“Are sculpture and poetry thus debased,” he cried, “to perpetuate the memory of a man whose best advantage is to be forgotten; whose no one action merits record, but as an example to be shunned?”
An elderly woman, leaning on her staff, now passed along the lane by the side of the church. The younger Henry accosted her, and ventured to inquire “where the daughters of Mr. Rymer, since his death, were gone to live?”
“We live,” she returned, “in that small cottage across the clover field.”
Henry looked again, and thought he had mistaken the word we; for he felt assured that he had no knowledge of the person to whom he spoke.
But she knew him, and, after a pause, cried—“Ah! Mr. Henry, you are welcome back. I am heartily glad to see you, and my poor sister Rebecca will go out of her wits with joy.”
“Is Rebecca living, and will be glad to see me?” he eagerly asked, while tears of rapture trickled down his face. “Father,” he continued in his ecstasy, “we are now come home to be completely happy; and I feel as if all the years I have been away were but a short week; and as if all the dangers I have passed had been light as air. But is it possible,” he cried to his kind informer, “that you are one of Rebecca’s sisters?”
Well might he ask; for, instead of the blooming woman of seven-and-twenty he had left her, her colour was gone, her teeth impaired, her voice broken. She was near fifty.
“Yes, I am one of Mr. Rymer’s daughters,” she replied.
“But which?” said Henry.
“The eldest, and once called the prettiest,” she returned: “though now people tell me I am altered; yet I cannot say I see it myself.”