My Aunt Julietta will never forget that day, when the shabby, battered-looking transport steamed in slowly to the Dockyard quayside, and the bugle blew, and the gangways opened, and the ragged, hairy men—not a vestige of uniform remaining on the backs of nineteen out of twenty of them—began to march, or limp, or halt, or hobble ashore by companies, as the band that had come to meet them struck up “Home, Sweet Home.” And Captain Goliath McCreedy was not seen amongst them—and in her bitter distress and disappointment my Aunt ran up crying to a thin, ragged maypole of an officer with a long red beard—he would have called it a “bird”—reaching down to his middle. She meant to ask him where her husband was?—but her sobs prevented the words from coming. And the lean, red-haired giant shouted, “Juley! don’t ye know me?” and caught her in a huge embrace....
There was a Triumph in Paris and there were rejoicings in London, including a Service of Thanksgiving at St. Paul’s. All the Bigwigs and Nobs attended in state, and Cowell, Powell, Dowell, Bowell, Crowell, Towell, Rowell, and the rest of the fraternity, were present; and gave thanks behind their shining hats with ostentatious devoutness. It would have been a peculiarly appropriate season for a National Fast, and a Litany, with special clauses having reference to Cabbaging, but nobody seems to have thought of that.
Though that lamentable public spirit of distrust of the Army Contractor—instilled into the national bosom by the malignant demon Tussell, was never to be exorcised—has not been laid unto this hour.... And a day was to dawn when the crowned Imperial charlatan who had made France his mistress and his slave, was to see Great Britain—awake at last, if only in part, to the truth that she herself had been his dupe and victim—stand by with white arms folded over those old ineffaceable bosom-scars of 1854-56; while he whom she had befriended, believed in, championed—for whom her sons had been offered up in hecatombs of slaughter, wallowed in the dust, a fallen Power.
Not a single taunt, O my England! not the shadow of a smile of contemptuous pity; only the stern silence, the grave, immovable regard, and the arms folded over the bosom marred by those old, old cruel scars of The Crimea. But, if his hidden hate of her long years before had amounted to obsession, judge to what a pitch of secret frenzy it was wrought when she afforded him, an exile, refuge from the well-earned vengeance of those whom he had ruled and ruined—a roof to shelter his disgraced and humbled head.
CV
In April, 1910, a radiant celestial traveler, with flaming silvery hair, came rushing back out of the inconceivable, immeasurable spaces that lie beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, drawn by that strange mysterious need that impels it—at the close of each successive period of eighty to eighty-five years—to revisit the dim glimpses of this speck of Earth, where once the Supreme Architect of the Universe dwelt, a poor man amongst men—and make its transit of the cooling sun, before it passes into the Southern Hemisphere, beyond the reach of the astronomer’s lens, pursuing the path appointed it to follow towards the unknown end....
In the opal dawn of mornings in late April it gleamed, a pale and sinister radiance under the white knee of the waning moon. In May it made a luminous streak of whiteness in the north-west after sunset, where an unknown comet had hung in the February of the year.
That strange new comet of February, and now this.... Old Hector Dunoisse was vaguely uneasy as he gazed at the dazzling-pale wonder. Did it presage some great approaching misfortune? Some visitations of War, or pestilence, or famine? Some cataclysmic disaster, such as the earthquake of Messina? Some great irreparable loss to the world in the sweeping away, by one swift stroke of the Death Angel’s sword, of some lofty, notable, familiar figure of man or woman, raised in virtue of high gifts, or lofty deeds, or elevated ranks above the heads of the rest?....