Tales of Angria by Charlotte Bronte

Author:Charlotte Bronte [Brontë, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141194028
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

So when he came again to Zamorna, having ascertained that she was still there, he began to employ his little odds and ends of leisure time in quiet speculations as to how, when and where he should reopen a communication with her. It would not do at all to conduct the thing in an abrupt, straightforward way. He must not seem to seek her; he must come upon her sometime as if by accident. Then, too, this business of her brother’s must be allowed to get out of her head. He would wait a few days, till the excitement of his trial had subsided, and the renegade was fairly removed from Zamorna and on his march to the quarters and companions assigned him beyond the limits of civilization. Miss Hastings would then be very fairly alone in the world, quite disembarrassed from friends and relations, not perplexed with a multitude of calls on her affection. In such a state of things, an easy chance meeting with a friend would, Sir William calculated, be no unimpressive event. He’d keep his eye, then, on her movements and, with care, he did not doubt, he should be able to mould events so as exactly to suit his purpose.

Well, a week or two passed on. Hastings’ trial, like all nine days’ wonders, had sunk into oblivion. Hastings himself was gone to the D—l, or to Belcastro, which is the same thing. He had actually marched bodily out of Zamorna, in the white trousers, the red sash, the gingham jacket of a thorough-going Bloodhound, as one of a detachment of that illustrious regiment under the command of Captain Dampier. To the sound of fife, drum and bugle, the lost desperado had departed, leaving behind him the recollection of what he had been, a man; the reality of what he was, a monster.

It was very odd, but his sister did not think a pin the worse of him for all his dishonour. It is private meanness, not public infamy, that degrade[s] a man in the opinion of his relatives. Miss Hastings heard him cursed by every mouth, saw him denounced in every newspaper; still, he was the same brother to her he had always been; still, she beheld his actions through a medium129 peculiar to herself. She saw him go away with a triumphant hope (of which she had the full benefit, for no one else shared it) that his future actions would nobly blot out the calumnies of his enemies. Yet, after all, she knew he was an unredeemed villain. Human nature is full of inconsistencies. Natural affection is a thing never rooted out where it has once really existed.

These passages of excitement being over, Miss Hastings, very well satisfied that her brother had walked out of jail with the breath of life in his body, and having the aforesaid satisfactory impression on her mind that he was the finest man on the top of this world, began to look about her and consider how she was to make off life.

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