CHAPTER XXVII. THE KNIGHT'S RETURN
We must now for a brief space, return to the Knight, as with a heavy heart he journeyed homeward. Never did the long miles seem so wearisome before, often and often as he had travelled them. The little accidental delays, which once he had met with a ready jest, and in a spirit of kindly indulgence, he now resented as so many intentional insults upon his changed and ruined fortune. The gossiping landlords, to whom he had ever extended so much of freedom, he either acknowledged coldly, or repelled with distance; their liberties were now construed into want of deference and respect; the very jestings of the postboys to each other seemed so many covert impertinences, and equivocal allusions to himself; for even so much will the stroke of sudden misfortune change the nature, and convert the contented and happy spirit into a temperament of gloomy sorrow and suspicion.
Unconscious of his own altered feelings, and looking at every object through the dim light of his own calamity, he hurried along, not, as of old, recognizing each well-known face, saluting this one, inquiring after that; he sat back in his carriage, and, with his hat drawn almost over his eyes, neither noticed the way nor the wayfarers.
In this mood it was he entered Castlebar. The sight of his well-remembered carriage drew crowds of beggars to the door of the inn, every one of whom had some special prayer for aid, or some narrative of sickness for his hearing. By the time the horses drew up, the crowd numbered some hundreds of every variety, not only in age, but in raggedness, all eagerly calling on him by name, and imploring his protection on grounds the most strange and dissimilar.
“I knew the sound of the wheels; ax Biddy if I did n't say it was his honor was coming!” cried one, in a sort of aside intended for the Knight himself.
“Ye 're welcome home, sir; long may you reign over us,” said an old fellow with a beard like a pilgrim. “I dreamed I seen you last night standing at the door there, wid a half-crown in your fingers. 'Ouid Luke,' says you, 'come here!——'”
A burst of rude laughter drowned this sage parable, while a good-looking young woman, with an expression of softness in features degraded by poverty and its consequences, courtesied low, and tried to attract his notice, as she held up a miserable-looking infant to the carriage window. “Clap them, acushla! 't is proud he is to see you back again, sir; he never forgets the goold guinea ye gave him on New Year's Day! Don't be pushin' that way, you rude cray-tures; you want to hurt the child, and it's the image of his honor.”
“Many returns of the blessed sason to you,” growled out a creature in a bonnet, but in face and figure far more like a man than a woman; “throw us out a fippenny to buy two ounces of tay. Asy, asy; don't be drivin' me under the wheels—ugh! it's no place for a faymale, among such rapscallions.”
“What did they give you, Maurice? how much did you get, honey?” cried a tall and almost naked fellow, that leaned over the heads of several others, and put his face close to the glass of the carriage, which, for safety's sake, the Knight now let down, while he called aloud to the postboys to make haste and bring out the horses.