What Will He Do with It? — Volume 08Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
What Will He Do with It? — Volume 08
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
COMPRISING MANY NEEDFUL EXPLANATIONS ILLUSTRATIVE OF WISE SAWS; AS
FOR EXAMPLE, "HE THAT HATH AN ILL NAME IS HALF HANGED." "HE THAT
HATH BEEN BITTEN BY A SERPENT IS AFRAID OF A ROPE." "HE THAT LOOKS
FOR A STAR PUTS OUT HIS CANDLES;" AND, "WHEN GOD WILLS, ALL WINDS
BRING RAIN."
The reader has been already made aware how, by an impulse of womanhood
and humanity, Arabella Crane had been converted from a persecuting into a
tutelary agent in the destinies of Waife and Sophy. That evolution in
her moral being dated from the evening on which she had sought the
cripple's retreat, to warn him of Jasper's designs. We have seen by what
stratagem she had made it appear that Waife and his grandchild had sailed
beyond the reach of molestation; with what liberality she had advanced
the money that freed Sophy from the manager's claim; and how
considerately she had empowered her agent to give the reference which
secured to Waife the asylum in which we last beheld him. In a few stern
sentences she had acquainted Waife with her fearless inflexible resolve
to associate her fate henceforth with the life of his lawless son; and,
by rendering abortive all his evil projects of plunder, to compel him at
last to depend upon her for an existence neither unsafe nor sordid,
provided only that it were not dishonest. The moment that she revealed
that design, Waife's trust in her was won. His own heart enabled him to
comprehend the effect produced upon a character otherwise unamiable and
rugged, by the grandeur of self-immolation and the absorption of one
devoted heroic thought. In the strength and bitterness of passion which
thus pledged her existence to redeem another's, he obtained the key to
her vehement and jealous nature; saw why she had been so cruel to the
child of a rival; why she had conceived compassion for that child in
proportion as the father's unnatural indifference had quenched the anger
of her own self-love; and, above all, why, as the idea of reclaiming and
appropriating solely to herself the man who, for good or for evil, had
grown into the all-predominant object of her life, gained more and more
the mastery over her mind, it expelled the lesser and the baser passions,
and the old mean revenge against an infant faded away before the light of
that awakening conscience which is often rekindled from ashes by the
sparks of a single better and worthier thought. And in the resolute
design to reclaim Jasper Losely, Arabella came at once to a ground in
common with his father, with his child. Oh what, too, would the old man
owe to her, what would be his gratitude, his joy, if she not only guarded
his spotless Sophy, but saved from the bottomless abyss his guilty son!
Thus when Arabella Crane had, nearly five years before, sought Waife's
discovered hiding-place, near the old bloodstained Tower, mutual
interests and sympathies had formed between them a bond of alliance not
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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