This man had stood before me, with all his god-like beauty but a few days past! Methought I yet saw that mantling blush, and the fine expressive curve of that quivering lip!
Feeling the tears again rushing to my eyes, I ran out of the room.
When I returned to the drawing-room, Lord Worcester was sitting in a very melancholy attitude, leaning on his hand.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked.
"Why, I was considering, suppose it were my next turn to be cut off thus suddenly in the flower of my youth, that I should not like it!"
There was something so very comical and natural about what Worcester said that, melancholy as I was, and little as his speech seems of the risible kind, it certainly much amused me for an instant.
His lordship looked at me in surprise, and declared that he was astonished at my want of feeling.
I assured him, with truth, that I had been most particularly shocked by Will Haught's account of the young soldier's death.
The man, as I learned from Worcester, while in the stable two days after we had seen him, complained of a pain in his head, and applied for leave to go immediately to the hospital. From his unusual paleness he was admitted at once. Worcester visited him on the following evening, and found him raging under the influence of a brain fever. The muscles and veins of his finely turned throat were all swollen, every nerve was agitated, and his heart and pulse were beating so violently, that the former was visible at a distance. The man, one might have fancied, was endued with a double portion of life, energy, and animal strength. His late pale cheek was now flushed with a bright crimson glow, and the disorder of his fine, dark, auburn ringlets seemed but to increase that beauty which could not easily be disfigured. As the poor young maniac struggled and wrestled in the arms of the men, who vainly endeavoured to confine him by means of a strait waistcoat, he offered some of the finest models for the statuary's art which could well be conceived. His beauty, as I have been told by several who witnessed this poor youth in his last moments, acquired a character of more sublimity from the disorder of his brain; and all that supernatural, glowing ardour, that immense bodily strength,—the youthful fire of that sweet countenance—the eye which flashed such wild indignation on his tormentors—that frame, like quicksilver, sensitive in every nerve and fibre—the boiling blood rushing through those veins—all this was to become a mass of cold senseless clay before the next revolving sun!