Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Eugene Aram — Volume 05 by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton
page 27 of 120 (22%)

"No, no, boy!" said he, drawing away his hand, "Rowland Lester is not the
one to desert a friend in the day of darkness and the hour of need. Be
silent I say!--My brother, my poor brother, you tell me, has been
murdered. I will see justice done to him: but, Aram! Fie! fie! it is a
name that would whisper falsehood to the loudest accusation. Go, Walter!
go! I do not blame you!--you may be right--a murdered father is a dread
and awful memory to a son! What wonder that the thought warps your
judgment? But go! Eugene was to me both a guide and a blessing; a father
in wisdom, a son in love. I cannot look on his accuser's face without
anguish. Go! we shall meet again.--How! Go!"

"Enough, Sir!" said Walter, partly in anger, partly in sorrow--"Time be
the judge between us all!"

With those words he turned from the house, and proceeded on foot towards
a cottage half way between Grassdale and the Magistrate's house, at
which, previous to his return to the former place, he had prudently left
the Corporal--not willing to trust to that person's discretion, as to the
tales and scandal that he might propagate throughout the village on a
matter so painful and so dark.

Let the world wag as it will, there are some tempers which its
vicissitudes never reach. Nothing makes a picture of distress more sad
than the portrait of some individual sitting indifferently looking on in
the back-ground. This was a secret Hogarth knew well. Mark his deathbed
scenes:--Poverty and Vice worked up into horror--and the Physicians in
the corner wrangling for the fee!--or the child playing with the coffin-
-or the nurse filching what fortune, harsh, yet less harsh than humanity,
might have left. In the melancholy depth of humour that steeps both our
DigitalOcean Referral Badge