The face of the outlaw blackened:—Clarence rose to his feet.
“Ha! think you so? We shall see. Shumway, Frink, Gasson!—you three are enough to saddle this fiery rebel to his last horse. Noose him, you slow moving scoundrels, to the nearest sapling, and let him grow wiser in the wind. To your work, villains—away!”
The hands of more than one of the ruffians were already on the shoulders of the partizan. Though shocked at the seeming certainty of a deed which he had not been willing to believe they would venture to execute, he yet preserved the fearless aspect which he had heretofore shown. His lips still uttered the language of defiance. He made no concessions, he asked for no delay—he simply denounced against them the vengeance of his command, and that of his reckless commander, whose fiery energy of soul and rapidity of execution they well knew. His language tended still farther to exasperate the person who acted in the capacity of the outlaw chief. Furiously, as if to second the subordinates in the awful duty in which they seemed to him to linger, he grasped the throat of Clarence Conway with his own hands, and proceeded to drag him forward. There was evidently no faltering in his fearful purpose. Every thing was serious. He was too familiar with such deeds to make him at all heedful of consequences; and the proud bearing of the youth; the unmitigated scorn in his look and language; the hateful words which he had used, and the threats which he had denounced; while they exasperated all around, almost maddened the ruffian in command, to whom such defiance was new, and with whom the taking of life was a circumstance equally familiar and unimportant.
“Three minutes for prayer is all the grace I give him!” he cried, hoarsely, as he helped the subordinates to drag the destined victim toward the door. He himself was not suffered one. The speech was scarcely spoken, when he fell prostrate on his face, stricken in the mouth by a rifle-bullet, which entered through an aperture in the wall opposite. His blood and brains bespattered the breast of Clarence Conway, whom his falling body also bore to the floor of the apartment. A wild shout from without followed the shot, and rose, strong and piercing, above all the clamor within. In that shout Clarence could not doubt that he heard the manly voice of the faithful Jack Bannister, and the deed spoke for itself. It could have been the deed of a friend only.
“The Hour and the Man.” A novel. By Harriet Martineau. 2 vols. Harper & Brothers, New York, 1841.
We do not belong to the admirers of Miss Martineau, though barring her ear-trumpet, and a few foolish notions, she is a very respectable and inoffensive old lady. Her present work is founded on the career of the celebrated negro chieftain, whom Napoleon had conveyed to France, and who there died. The good old spinster has taken up the Orthodox English account of this transaction, and as Napoleon was always a monster in the eyes of the Cockneys, Touissant, according to their story and Miss Martineau’s, was murdered. Nothing can be more ridiculous. Bonaparte never committed a crime where it could be avoided, and having once secured Touissant in a state prison in France, what farther had the first consul to fear from the negro chieftain?
The story is, in some parts, well told. It has been apparently prepared with much care. But it fails, totally fails, in its main object; and though as men, we sympathise with a persecuted man, we cannot, as critics, overlook the glaring faults of the novel, or, as partizans of truth, forgive the historical inaccuracies of the narrative.
“The History of England from the Earliest Period to 1839.” By Thomas Keightley. 5 vols. Harper & Brothers, New York.