sons, mothers and daughters, women with children in
their arms and babies at their breasts, and drank until
they died. While some stooped with their lips
to the brink and never raised their heads again, others
sprang up from their fiery draught, and danced, half
in a mad triumph, and half in the agony of suffocation,
until they fell, and steeped their corpses in the liquor
that had killed them. Nor was even this the worst
or most appalling kind of death that happened on this
fatal night. From the burning cellars, where they
drank out of hats, pails, buckets, tubs, and shoes,
some men were drawn, alive, but all alight from head
to foot; who, in their unendurable anguish and suffering,
making for anything that had the look of water, rolled,
hissing, in this hideous lake, and splashed up liquid
fire which lapped in all it met with as it ran along
the surface, and neither spared the living nor the
dead. On this last night of the great riots—for
the last night it was—the wretched victims
of a senseless outcry, became themselves the dust
and ashes of the flames they had kindled, and strewed
the public streets of London.
With all he saw in this last glance fixed indelibly
upon his mind, Barnaby hurried from the city which
enclosed such horrors; and holding down his head that
he might not even see the glare of the fires upon the
quiet landscape, was soon in the still country roads.
He stopped at about half-a-mile from the shed where
his father lay, and with some difficulty making Hugh
sensible that he must dismount, sunk the horse’s
furniture in a pool of stagnant water, and turned the
animal loose. That done, he supported his companion
as well as he could, and led him slowly forward.
It was the dead of night, and very dark, when Barnaby,
with his stumbling comrade, approached the place where
he had left his father; but he could see him stealing
away into the gloom, distrustful even of him, and
rapidly retreating. After calling to him twice
or thrice that there was nothing to fear, but without
effect, he suffered Hugh to sink upon the ground,
and followed to bring him back.
He continued to creep away, until Barnaby was close
upon him; then turned, and said in a terrible, though
suppressed voice:
’Let me go. Do not lay hands upon me.
You have told her; and you and she together have betrayed
me!’
Barnaby looked at him, in silence.
‘You have seen your mother!’
‘No,’ cried Barnaby, eagerly. ’Not
for a long time—longer than I can tell.
A whole year, I think. Is she here?’
His father looked upon him steadfastly for a few moments,
and then said—drawing nearer to him as
he spoke, for, seeing his face, and hearing his words,
it was impossible to doubt his truth:
’Hugh—Hugh. Only Hugh.
You know him. He will not harm you.
Why, you’re afraid of Hugh! Ha ha ha!
Afraid of gruff, old, noisy Hugh!’
