Guy Mannering [112]
all these trifles, because you say that they amuse you,--and yet I wonder how they should. I remember, in our stolen voyages to the world of fiction, you always admired the grand and the romantic--tales of knights, dwarfs, giants, and distressed damsels, soothsayers, visions, beckoning ghosts, and bloody hands,--whereas I was partial to the involved intrigues of private life, or at furthest, to so much only of the supernatural as is conferred by the agency of an Eastern genie or a beneficent fairy. You would have loved to shape your course of life over the broad ocean, with its dead calms and howling tempests, its, tornadoes, and its billows mountain-high,--whereas I should like to trim my little pinnace to a brisk breeze in some inland lake or tranquil bay where there was just difficulty of navigation sufficient to give interest and to require skill, without any sensible degree of danger. So that, upon the whole, Matilda, I think you should have had my father, with his pride of arms and of ancestry, his chivalrous point of honour, his high talents, and his abstruse and mystic studies--You should have had Lucy Bertram too for your friend, whose fathers, with names which alike defy memory and orthography, ruled over this romantic country, and whose birth took place, as I have been indistinctly informed, under circumstances of deep and peculiar interest--You should have had, too, our Scottish residence, surrounded by mountains, and our lonely walks to haunted ruins--And I should have had, in exchange, the lawns and shrubs, and greenhouses, and conservatories, of Pine Park, with your, good, quiet, indulgent aunt, her chapel in the morning, her nap after dinner, her hand at whist in the evening, not forgetting her fat coach-horses and fatter coachman. Take notice, however, that Brown is not included in this proposed barter of mine--his good-humour,
lively conversation, and open gallantry, suit my plan of life, as well as his athletic form, handsome features, and high spirit, would accord with a character of chivalry. So as we cannot change altogether out and out, I think we must e'en abide as we are."
CHAPTER XXX.
I renounce your defiance; if you parley so roughly I'll barricado my gates against you.--Do you see yon bay window? Storm,--I care not, serving the good Duke of Norfolk. Merry Devil of Edmonton.
JULIA MANNERING TO MATILDA MARCHMC)NT.
"I rise from a sick-bed, my dearest Matlida, to communicate the strange and frightful scenes which have just passed. Alas! how little we ought to jest with futurity! I closed my letter to you in high spirits, with some flippant remarks on your taste for the romantic and extraordinary in fictitious narrative. How little I expected to have had such events to record in the course of a few days! and to witness scenes of terror, or to contemplate them in description, is as different, my dearest Matilda, as to bend over the brink, of a precipice holding by the frail tenure of a half-rotted shrub, or to admire the same precipice as represented in the landscape of Salvator. But I will not anticipate my narrative.
"The first part of my story is frightful enough, though it had nothing to interest my feelings. You must know that this country is particularly favourable to the commerce of a set of desperate men from the Isle of Man, which is nearly opposite. These smugglers are numerous, resolute, and formidable, and have at different times become the dread of the neighbourhood when any one has interfered with their contraband trade. The local magistrates, from timidity or worse motives, have become shy of acting against them, and impunity has rendered them equally daring and desperate. With all this, my father, a stranger in the land, and invested with no official authority, had, one would think, nothing to do. But it must be owned, that, as he himself expresses it, he was born when Mars was lord of his ascendant, and that strife and bloodshed find him out in circumstances and situations the most retired and pacific.
"About eleven o'clock on last Tuesday morning,
lively conversation, and open gallantry, suit my plan of life, as well as his athletic form, handsome features, and high spirit, would accord with a character of chivalry. So as we cannot change altogether out and out, I think we must e'en abide as we are."
CHAPTER XXX.
I renounce your defiance; if you parley so roughly I'll barricado my gates against you.--Do you see yon bay window? Storm,--I care not, serving the good Duke of Norfolk. Merry Devil of Edmonton.
JULIA MANNERING TO MATILDA MARCHMC)NT.
"I rise from a sick-bed, my dearest Matlida, to communicate the strange and frightful scenes which have just passed. Alas! how little we ought to jest with futurity! I closed my letter to you in high spirits, with some flippant remarks on your taste for the romantic and extraordinary in fictitious narrative. How little I expected to have had such events to record in the course of a few days! and to witness scenes of terror, or to contemplate them in description, is as different, my dearest Matilda, as to bend over the brink, of a precipice holding by the frail tenure of a half-rotted shrub, or to admire the same precipice as represented in the landscape of Salvator. But I will not anticipate my narrative.
"The first part of my story is frightful enough, though it had nothing to interest my feelings. You must know that this country is particularly favourable to the commerce of a set of desperate men from the Isle of Man, which is nearly opposite. These smugglers are numerous, resolute, and formidable, and have at different times become the dread of the neighbourhood when any one has interfered with their contraband trade. The local magistrates, from timidity or worse motives, have become shy of acting against them, and impunity has rendered them equally daring and desperate. With all this, my father, a stranger in the land, and invested with no official authority, had, one would think, nothing to do. But it must be owned, that, as he himself expresses it, he was born when Mars was lord of his ascendant, and that strife and bloodshed find him out in circumstances and situations the most retired and pacific.
"About eleven o'clock on last Tuesday morning,