“Hurrah!” cried the murderer, leaping
from his hiding place, and walking with rapid strides
towards his victim, “hurrah! for liberty and
England!”
Scarce had he uttered those prostituted names, before
the triumph of misguided zeal faded suddenly and forever
from his brow and soul.
The wounded man leaned back in the supporting arms
of his chilled and horror-stricken friend; who, kneeling
on one knee to support him, fixed his eager eyes upon
the pale and changing countenance of his burden, unconscious
of the presence of the assassin.
“Speak, Mordaunt; speak! how is it with you?”
he said. Recalled from his torpor by the voice,
Mordaunt opened his eyes, and muttering, “My
child, my child,” sank back again; and Lord Ulswater
(for it was he) felt, by his increased weight, that
death was hastening rapidly on its victim.
“Oh!” said he, bitterly, and recalling
their last conversation—“oh! where,
where, when this man—the wise, the kind,
the innocent, almost the perfect—falls
thus in the very prime of existence, by a sudden blow
from an obscure hand, unblest in life, inglorious in
death,—oh! where, where is this boasted
triumph of Virtue, or where is its reward?”
True to his idol at the last, as these words fell
upon his dizzy and receding senses, Mordaunt raised
himself by a sudden though momentary exertion, and,
fixing his eyes full upon Lord Ulswater, his moving
lips (for his voice was already gone) seemed to shape
out the answer, “It is here!”
With this last effort, and with an expression upon
his aspect which seemed at once to soften and to hallow
the haughty and calm character which in life it was
wont to bear, Algernon Mordaunt fell once more back
into the arms of his companion and immediately expired.
Come, Death, these are thy victims,
and the axe
Waits those who claimed the chariot.—Thus
we count
Our treasures in the dark, and when the light
Breaks on the cheated eye, we find the coin
Was skulls—
. . . . . .
Yet the while
Fate links strange contrasts, and the scaffold’s
gloom
Is neighboured by the altar.—Anonymous.
When Crauford’s guilt and imprisonment became
known; when inquiry developed, day after day, some
new maze in the mighty and intricate machinery of
his sublime dishonesty; when houses of the most reputed
wealth and profuse splendour, whose affairs Crauford
had transacted, were discovered to have been for years
utterly undermined and beggared, and only supported
by the extraordinary genius of the individual by whose
extraordinary guilt, now no longer concealed, they
were suddenly and irretrievably destroyed; when it
was ascertained that, for nearly the fifth part of
a century, a system of villany had been carried on
throughout Europe, in a thousand different relations,
without a single breath of suspicion, and yet which
