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But on Easter Sunday the boys and girls who had gone walking out to the lake heard a great noise in the hut. The door was locked; but the boys broke it in, and the two pigs ran out, jumping like gnats. No one ever saw them again. The whole crowd went in; they saw some old rags on the floor, the beggar's hat, some bones, clots of dried blood and bits of flesh in the hollows of the skull.
"Is it not late in the day, Hogan, for you and me to prate of honour?" asked Crispin bitterly, yet with averted gaze. "God knows my honour is as like honour as a beggar's rags are like unto a cloak of ermine. What signifies another splash, another rent in that which is tattered beyond all semblance of its original condition?"
Often after one of those outpourings of rage and menace and despair, I would fly to some quiet spot and weep till all the hardness of my heart was wept away. And often in those nightly vigils I would pause by the door and murmur, "This shelter, denied not to the beggar and the beggar's child, this would you deny to me if you could dream that I was so near you.
With the accuracy of the rest she appeared to be satisfied only when she found again their poor suggestion that she was influenced by vanity, she broke out with a burst of passionate indignation. "I would rather be a poor beggar's wife," she said, "and be sure of heaven, than queen of all the world, and stand in doubt thereof by reason of my own consent.
He looked around, and in an adjacent street, which the moon faintly enlightened, he perceived a tall figure, wrapped in a cloak, pacing slowly backwards and forwards. "'Tis the hand of God which hath guided him hither yes I'll I'll BEG better to play the beggar in Venice than the villain in Naples; for the beggar's heart may beat nobly, though covered with rags."
All laughed, except Sophia, who would have it the beggar's threat was perfectly rational, and concluded with these words: "Surely if it were put out of our power to perform acts of benevolence, our life itself would become poor enough. If it were possible that the impulse of pity could die in us, there would be a melancholy prospect for our joy and our pleasure.
Osborne continued, gathering wrath and astonishment as the thought now first came upon him; "you don't mean that he's such a d fool as to be still hankering after that swindling old bankrupt's daughter? You've not come here for to make me suppose that he wants to marry HER? Marry HER, that IS a good one. My son and heir marry a beggar's girl out of a gutter.
I can't see my patient as yet, but there is a certain something in the atmosphere of this hut which tells me that if the poor beggar's life is to be saved we have no time to waste. Where is he, I wonder? Oh, I think I see him, there on the ground at the far side from the doorway! Yes, there he is. Another minute and I shall be able to see him clearly.
It is true that a certain element of Bohemian picturesqueness is lost to Henry Fielding's life, already not very rich in recorded incident; and it would certainly have been curious if he, who ended his days in trying to dignify the judicial office, should have begun life by acting the part of a "trading justice," namely that of Quorum in Coffey's Beggar's Wedding, which Timothy Fielding had played at Drury Lane.
Down in yon cellar, where a farthing rushlight glimmers upon haggard cheeks, distorted with the idiotcy of drink; there, in that foul attic, from whose casement you see the beggar's rags hang to dry, or rather to crumble in the reeking and filthy air; farther on, within those walls which, black and heavy as the hearts they hide, close our miserable prospect, there, even there, in the mildewed dungeon, in the felon's cell, on the very scaffold's self, Ambition hugs her own hope or scowls upon her own despair.
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