"And so de shamwally is hung at last! serbe him right; and I hopes it did him good; an' I wish it was my lordship an' de whited salt- peter along ob him!" she said, folding her arms ever her fat bosom and rolling herself from side to side with infinite satisfaction.
"For shame, Katie, to triumph so over a dead man! I should have thought a good Christian woman like you would have prayed for him before he died," said Claudia gravely.
"'Deed didn't I! An' I aint gwine to do it nuther. I aint gwine to bother my Hebbenly Master 'bout no sich grand vilyan! dere now!"
"Oh, Katie, Katie, I am afraid you are a great heathen!"
"Well, den, I just ruther be a heathen dan a whited salt-peter, or a shamwally, or a lordship either, if I couldn't do no more credit to it dan some," said Katie, having, as usual, the last word.
Claudia longed to be alone on this night; so she soon dismissed her attendants, closed up her room, put out all her lights, and lay down in darkness, solitude, and meditation.
Strange! but on this night her thoughts, and even her sympathies, were with Lord Vincent in his prison cell. Why should she think of him? Why should she pity him? She had never loved him, never even fancied that she loved him, even in the delusive days of courtship; or in the early days of marriage; and she had despised and shunned him in the miserable days of their estranged life at Castle Cragg. Why, then, as she lay there in the darkness, silence, and solitude of her own chamber, should her imagination hover over him? Why did she contemplate him in sorrow and in compassion?
Because in that dreary cell she saw the twofold man—the man that he ought to have been, and the man that he was; because she was his wife, and though she had never loved him, yet with better treatment she might have been won to do so; and finally, because she was a woman, and therefore full of sympathy with every sort of suffering.
She knew that the dying confession of Frisbie would seal Lord Vincent's fate. And she contemplated that fate as she had never done before.
Penal servitude.