Wilmot

“ Why, there's Kilsyth of Kilsyth--ah, Wilmot, you threw me over in that direction, but I don't bear malice--he swears by you. The fine old fellow came to the bank yesterday; I met him in the hall, and he got into my brougham, and came home with me, for no other reason on earth than to talk about you. Wilmot's skill and Wilmot's coolness, Wilmot's kindness and Wilmot's care--nothing but Wilmot. I should have been bored to death by so much talking all about one man, if it had been any man but yourself. ”

“ In the evening I saw Miss Wilmot; and, in offering her with as much delicacy as possible pecuniary aid, she informed me that fortunately she had found a friend; generous, beneficent, and tender; not less prudent than kind; and, though very young, possessed of a dignity of understanding such as she had never before met in woman. Miss Wilmot spoke with so much enthusiasm that I, whose imagination readily caught fire, felt a redoubled wish to see this angel. ”

“ To Wilmot there appeared the figure of a little stout man with red hair and a pug nose, who was dripping wet, and who smiled in an engaging fashion.
"You're safe as you'd be in your own house," said the kindly Jew; "no ether--no amputation--no nothing. And here's a note from Miss Barbara. I'm dripping wet, but I guess the ink hasn't run so's you can't read it."
Wilmot read his note, and a great light of happiness came into his eyes,
"After a while," said Lichtenstein, "I'll hunt up more clothes for you, and you can jump into a car and run out to Clovelly. ”

“ No infant was ever known to cut its teeth with greater ease. No little girl was more amiable, more beautiful; the intelligence the child exhibited was preternatural. When, in course of time, Wilmot grew into a really pretty girl, with very taking if somewhat forward manners, the exultation of the father knew no bounds. Nor was her mother, Zerah, less devoted to the child; and for a long period Wilmot was the bond between husband and wife, the one topic on which they thought alike, the one object over which they were equally hopeful, ambitious, and proud. ”

“ Lord Wilmot was only slightly known to them; but they received him courteously, and learned from him a good many details of the disastrous fight at Worcester, and the hopelessness of any farther resistance to the Parliamentary leaders.
"But His Majesty is safe, I trust?" questioned the old lady anxiously. Lord Wilmot made guarded reply:
"His Majesty is with friends, who are forwarding him to the coast where he must take ship for France once more."
"Pray heaven he fall not into the hands of his foes!" cried Mrs. Lane earnestly; and the two men breathed a fervent "Amen." ”

“ Wilmot’s parish, where he had been making a visit to his former tutor, and talking over the removal to Eton of Tom, who had well responded to the care taken of him, and with his good principles confirmed, and his character strengthened, might be, with less danger, exposed to trial.
It had been a visit such as to leave a deep impression on Norman’s mind. Sixty years ago, old Mr. Wilmot had been what he now was himself—an enthusiastic and distinguished Balliol man, and he had kept up a warm, clear-sighted interest in Oxford throughout his long life. ”

“ He found himself arguing the whole matter out with Francey Wilmot—a cool and reasoned exposition such as he had been incapable of at the crisis of their relationship. ("This woman is a malignant growth. Nature destroys her. Do you pretend to feel regret or pity?") But though he imagined the whole scene—saw himself as authoritative and convincing—he could not re-create Francey Wilmot. She remained herself. Her eyes, fixed on him with that remembered look of candid and questioning tenderness, blazed up into an anger as unexpectedly fierce and uncompromising. ”

“ Wilmot would be a godsend. “I shall learn more than I could pick up in three months, otherwise,” was her smiling reflection as she settled herself opposite her hostess at one of the tables of colored marble, in the embrasure of a window.
“We’re early, or we shouldn’t get a table,” pursued Lady Wilmot. “Always a hideous crush here. Well, my dear, I hope the babies are better? What an untold nuisance children must be! Measles is part of them, I suppose? How do you like your cottage? And when is Jack coming home? Tea and cake and muffins”—this to the waiter, in parenthesis. ”

