“And is my lady and your family here at Richmond?”
“No,” says he, with a sad shake of the head; and the poor fellow's hollow eyes filled with tears.
“Good heavens, Denny! what's the matter?” said I. He was squeezing my hand like a vice as I spoke.
“They've LEFT me!” he burst out with a dreadful shout of passionate grief—a horrible scream which seemed to be wrenched out of his heart. “Left me!” said he, sinking down on a seat, and clenching his great fists, and shaking his lean arms wildly. “I'm a wise man now, Mr. Fitz-Boodle. Jemima has gone away from me, and yet you know how I loved her, and how happy we were! I've got nobody now; but I'll die soon, that's one comfort: and to think it's she that'll kill me after all!”
The story, which he told with a wild and furious lamentation such as is not known among men of our cooler country, and such as I don't like now to recall, was a very simple one. The mother-in-law had taken possession of the house, and had driven him from it. His property at his marriage was settled on his wife. She had never loved him, and told him this secret at last, and drove him out of doors with her selfish scorn and ill-temper. The boy had died; the girls were better, he said, brought up among the Molloys than they could be with him; and so he was quite alone in the world, and was living, or rather dying, on forty pounds a year.
His troubles are very likely over by this time. The two fools who caused his misery will never read this history of him; THEY never read godless stories in magazines: and I wish, honest reader, that you and I went to church as much as they do. These people are not wicked BECAUSE of their religious observances, but IN SPITE of them. They are too dull to understand humility, too blind to see a tender and simple heart under a rough ungainly bosom. They are sure that all their conduct towards my poor friend here has been perfectly righteous, and that they have given proofs of the most Christian virtue. Haggarty's wife is considered by her friends as a martyr to a savage husband, and her mother is the angel that has come to rescue her. All they did was to cheat him and desert him. And safe in that wonderful self-complacency with which the fools of this earth are endowed, they have not a single pang of conscience for their villany towards him, consider their heartlessness as a proof and consequence of their spotless piety and virtue.
FOOTNOTES
1 ([return])
[ The words of this song are copyright, nor will the copyright be sold for less than twopence-halfpenny.]