to heaven for my
deliverance, effected by a chain of providential occurrences, the
failing of a single link of which must have ensured my destruction, I
was long before I could look back upon it with other feelings than those
of bitterness, almost of agony.
The only being that had ever really loved me, my nearest and dearest
friend, ever ready to sympathise, to counsel, and to assist--the gayest,
the gentlest, the warmest heart--the only creature on earth that cared
for me--HER life had been the price of my deliverance; and I then
uttered the wish, which no event of my long and sorrowful life has
taught me to recall, that she had been spared, and that, in her stead,
_I_ were mouldering in the grave, forgotten and at rest.
THE BRIDAL OF CARRIGVARAH.
Being a Sixth Extract from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell, P. P.
of Drumcoolagh.
In a sequestered district of the county of Limerick, there stood my
early life, some forty years ago, one of those strong stone buildings,
half castle, half farm-house, which are not unfrequent in the South of
Ireland, and whose solid masonry and massive construction seem to prove
at once the insecurity and the caution of the Cromwellite settlers who
erected them. At the time of which I speak, this building was tenanted
by an elderly man, whose starch and puritanic mien and manners might
have become the morose preaching parliamentarian captain, who had raised
the house and ruled the household more than a hundred years before;
but this man, though Protestant by descent as by name, was not so in
religion; he was a strict, and in outward observances, an exemplary
Catholic; his father had returned in early youth to the true faith, and
died in the bosom of the church.
Martin Heathcote was, at the time of which I speak, a widower, but his
house-keeping was not on that account altogether solitary, for he had a
daughter, whose age was now sufficiently advanced to warrant her father
in imposing upon her the grave duties of domestic superintendence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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