“The thing was very simple, and he was not long about it. When we got to the prison, at the instant when they opened the door, he unceremoniously seized the sentinel’s gun; he twisted it round like the sails of a windmill, and threw down three-fourths of our number flat on our backs. I immediately rushed upon him; together with the rest who were still on their legs, and you see”—here he exhibited his exterior, including his black and swollen eye—“what I got by it. After having nearly felled me by putting his doubled fist into my eye, he seized me by the skin, and threw me, like a bundle of old clothes, on the top of my comrades. We were all left rolling pell-mell together; and, when I got up, I saw that demon already landed on the other side of the river. The guard came out and fired more than thirty musket-shots at him while he was climbing up the bank; but, bless me! they might just as well have dusted his back with pepper and salt. The bullets were flattened without hurting him.”
“The thing is prodigious!”
“After he got to the other side of the river, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he burrowed into the ground, whilst others declare that he took flight with a couple of great black wings that suddenly grew out of his sides and unfolded wide. The soldiers belonging to the guard will have it that he laid hold of a horse that was grazing there, that he jumped on its back, and set off at full gallop.”
LANGTHWAITE.
Langthwaite was in a state of excitement; its morals were perturbed, and its ideas confused; its old landmarks were being swept away, and it did not approve of its new landmarks. Langthwaite notions were being assaulted, and Langthwaite’s morality was put to shame. Madame Floriani, the Italian widow, had dared to defy the authority and disturb the influence of Mr. Bentley, the young incumbent. Was Langthwaite to be ruled over by a strange woman who introduced foreign customs, and upset the existing institutions, or was its government to be a virtuous hierarchy as before? Was the cousin of a dean, or the widow of an Italian count, to be considered the first personage of the vale? This grave question was what Langthwaite was called on to decide; and the quiet valley in the heart of the mountains lashed itself into a state of perturbation, strongly suggestive of the famous tempest that was brewed in a teapot.
The origin of the evil was this:—
When old Jacob White the miser, who built Whitefield House of stone and marble, and furnished it with painted deal and calico—died, he left all his wealth to a certain niece of his, his sister’s child, who had been born and bred and married in Rome, and who was now Count Floriani’s widow. She was his only relative; and, although it went sorely against him to leave his wealth to one who was more than half a foreigner, yet family pride at last conquered national prejudice, and Madame la Comtessa Floriani was made the heiress of Whitefield House and the lands circumjacent. This good fortune brought that Romanised young Englishwoman from the blue skies and rich light of Italy, to a remote village in the heart of the Cumberland mountains.
The society of Langthwaite was peculiar, and beyond measure dull. Dull, because bigoted. The ideas of the denizens ran in the narrowest of all narrow gauges, out of which not a mind dared to move. The peculiarity of Langthwaite was its power of condemnation. Everything was wicked in its more than puritanic eyes. Life was a huge snare; the affections were temptations; amusements were sins; pleasure was a crime; novel-writers “had much to answer for,” and novel-readers were next door to iniquity; an actor was a being scarcely less reprehensible than a murderer; and an artist was lost to all moral sense—if, indeed, it ever chanced that artists were spoken of at all, for the Langthwaite intellect did not penetrate far into the regions of art. No one “living in the world” had a conscience, and no foreigners had the faintest notion of virtue. Langthwaite was the centre of salvation, and outside its sphere revolved desolation and ruin.
There was a national school at Langthwaite, where all the ladies went on different days and at different hours, to superintend, some the work, and some the spelling; and there was a Sunday school where everyone fought for a class. It was the cordon bleu of Langthwaite to have a class in the Sunday school. There were a great many dissenting chapels, and a great many missionary meetings. Religious excitement being the principal dissipation at Langthwaite, school feasts, Dorcas meetings, district visitings, missionary sermons, awakening preachings, and prayer meetings, were infinite. The parish clergyman, Mr. Bentley, said that the parish was well-worked; and so it was. It was worked until its mental condition was in such a state of turmoil and unrest that no one knew exactly what to believe.
To this society came Rosa Floriani, the widow of an Italian artist-count, certainly, and the semi-papistical latitudinarian, perhaps. Why she came to Langthwaite seemed a mystery to many. But it was in truth no mystery:—she thought it was only right to live among her tenants, and to do her best to the society which gave her her fortune.