"I have told you now the whole history, from first to last. I need not ask you to forgive my having kept it secret from you so long."
"Why should you ask me? Every man has a right to his own secrets, and I like him the better for keeping them. Vinal, at all events, had good cause to thank you."
"He is dead; and his memory, if it will, had better die with him."
"You said in your letter that his agent was called Henry Speyer. I thought, at the time, that I had seen the name before; and a day or two since, I found it accidentally again. The newspapers, two months or more ago, mention a foreigner called Henry Speyer as an officer in this last piratical forray into Cuba. His party lost their way, fell into an ambuscade of government soldiers, and Speyer was shot through the head."
"He found a better end than his principal."
"And deserved a better one. A professed rascal is better than a pharisee."
CHAPTER LXXIV.
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The rainbow to the storms of life; The evening beam that smiles the clouds away.—Bride of Abydos. |
Morton rode along the edge of the lake at Matherton. He passed under the shadowy verdure of the pines, and approached the old family mansion of the Leslies. It was years since he had seen it. His imprisonment, his escape, his dreary greeting home, all lay between. He was the same man, yet different;—with a mind calmed by experience, and strong by action and endurance; an ardor which had lost all of its intoxication, but none of its force; and which, as the past and the present rose upon his thoughts, was tempered with a melancholy which had in it nothing of pain.