"Come here to me, my dear! You are a good, virtuous girl, and deserve to be taken care of. The coach will go in a quarter of an hour, and my son, Will, shall go with you on the top, to see that no harm comes to you. There's the picture, my dear--we don't want it; and as for the gentleman, he had better budge, for if my husband had heard all that I have heard, he would have leathered his jacket."
Lieberg gazed at her for a moment, with a look of calm scorn, for his self-possession had been restored in a moment.
"My good woman," he said, "you are a very foolish person; and, if you meddle in this way, with things that don't concern you, you will burn your fingers some day. Miss Barham, we shall meet again, when you will think differently."
"Never!" said Helen; and Lieberg, without more reply, quitted the room, and ordered his horse over to the other inn.
"Feed him," he said, to the hostler who took him, "and bring him round as soon as he is ready."
He then called for a private room, and buried his eyes in his hands till the sound of a coach setting out from the office opposite made him look up. Then biting his lip, without any other gesticulation, he muttered--"Curses upon it all!"
CHAPTER XXIX.
In passing through life we must have remarked, not only that the satirical maxim of La Rochefoucauld is true, with a great number of people, in regard to the pleasures that they derive from the misfortunes of their friends, but that the general world contrives to extract an infinite quantity of amusement, delight, and satisfaction from all the evils that are going on throughout the universe. What a fund of pleasant excitement is there to the minds of many, in that column of a newspaper, headed "Accidents and Offences." What gratification to multitudes in a child being scalded to death, a house being burnt down, a retired tradesman, in a solitary cottage, undergoing the process of murder! And such is the joy and delight the great mass of mankind in crime and sorrow, that I do really believe, if any person could invent an unheard-of iniquity, or contrive to die some unknown kind of death, not only would rags of his clothes be kept as relics, locks of his hair preserved in lockets, or the rope that hanged him be sold at a guinea an inch, but a very handsome subscription might be gathered, to raise a statue to him, as the man who furnished the public with a new kind of excitement.
Fie upon it! The morbid taste for stimulating things, that habitual drunkenness of the mind, which is increasing day by day more and more throughout the whole world, excluding the sane, the simple, and the just, must end in moral death--the sad, worn-out, apathetic death of the spirit drinker. On my life, I have a great inclination to shake hands with Father Mathew, and preach a mental teetotalism!
The prevailing spirit, the love of excitement, which is in every human being, was not wanting even amongst the quiet fields and villages around Yelverly; and the news of that famous burglary having spread far and wide, the retired house of Mr. Carr became an object of attention and visitation, for all the places in the neighbourhood. Magistrates flocked in, farmers and yeomen made their appearance, constables, from every place in the vicinity, travelled thither without loss of time; and though many a one winked the eye and laughed at Old Carr's misfortune, the general pleasure derived by the multitude from an extensive robbery in that part of the country was of the higher and more interesting kind called excitement.