CHAPTER II.
Now, Henry Burrel was a great deal too sincere a man, even in his commune with himself, to endeavour by any means to cheat himself into the belief that he was a hero. In short, he had quite sufficient real enthusiasm in his disposition, and quite sufficient contempt for those who affected it without having any, to make him very jealous of letting the portion he did possess appear openly, even before his own eyes; and, in order to correct such propensities, he had got up, as we have shown before, a system of apathetic indifference to every thing that did not affect himself, which, though sometimes run away with by his zeal or his affections, contrived generally to bridle feelings that would otherwise have been somewhat headstrong.
Left alone in a little bed, in a little room in a smuggler's cottage, on the loneliest part of the sea-shore--locked in without being able to set a foot to the ground--without a light----and with a confounded smell of fish pervading the whole atmosphere--his first impulse, as all these minor miseries tickled his imagination one after the other, was to laugh heartily. But the impression lasted but a moment; and, when he thought of the more remote, but more dreadful, circumstances connected by an inseparable link with his temporary situation--the murder of a helpless old man, which he doubted not had been committed--the fearful moral offence which three of his fellow-creatures had perpetrated; and the miserable fate of a youth, in whom he had taken considerable interest--for he had recognized, as we have before hinted, the voice of poor Wat Harrison--when he thought of all these circumstances, his heart smote him for the moment of levity in which he had indulged; and poured out the full tide of its generous and kindly feelings to wash away the fault of that one instant.
He now revolved the matter more seriously; and, as he did so, of course his own situation came again soberly under consideration. That situation was evidently anything but pleasant, for no man could be expected to find his pillow very soft when it was shaken by the hands of a gang of murderers. But Beauchamp was constitutionally a brave man. His impulses were not those of fear; and, though he had a very considerable share of imagination, yet when he wanted to frighten himself about anything, he had to think of it seriously, and call up all the dangers one by one. Now, in the present instance, there were so many unpleasant and perilous points in his position, which he could neither divert nor avoid, that, after a short reflection, he found it would be best and wisest not to think of the danger at all; and, when he had so settled the matter, he found no great difficulty in forgetting it altogether, although with a degree of feverish restlessness he turned and returned in his mind the conversation which he had heard in the adjoining room.
It was evident that Walter Harrison had not told the whole truth to the old man who had given them shelter; and whether it was the smuggler's previous conclusions that had led him to believe the crime, from the consequences of which the young sailor was flying, had been committed in an endeavour to defraud the revenue, or whether by a direct falsehood on the lad's own part, Beauchamp naturally deduced from every thing which he had discovered, that Willy Small, as they called him, would be the first to shrink from the perpetrators of the deeper offence which had really been offered to the laws of God and man. This was, at least, some consolation; and although Beauchamp still felt a sensation of awe and horror when he reflected calmly on the whole transactions of that night, yet his feelings were more like those of one who reads a horrid tale of crime and sorrow in the newspapers, than those of one around whose very person the circumstances had been transacted, and who was in some degree a party to the whole.
Nevertheless, he could not go to sleep over it, with the easy carelessness of one of those daily devourers of manufactured horrors, who join to patronize the periodical press with the devout idolaters of agitation, and who, like men fed upon deviled gizzards, find that nothing on earth has enough cayenne. Whether it was busy thoughts, or a broken head, or an ancle that had been dislocated, that kept him awake, I cannot tell; but he lay in feverish and uneasy restlessness long after all was quiet in the house, and even the murderers had retired--I had almost said--to sleep.
Towards morning, however, exhaustion overcame all, and he slept long and profoundly. How long indeed he did not know, for he had forgot to wind up his watch; but, at all events, he woke refreshed and calm, his headach gone, and the pain of his hurt ancle so much relieved, that he fancied he could do anything, and at once sprang out of bed. He instantly found his mistake; for the moment he attempted to set that foot to the ground, he reeled, and would have fallen but for his hold of the bedstead; and, on examining more closely, he found his leg enormously swelled, and bidding fair, as the smuggler had predicted, to confine him to the house for more than one day. Notwithstanding this discovery, he determined to make his way to the window before any one interrupted him, in order to examine the local, and what was passing without; and by means of the table and the chairs he contrived to effect this purpose.
The scene that presented itself, was one that may be met with about once every three miles along the greater part of the southern and eastern coasts of England--a small sandy bay opening out into the wide blue sea, with two or three high cliffs on either hand, and nothing more. In the present instance, however, an object struck the eyes of Henry Beauchamp, which was not without its peculiar interest. It was a small low-rigged cutter, just making her way out to sea, with a full steady wind, and a press of sail. He looked up to the sky; and as far as he could judge, from the position of the sun, concluded that one or two hours must have passed since noon. At the same time, there was no sound of voices below; a lad was seen mending one of the boats on the shore; and a man, in whom he easily distinguished the old smuggler, was standing on the nearest bank, with a glass to his eye, either watching the progress of the cutter, or examining a vessel that could just be seen hull down in the offing. All seemed to imply, that those who had brought him thither had effected their escape from England; and after gazing out for a moment he returned to his bedside, and proceeded to dress himself as well as he could. The gentleman who threaded the Dædalion labyrinth, and slew Mrs. Pasephae's illegitimate son at the end of it, had not half such a piece of work of it, as Henry Beauchamp had, to get into his clothes. It is wonderful how much more use one makes of one's foot even in dressing oneself, than one knows anything about; and what would have come of it in the present instance, can hardly be divined, had it not so happened that, after Beauchamp had struggled with innumerable difficulties for nearly half an hour, the old smuggler presented himself as a somewhat rude valet-de-chambre, and saved his guest from martyrdom.
The old man, in his quality of surgeon, blamed Beauchamp highly for getting up at all; and, pointing out the swelled state of his ancle, declared that he would only let him remain up, on condition that he would keep it raised upon a chair during the rest of the day.
Beauchamp was perhaps a little irritable with the contention he had just gone through with various parts of his apparel; and consequently, seating himself calmly on the nearest chair, he informed the old man, in a cool determined tone, that it was his intention immediately to proceed to Dorchester, which, as far as he could calculate, was the nearest large town. He was met by the smuggler, however, in a way that he did not expect, and this, of course, gave a sudden change to the current of his feelings. Instead of telling him that he could not go, or that he should not go, or any of those things which would have rendered him more determined than ever, the old man replied in a civil tone:--"Well, sir, you can do as you like; but I don't see how you can manage it to-night, for it is now near four--Dorchester's twenty miles off; and even were I to send for a shay, it can't come down within two mile of this place--cause there is no road."