Hawbury

“ And Hawbury, uttering this exclamation, relapsed into silence, and wondered over his friend's infatuation.
On the following day when Dacres came in he found that Hawbury had kept his word.
"Great bore, old fellow," said he; "but I did it. The old lady is an old acquaintance, you know. I'm going there to-morrow again. Didn't see any thing to-day of the child-angel. But it's no end of a bore, you know." ”

“ And now what was the injured husband doing with his demon wife? Doing! why, doing the impassioned lover most vigorously; sustaining her steps most tenderly; grasping her hand; pushing aside the bushes; assisting her down the slope; overwhelming her, in short; hovering round her, apparently unconscious that there was in all the wide world any other being than Mrs. Willoughby. And as Hawbury looked upon all this his eyes dilated and his lips parted involuntarily in utter wonder; and finally, as Dacres reached the spot, the only greeting which he could give his friend was,
"By Jove!" ”

“ What have you against me?"
"Inglis milor," cried Girasole, who was stung to the quick by a certain indescribable yet most irritating superciliousness in Hawbury's tone—"Inglis milor, you sall see what you sall soffair. You sall die! Dere is no hope. You are condemn by de brigand. You also are condemn by me, for you insult me."
"Well, of all the beastly rot I ever heard, this is about the worst! What do you mean by all this infernal nonsense? Insult you! What would I insult you for? Why, man alive, you're as mad as a March hare! If I thought you were a gentleman, I'd—by Jove, I will, too! ”

“ She lay there before my eyes a picture of loveliness beyond imagination—as beautiful as a dream—more like a child-angel than ever. Her hair clustered in golden curls over her white brow, her little hands were folded meekly over her breast, her lips were parted into a sweet smile, the gentle eyes no longer looked at me with the piteous, pleading, trustful, innocent expression which I had noticed in them before, and her hearing was deaf to the words of love and tenderness that I lavished upon her."
"Good!" muttered Hawbury; "you talk like a novel. Drive on, old man. ”

“ So much with regard to Hawbury. For 106b Minnie and her sister the indefatigable priest had already concocted a plan before leaving home. This was the very commonplace plan of a disguise. It was to be an old woman's apparel, and he trusted to the chapter of accidents to make the plan a success. He noticed with pleasure that some women were at the place, and thought that the prisoners might be confounded with them.
When at length Ethel had explained the plan to Hawbury he made a few further objections, but finally declared himself ready to carry it out. ”

“ In the solitude of their aspiring souls, the young men worshipped the memory [194] of Lord Hawbury and Lord Charles Chawles, and moulded their whiskers after the style of whiskerage patronized by those eminent nobles. It mattered not that the vulgar rumor had crossed the Atlantic that Lord Hawbury, immediately on his return to his ancestral acres, had been clapped into limbo by a low British tradesman, on account of certain pounds, shillings and pence owed by him the said Hawbury to him the said low tradesman. ”

“ It's her art. There never was such cunning. She cultivates the soft, sad style so as to attract lovers—lovers—who adore her—who save her life—who become her obedient slaves! Oh yes; and I—what am I? Why they get together and laugh at me; they giggle; they snicker—"
"Confound it all, man, what are you going on at that rate for?" interrupted Hawbury. "Are you taking leave of your senses altogether? By Jove, old man, you'd better give up this Roman journey." ”

“ Besides, I feel that I am far more to her than any other man. No other man has stood to her in the relation in which I have stood. Recollect how I saved her from death. That is no light thing. She must feel toward me as she has never felt to any other. She is not one who can forget how I snatched her from a fearful death, and brought her back to life. Every time she looks at me she seems to convey all that to me in her glance."
"Oh, well, my dear fellow, really now," said Hawbury, "just think. You can't do any thing." ”

“ Now no ordinary mode of escape was possible for Hawbury. A strict watch was kept. 106 The priest had noticed on his approach that guards were posted in different directions in such a way that no fugitive from the house could elude them. He had also seen that the guard inside the house was equally vigilant. To leap from the window and run for it would be certain death, for that was the very thing which the brigands anticipated. To make a sudden rush down the stairs was not possible, for at the door below there were guards; and there, most vigilant of all, was Girasole himself. ”

“ The Baron asked his advice, but Hawbury declined giving any. He said he couldn't advise any man in a love-affair. Every man must trust to himself. No one's advice could be of any avail. Hawbury, in fact, was puzzled, but he said the best he could. The Baron himself was fully of Hawbury's opinion. He swore that it was truth, and declared the man that followed another's advice in a love-affair was a "darned fool that didn't deserve to win his gal." ”

“ Her pleading look at you. Why, man, there was love at first sight. Then tumbling down the crater of a volcano, and getting fished out. Why, man, what woman could resist a claim like that, especially when it is enforced by a man like Scone Dacres? And, by Jove! Sconey, allow me to inform you that I've always considered you a most infernally handsome man; and what's more, my opinion is worth something, by Jove!"
Hereupon Hawbury stretched his head and shoulders back, and pulled away with each hand at his long yellow pendent whiskers. ”

“ Girasole saw him too, with equal horror, if not greater. He saw Hawbury. It was the man whom he had killed stone-dead with his own hand. He was there before him—or was it his ghost? For an instant horror paralyzed him; and then, with a yell like a madman's, he leaped back and fled after the others.
CHAPTER XXXVI. FLY! FLY!
In the midst of that wild uproar which had roused Dacres and Mrs. Willoughby there was nothing that startled him so much as her declaration that she was not Arethusa. ”

