“Indeed, Mr. Hartley, I see my folly in its true colours.”
“And now for bed,” he replied. “You to your hotel, and I to my chamber. Let me see you early to-morrow. Should business have called me from home, you will find Isidora, and her sable genius, Dominique.”
“You never travel far without your black attendant,” I remarked.
“He never leaves us; and for twenty years, amidst all its storm and sunshine, he has followed my fortunes with devoted fidelity. Next to that of my child, the greatest loss Heaven could inflict would be to take from me that faithful negro. He comes.—Show Mr. O’Halloran down stairs.—Once more, good night.” He shook me warmly by the hand. “One word more, friend Hector,” he added with a smile; “you need not lose time in a visit to Jermyn-street—the birds have flown!”
It was past midnight, if you could believe the watchman; and as I walked slowly westward, and thought on the events of the few last hours, I doubted their actual reality. The strange and quick succession in which they followed, seemed like the wanderings of a dream. A second time had I been delivered from a critical position by a person, two months ago a stranger—and yet one, who appeared to have dropped upon the earth, for the especial purpose of looking after me. I slept—many a vision passed “in shadowy review.”—but one, more brilliant than the rest, was ever before “my mind’s eye.”—Mr. Hartley, the genius of my good fortune, and Isidora, its bright reward.
I have said already, that the destinies of my foster-brother and myself were intimately united. Mark Antony left my father’s house to join me in Dublin—the hand of fate had interposed—and on this eventful night, while I reposed at Stevens’s, my alter ego was “taking his rest” in a back attic, two pair up, in a ramification of the Seven Dials—a safe and agreeable domicile, to which his friend, the ratcatcher, had introduced him. A cheaper lodging might have been certainly obtained; but this was quiet and select. From slates to cellar there were but seven families in the house—“and the beauty of it was,” as Shemus Rhua remarked with triumphant satisfaction, “every soul of them was Irish.”
CHAPTER XVII. THE ROBBERY OF TIM MALEY.
“My father, the deacon, wrought him his first hose. Odd, I’m thinking deacon Threeplie, the rape-spinner, will twist him his last cravat. Ay, ay, puir Robin is in a fair way o’ being hanged.”—Rob Roy.