The Royal Regiment, and Other NovelettesGrant, James
History
The Royal Regiment, and Other Novelettes
Grant, James
Scotland -- Fiction; Scotland -- History, Military -- Fiction
And in that book, safe and dry, were the lost will and certificate of
marriage.
"But, oh," moaned the lad, when he had told his mother this startling
occurrence, as he sank half sick upon her breast, "if that was poor
papa I saw, he came from his grave in the sea, mamma, with those
papers for you!"
But the body was soon known to be that of a channel pilot.
Ere the end of that week Basset Tresilian had to change his tone, and
Diana and her sons took legal steps to make her the mistress and them
the masters of Restormel Court. So autumn drew towards winter; but
ere the sad widow quitted Carn Spern, one night a carriage drew up, a
man alighted, full of bustle and excitement; a well-known voice was
heard, and Arthur Tresilian, the elder, was clasped in the arms of
his half-fainting wife.
Washed overboard from the steamer, he had been picked up by a vessel
bound for Cuba; his coat had been donned by the pilot, so there was
an end of all the sorrow and mystery.
THE STUDENT'S STORY.
It is a ghastly tale I have to tell, in some respects; but so far as
regards its close, I have some reason to congratulate myself, and to
feel, that "All is well that ends well."
It is almost an old story now, though I was an actor in it; but the
world is ever reproducing itself in some form or fashion. Was there
not an instance, in the August of 1870, of a resurrection taking
place at Harrington, when all that quiet locality was startled from
its propriety by the discovery of a body cast in its shroud beside
its grave, which had been violated to procure the jewellery with
which the deceased had been interred? My adventure, however, refers
to the regular old "body-snatching" times, before unclaimed subjects
were supplied to the anatomical theatres from our public hospitals,
and when houseless ruffians of the lowest and vilest type made a
livelihood by their loathsome and almost nameless trade.
I had graduated at the great medical school of Edinburgh, after a
hard tussle with Hunter and Fyfe's Anatomies, Bell on the Bones, the
cell theories of Schwan, and even grappling with some of the abstruse
and now exploded speculations of Gall and Spurzheim. I had mastered
all; I had been solemnly "capped" in the old Academia Jacobi VI.
Regis Scotorum, by the Reverend Principal L---- (now in his grave); I
had undergone all the jollity of the graduation dinner, and with
_Frederick Mortimer, M.D._, duly figuring on my portmanteau, found
myself, with my college chum, Bob Asher (who, by the way, had _not_
passed), sailing from the harbour of Leith for London, in the Royal
Adelaide, one of the only two steamers which then plied between these
ports.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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