Lorenzo dismounted, and throwing open the door, Louis leaped out, and taking Cornelia in his arms, who was almost fainting from exhaustion, he carried her out of the reach of the wheels and refractory horses. One of the servants approached him at the moment, and told him the accident was occasioned by the breast of one of the leaders striking against the angle of a stone-hovel. It was a miserable, uninhabited shed; but might give some shelter to Miss Coningsby, till they saw what could be done with the carriage.
Revived at hearing of any refuge from the fury of the elements, Cornelia exerted herself to obey the suggestions of the servant; and Louis, equally glad of so providential a shelter, supported her tottering steps through the muddy ground. The hovel appeared of considerable extent, from the length of wall they had to grope along, before they reached the entrance, for door it had none. Louis bent under the low rafter, and leading Cornelia in, found his way obstructed by heaps of dried turf. On one of these heaps, she proposed seating herself, till her cousin had enquired after the injury of the horse, and given his judgment on what was best to be done for the extrication of the carriage.
Louis knew her too well, to fear that solitude and darkness alone could create any alarm in her mind; and, having seen her harassed spirits a little revived by the comparative security of the place, he had just consented to quit her for a short time, when Lorenzo re-entered with a glimmering lamp he had rescued from the carriage. All the others had been extinguished in succession, by the storm; and this was following their fate, when the prompt Italian seized it from its hook, and brought it in to light a few turfs, and warm Cornelia.
She took it, and dismissing her cousin and Lorenzo to their exertions without, with her own unpractised hands, she gathered some of the moor-fuel into a distant corner from the rest, and soon spread a cheering light and glow through the dreary habitation. Lorenzo ran in with a flask of oil from one of the postillions' pockets, to replenish her lamp; and he answered her anxious enquiries, by saying, that the wounded horse was loosened from the harness, and his master was then examining the injury. After this information, he left her.
While the group without, were raising the carriage from the bog into which it appeared to sink the deeper after every attempt at extrication, Cornelia sat, anxiously attending to their alternate voices of hope, and the disappointing plunges of the vehicle into the treacherous soil. In the midst of this solicitude, she thought she heard sounds of another import; and listening, found they were repeated low and heavily, as from one in a dying extremity. She turned her head in the direction whence they came; and, as she held her breath to hear more distinctly, the moans became louder, and drew her eye to a narrow door-way in the side of the intermediate mud-wall, at some distance from where she sat.— Without once considering there might be danger to herself, in exposing herself alone to the human being, or beings, she might find there, she thought only of succouring the distress those sounds indicated; and taking up her lamp, made her way over the scattered turf, to the miserable half-shut door.
It let her into a part of the hovel, even more dismal than the one she had left; for here was the confusion and stench of old worm-eaten sheep-skins; broken tar-tubs; and other implements of the shepherd's life, lying about in rust and disorder. In the middle of the apartment, something dark was spread on the floor. From that wretched bed the moans proceeded. Probably the poor tenant of this lonely sheep-cote, lay perishing there, under the toil of his occupation; without the support of necessary nourishment, or the comfort of a companion to soothe him in the last moments of over-tasked nature! She stepped gently towards the object of her pity. As she drew near, she saw the bed was a heap of these dingy fleeces, half covered with a cloak, on which lay the suffering person.
Cornelia bent over it; and holding the lamp, so as to distinguish what was beneath, beheld, not the squallid shape of poverty and comfortless old age, but a man in the garb of a gentleman, and with one of the noblest forms that ever met her sight. His dress was disordered, and clotted with the slime of the morass; but his figure, whose contour she thought she had never seen equalled, needed no embellishment to shew its consummate elegance, though now motionless in the torpor of approaching death.
Cornelia's astonishment was not so great as to supersede the active exercise of the benevolence which brought her to his side. She bent down, and placing the lamp on the ground, with her trembling hands attempted to turn the face of the dying person, from the stifling wool in which it was now sunk. When she had accomplished what she wished, her pitying admiration was not less attracted to that face, than it had been to the figure of the unhappy sufferer. It was as pale and motionless as marble; and as perfect in every line of manly lineament, as the finest statue that ever lay under the chizel of the sculptor. A majesty, almost more than human, was stampt in the brow, on which her eyes were rivetted.
A deep groan broke the fixture of his lips. It was that of pain; and she took up the lamp, to see if she could find its immediate cause. She then saw that where his waistcoat was open, the linen on his breast was stained and stiff with blood. His before tranquil features, which had appeared fixed in death, were agitated by an evident sense of acute suffering. She put her hand upon that part of his linen, where the blood-stain was the widest, and in the act, she thought she felt a gaping wound. He shrunk under the touch, and convulsively opened his eyes. They were shut as suddenly, and in a low voice, he hardly articulated—
"Where am I?"