“ The brigands now turned their attention to their own men. Two of these had received bad but not dangerous wounds from the dagger of Dacres, and the scowls of pain and rage which they threw upon Hawbury and the other captives boded nothing but the most cruel fate to all of them. Another, however, still lay there. It was the one who had intercepted 87 Dacres in his rush upon Girasole. He lay motionless in a pool of blood. They turned him over. His white, rigid face, as it became exposed to view, exhibited the unmistakable mark of death, and a gash on his breast showed how his fate had met him. ”

“ Upon this lay the dead body of a man, his white face upturned, and his limbs stiffened in the rigidity of death. Hawbury did not remember very distinctly any of the particular events of his confused struggle with the brigands; but he was not at all surprised to see that there had been one of the ruffians sent to his account. The brigands who carried in their dead companion looked at the captive with a sullen ferocity and a scowling vengefulness, which showed plainly that they would demand of him a reckoning for their comrade's blood if it were only in their power. ”

“ Behind them was the forest, vast, gloomy, clothed in impenetrable shade, in which lay their only hope of safety, yet where even now there lurked the watchful guards of the brigands. It was close behind them. Once in its shelter, and they might gain freedom; yet between them and it was an impassable barrier of enemies, and there also lay a still more impassable barrier in the grave where Hawbury lay. To fly, even if they could fly, would be to give him up to death; yet to remain, as they must remain, would be to doom him to death none the less, and themselves too. ”

“ One part of that errand was that a man should be conveyed out of the house and carried away and left in a certain place. Now the man who was thus to be carried out was a dead man, and the certain place to which he was to be borne and where he was to be left was the grave; but these stern facts did not at all deter the Irish priest from trying to make use of this task that lay before him for the benefit of Hawbury. ”

“ It's the young one, you know—Miss Fay. He rather affects her, you know. That's about it."
73b
"Miss Fay?"
"Yes; your child-angel, you know. But it's an older affair than yours; it is, really; so don't be giving way, man. Besides, his claims on her are as great as yours; yes, greater too. By Jove!"
"Miss Fay! Oh, is that all?" said Dacres, who, with a sigh of infinite relief, shook off all his late excitement, and became cool once more.
Hawbury noted this very thoughtfully. ”

“ No one, I think, has so well defined our relation to the English as Hawthorne, in a casual phrase from one of his printed letters: "We stand in the light of posterity to them, and have the privileges of posterity." This, on London, ought to become proverbial: "London is like the grave in one respect,—any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better die, or go to London." ”

“ The shadows of the elms, in The House of the Seven Gables, are exceptionally dense and cool; the summer afternoon is peculiarly still and beautiful; the atmosphere has a delicious warmth, and the long daylight seems to pause and rest. But the mild provincial quality is there, the mixture of shabbiness and [125] freshness, the paucity of ingredients. The end of an old race—this is the situation that Hawthorne has depicted, and he has been admirably inspired in the choice of the figures in whom he seeks to interest us. ”

“ Into this paradise of the Manse at Concord, set in the very heart of outer and inward peace so complete, poverty had come. Hawthorne had never had any superfluity in the things that give comfort and ease to life even on a small scale. The years at Salem had been marked by strict economies always, it is plain; there was no more than enough in that house, and thence arose in part its proud instinct of isolation ”

“ One may well say that there is nothing like leather; for Hoby died worth a hundred and twenty thousand pounds.
Hoby was bootmaker to George III., the Prince of Wales, the royal dukes, and many officers in the Army and Navy. His shop was situated at the top of St. James's Street, at the corner of Piccadilly, next to the Old Guards Club. He was bootmaker to the Duke of Wellington from his boyhood, and received innumerable orders in the duke's handwriting, both from the Peninsula and France, which he always religiously preserved. Hoby was the first man who drove about London in a tilbury. ”

“ The Hawkesbury is a noble river, particularly opposite to Windsor Lodge, the house, or rather mansion, of the owner of the Green [Pg 388] Hills around. If real worth and talent, if public and private benevolence, with the most expansive views of men and things, together with acts of such virtue and dignity as speak the spirit of true nobility, could be found in any one, they existed in the mind and heart of that youth, who left the shores of old England a simple, single-minded Suffolk farmer’s son, to become a man of wealth and goodness in a distant land. ”

“ Hawthorne's English experiences will, perhaps, be best realized, if he is thought of apart from literature, as a man much identified with the shipping interests and commercial society of Liverpool, and attending to this business rather doggedly and wearily, not especially liking the place or the people, whose ways and notions he was instinctively against, being himself a settled New Englander of a strong race type ”

“ An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which we owe the high qualities of New England,—a nature which is often so easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,—this side, long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's genius revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England character had piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion and prudence imposed ”

“ Christmas Day was an occasion of special festivity at this boarding-house, and that of 1855 was unusually distinguished in its annals by the presence of Hawthorne and the legend of the merry-making about him which his friend Bright put into his clever rhymes of the "Song of Consul Hawthorne." Whether in his office, or at the boarding-house, or going about the docks at Liverpool, "Consul Hawthorne" was evidently a very typical New Englander abroad, and popular with his own people. ”

“ How could they have disappeared so completely during that single moment he had waited to speak to Fairbain? The man's heart beat like a trip-hammer with apprehension, a sudden fear for Hope taking possession of him. Surely the girl would never consent to enter any of those dens along the way, and Hawley would not dare resort to force in the open street. ”

“ The summer term proved exceptionally fine, and Haviland and other collectors revelled in the bright and glowing weather. If at times illicit, the long breezy rambles over field and down were fraught with all that was healthful and wholesome, in the splendid air, the beautiful surroundings of the fairest of English landscapes, the hardening of the young frame into the most perfect training, the excitement of a certain amount of ever present risk, and the absorbing pursuit of a favourite hobby. ”