“ He was delicate though decisive in his opposition; and only requested Mr. Wilmot to consider, whether to effect the good of the whole be not the true purpose of virtue? Ought not the good of the whole therefore to be its only rule and guide? If so, can the man, who possesses that degree of activity without which he cannot commit suicide, be incapable of being farther useful to society?
Depressed and gloomy as his state of mind was, Mr. Wilmot testified great satisfaction at our rencontre; and the interest which I unfeignedly took in his welfare soon revived all his former affection for me. ”

“ Wilmot's sudden death had had such an effect upon him physically and mentally, that he felt compelled to relinquish practice, at least for the present, and to seek abroad for that rest and change of scene which was absolutely necessary for him. He had turned the phrases very neatly in his mind, but he had forgotten one thing. He had forgotten his conversation with the old gentleman on the garden walk overhanging the brawling Tay on the morning when he received the telegram from Kilsyth. ”

“ For a man like Wilmot, with virtues so eminent, sensations so acute, and a mind so elevated, to be thus impelled to seek a refuge in death was a thought that almost made me hate existence myself, and doubt whether I might not hereafter be driven to the same desperate expedient, to escape the odious injustice of mankind. The distraction too which would seize on Miss Wilmot haunted my thoughts ”

“ If the case had not been his own, Wilmot would have remembered that the spectacle of a new-made widow or widower always has attractions for the curiosity of the vulgar: strong, if the grief in the case be very violent; and stronger, if it be mild or non-existent. Wilmot was awfully shocked by his wife's death, terribly remorseful for his own absence, and perhaps for another reason--at which, however, he had not yet had the hardihood to look--almost stunned by the terrible sense, the conviction of the irrevocable ill of the past, the utterly irreparable nature of the wrong that had been done. ”

“ Therefore, although he had often been forbidden to call during working hours, he had himself driven to 17 McBurney Place and climbed the two flights of stairs to her studio.
It was a disconsolate Barbara who received him. She had on her work-apron, but she was not working. She sat in a deep chair, and presented the soles of her small shoes to an open fire. Wilmot, expecting to be scolded for disobeying orders, was relieved at being received with visible signs of pleasure.
"You're just the person I wanted to see," she said, "just the one and only Wilmot in the world."
"Are you dying?" he asked. ”

“ Wilmot was his second mate. A harum-scarum fellow, and pretending to a great scorn for all the girls. The fact is he was really timid. But let only one of them do as much as lift her little finger in encouragement, and there was nothing that could hold the beggar. As apprentice, once, he deserted abroad after a petticoat, and would have gone to the dogs then, if his skipper hadn’t taken the trouble to find him and lug him by the ears out of some house of perdition or other.
“It was said that one of the firm had been heard once to express a hope that this brute of a ship would get lost soon. ”

“ Whittaker, who had contrived in a wonderfully brief space of time to accumulate an extraordinary quantity of information relative to the nature and extent of Wilmot's inheritance. The worthy man possessed an inherent talent for gossip, which was likely to be of great service to him in his career, being admittedly an immense recommendation for a physician, especially when his practice lies in a class of society largely productive of malades imaginaires. Wilmot was left at perfect liberty, except in the matter of the house in Portland-place. ”

“ The window-blinds fluttered in the faint autumn wind as Wilmot opened the door, then quickly closed and locked it; and the rustling sound added to the impressiveness of the great human silence. The hands of the stern woman who loved her had ordered all the surroundings of the dead tenderly and gracefully; and the tranquil form lay in its deep rest very fair and solemn, and not terrible to look upon, if that can ever be said of death, in its garments of linen and lace. ”

“ Webbe’s epistle is an encouragement to Wilmot to publish his ‘waste papers’, and refers to Tancred as ‘framed’ by the Inner Temple, and to Wilmot as ‘disrobing him of his antique curiosity and adorning him with the approved guise of our stateliest English terms’. Wilmot’s own Epistle to the Readers apologizes for the indecorum of publishing a play, excuses it by the example of Beza’s Abraham and Buchanan’s Jephthes, and refers to ‘the love that hath been these twenty-four years betwixt’ himself and Gismund. ”

