Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/287

223 THE PICKWICK CLUB. 223

lie now, was in those days a desolate place enough, surrounded hy little else than fields and ditches.

" Having drawn the travelling-cap he had on, half over his face, and muffled himself in his cloak, Heyling stopped before the meanest- looking house in the street, and knocked gently at the door. It was at once opened by a woman, who dropped a curtesy of recognition, and Heyling whispering the officer to remain below, crept gently up stairs, and, opening the door of the front room, entered at once.

" The object of his search and his unrelenting animosity, now a decrepid old man, was seated at a bare deal table, on which stood a miserable candle. He started on the entrance of the stranger, and rose feebly to his feet.

" ' What now, what now?' said the old man — * What fresh misery is this? What do you want here?'

«< * A word with i/ou,' replied Heyling. As he spoke, he seated himself at the other end of the table, and, throwing off his cloak and cap, disclosed his features.

" The old man seemed instantly deprived of the power of speech. He fell backward in his chair, and, clasping- his hands together, gazed on the apparition with a mingled look of abhorrence and fear.

" * This day six years,' said Heyling, * I claimed the life you owed me for my child's. Beside the lifeless form of your daughter, old man, I swore to live a life of revenge. I have never swerved from my purpose for a moment's space ; but if I had, one thought of her uncomplaining, suffering look, as she drooped away, or of the starving face of our inno- cent child, would have nerved me to my task. My first act of requital you well remember : this is my last.'

" The old man shivered, and his hands dropped powerless by his side.

" * I leave England to-morrow,' said Heyling, after a moment's pause. — * To-night I consign you, to the living death to which you devoted her — a hopeless prison '

" He raised his eyes to the old man's countenance, and paused. He lifted the light to his face, set it gently down, and left the apartment.

" ' Yon had better see to the old man,' he said to the woman, as he opened the door, and motioned the officer to follow him into the street — ' I think he is ill.' The woman closed the door, ran hastily up stairs, and found him lifeless. He had died in a fit.

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" Beneath a plain grave-stone, in one of the most peaceful and secluded church-yards in Kent, where wild flowers mingle with the grass, and the soft landscape around, forms the fairest spot in the garden of England, lie the bones of the young mother and her gentle child. But the ashes of the father do not mingle with theirs ; nor from that night forward, did the attorney ever gain the remotest clue, to the sub- sequent history of his queer client."

As the old man concluded his tale, he advanced to a peg in one comer, and taking down his hat and coat, put them on with grewt