Unheard-of tortures are reserved
For murderers of themselves. They herd together:
The common damn'd shun their society,
As fiends too foul for converse."
Dreadful as is this resolve, she puts it in execution by bribing the servant of her father to procure her a dose of laudanum. Close to the vial, which lies on the floor, Hogarth has judiciously placed Counsellor Silvertongue's last dying speech, thus intimating that he also has suffered the punishment he justly merited.[23] The records of their fate being thus situated, seems to imply, that as they were united in vice, they are companions in the consequences. These two terrific and monitory testimonies are a kind of propitiatory sacrifice to the manes of her injured and murdered lord.
Her avaricious father, seeing his daughter at the point of death, and knowing the value of her diamond ring, determined to secure this glittering gem from the depredations of the old nurse, coolly draws it from her finger. This little circumstance shows a prominent feature of his mind. Every sense of feeling absorbed in extreme avarice, he seems at this moment calculating how many carats the brilliants weigh.
From a gown hung up near the clock we know him to be an alderman; and from his sleek appearance, we have some right to infer that he is constant in his attendance at city feasts, for so comely a countenance could never be supported by the scanty and meagre viands of his own table. His domestic care is intimated by the gaunt and hungry appearance of a dog, who, taking advantage of this general confusion, seizes the brawn's head.[24]
A rickety child, heir to the complaints of its father, shows some tenderness for its expiring mother; and the grievous whine of an old nurse is most admirably described. These are the only two of the party who exhibit any marks of sorrow for the death of our wretched Countess. The smug apothecary, indeed, displays some symptoms of vexation at his patient dying before she has taken his julap, the label of which hangs out of his pocket. Her constitution, though impaired by grief, promised to have lasted long enough for him to have marked many additional dittos in his day-book. Pointing to the dying speech, he threatens the terrified footboy with a punishment similar to that of the Counsellor for having bought the laudanum. The fellow protests his innocence, and promises never more to be guilty of a like offence. The effects of fear on an ignorant rustic cannot be better delineated; nor is it easy to conceive a more ludicrous figure than this awkward retainer, dressed in an old full-trimmed coat, which in its better days had been the property of his master. By the physician retreating, we are led to conceive that, finding his patient had dared to quit the world in an irregular way, neither abiding by his prescriptions nor waiting for his permission, he cast an indignant frown on all present, and exclaimed in style heroic,
" 'Fellow, our hat!'—no more he deign'd to say,
But stern as Ajax' spectre, stalk'd away."