“ Wilmot took his seat as a member of the House of Assembly on January 25th, 1835. Young as he was, he had already made a great reputation as a public speaker, and there was no man in the legislature or in the province who could stand any comparison with him in point of eloquence. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the British North American provinces have ever produced a man who was Wilmot's superior in that style of oratory which is so telling on the hustings or where great masses of men are to be moved. ”

“ Manners, the chrysalis had burst into the butterfly, and Wilmot House had never been so gay. It must be remembered that there were times when young ladies made their entrance into the world at sixteen, and for a beauty to be unmarried at twenty-two was rare indeed. When I went to Wilmot House to dine, the table would be always full, and Mr. Marmaduke simpering at the head of it, his air of importance doubled by his reflected glory.
“We see nothing of you, my lad,” he would say; “you must not let these young gallants get ahead of you. ”

“ The truth was that at every squall the wind hauled aft a little, till gradually the ship came to be heading straight for the coast, without a single soul in her being aware of it. Wilmot himself confessed that he had not been near the standard compass for an hour. ”

“ Wilmot is a man but little given to talking of his own afnot fairs or his own feelings."
"Not given to talking of them at all, Lady Muriel. I never met a more reticent man, even with myself; and I flatter myself he has no closer friend, none with whom he is on more confidential terms; he is very reserved in some things. ”

“ When Barbara was kind he despised his anomalous position and strove to free himself from it; but even the best man has to live.
And during those intervals when he thought he could do without her, Wilmot sank deeper and deeper into methods of self-advancement which, if not actually base and culpable, at least smirched the finer qualities of his nature, and hardened his heart.
If the father's heritage, drink and women, were spared him, or at least that part of him which was really noble, a love of cleanness, clear-mindedness, and purity, died hard. But gambling was second nature to him. ”

“ On arriving in New York a man of more complex mental processes would have tried first of all to get the precious information which he carried into the possession of Lichtenstein, but Wilmot felt that he could have no peace until he had seen Blizzard, spoken his mind, and washed his hands of him. ”

“ Just then Lord Wilmot, Colonel Roscarrock, Colonel Blague, and some others came in, and almost started back on seeing how strangely the king was metamorphosed.
"You see, gentlemen, to what a state I am reduced," he observed, with a sad smile. "I must commit these ornaments to your custody," he added.
"I hope we shall soon be able to restore them to your majesty," said Lord Wilmot, who received the George.
"What has been decided?" inquired Charles. "Do you all join Leslie?"
"The majority have so determined," replied Lord Wilmot. "But I shall take another course. ”

“ You may damn a man with faint praise; you may doubly damn a man by overstrong patronage. And this was done to perfection by Wilmot. He—a young, agreeable, and not bad-looking man—was a far different person in the eyes of the world from rough old Gilbert Thorneley; and when he stepped into the enormous wealth of his uncle—when, in spite of the existence of the son and heir, no will was forthcoming, no legal grounds could be found on which to dispute his possession, the world made her best bow to him, and society knelt at his feet, offered up her worship and swung her censers before him. ”

“ Wilmot in surprise.
"Yes, of you; and why not? Thar's many a man, not as good as you, judging by your looks, has had a hearing in his day; but, however, I haint heard of you by the papers. As I was coming home last night I got along to old man Edson's, and I seen him swarin' and tarin' round so says I, 'Ho, old man, what's the row?' 'Oh,' says he, 'that you, Middleton? Nuff's the row. I've done let my best horse and nigger go off with a man from the free States, who said he's going to your house, and here 'tis after nine and Jim not at home yet. ”

“ It was so very charming to think of any man, especially one so talented, so popular, so altogether delightful as Wilmot, being "broken-hearted" by the death of his wife. Lady Muriel gently insinuated, once or twice, a doubt whether there was any ground for this very congenial but rather romantic supposition: her doubts, however, were by no means well received, and she found herself overwhelmed with evidence of the irremediably desolate condition of Wilmot's heart. ”