“O Lord!” said the latter, stepping forth,
and throwing, as it were, in that exclamation, a whole
weight of suffocating emotion from his chest, “what
bloody miscreants! Murder his Majesty’s
ministers!— ‘shoot them like pigeons!’—’d—d
pretty shot!’ indeed. O Lord! what would
the late Lady Waddilove, who always hated even the
Whigs so cordially, say, if she were alive?
But how providential that I should have been here!
Who knows but I may save the lives of the whole administration,
and get a pension or a little place in the post-office?
I’ll go to the prime minister directly,—this
very minute! Pish! ar’n’t you right
now, you cursed thing?” upbraiding the umbrella,
which, half-right and half-wrong, seemed endued with
an instinctive obstinacy for the sole purpose of tormenting
its owner.
However, losing this petty affliction in the greatness
of his present determination, Mr. Brown issued out
of his lair, and hastened to put his benevolent and
loyal intentions into effect.
When laurelled ruffians die,
the Heaven and Earth,
And the deep Air give warning.
Shall the good
Perish and not a sign?—Anonymous.
It was the evening after the event recorded in our
last chapter: all was hushed and dark in the
room where Mordaunt sat alone; the low and falling
embers burned dull in the grate, and through the unclosed
windows the high stars rode pale and wan in their career.
The room, situated at the back of the house, looked
over a small garden, where the sickly and hoar shrubs,
overshadowed by a few wintry poplars and grim firs,
saddened in the dense atmosphere of fog and smoke,
which broods over our island city. An air of
gloom hung comfortless and chilling over the whole
scene externally and within. The room itself
was large and old, and its far extremities, mantled
as they were with dusk and shadow, impressed upon
the mind that involuntary and vague sensation, not
altogether unmixed with awe, which the eye, resting
upon a view that it can but dimly and confusedly define,
so frequently communicates to the heart. There
was a strange oppression at Mordaunt’s breast
with which he in vain endeavoured to contend.
Ever and anon, an icy but passing chill, like the
shivers of a fever, shot through his veins, and a
wild and unearthly and objectless awe stirred through
his hair, and his eyes filled with a glassy and cold
dew, and sought, as by a self-impulse, the shadowy
and unpenetrated places around, which momently grew
darker and darker. Little addicted by his peculiar
habits to an over-indulgence of the imagination, and
still less accustomed to those absolute conquests
of the physical frame over the mental, which seem
the usual sources of that feeling we call presentiment,
Mordaunt rose, and walking to and fro along the room,
endeavoured by the exercise to restore to his veins
their wonted and healthful circulation. It was
