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And as we followed on and on, along the mouldering corridors and rooms where the black peeling papers hung like stalactites, the dominance of our senses gradually dropped from us, and with our souls we saw its soul the soul of this old-time place; this mustering house of the old South, bereft of all but ghosts and the grey pigeons niched in the rotting gallery round a narrow courtyard open to the sky.
But as the moments flew by and no succour came, some gave way altogether and moaned piteously, while others appeared to be bereft of all capacity of thought or action. Many began to pray in frantic incoherence, and several gave vent to their feelings in curses. Only a few maintained absolute self-possession and silence. Among these were the widow and one or two of the other women.
When the conversation turned to serious topics, her voice steadied perceptibly, the blue in her eyes took on a deeper and darker hue, the half-satirical smile vanished from her adorable lips, and she spoke with the gravity of a profound thinker. Barnes watched her, fascinated, bereft of the power to concentrate his thoughts on anything else.
"I have done wrong in engaging in the remotest way in this affair, in urging you to become a party to it, but my humanity forbids me to withhold whatever of aid I can render. Was ever a monarch so cruelly beset, so bereft of wise counsellors, of trusty friends? He knows not where to look for help, nor which way to turn.
Pressed into their service there was also the Marquise de Villars, a frantic gambler, a creature bereft of all principle and all modesty, to whom a sum of twenty thousand crowns in cash was paid over beforehand, with the promise of a million directly success was ensured. She undertook to manage Rohan and tell him what to do. Certain ciphers had to be used, and to these the Marquise had the key.
Just and his party had triumphed, and here in England, face to face with these three refugees driven from their country, flying for their lives, bereft of all which centuries of luxury had given them, there stood a fair scion of those same republican families which had hurled down a throne, and uprooted an aristocracy whose origin was lost in the dim and distant vista of bygone centuries.
This was an Eden for city children, and my mother had chosen it because she beheld it in imagination flowing with the true Garden of Paradise rivers of health and freedom for her little ones. My father died on the 14th of February, 1837, and on the 1st of March of the same year I was born, a fortnight after the death of the man in whom my mother was bereft of both husband and lover.
It was an elder sister of the Senora's, a sister old enough to be wooed and won while the Senora was yet at play, who had been promised in marriage to a young Scotchman named Angus Phail. She was a beautiful woman; and Angus Phail, from the day that he first saw her standing in the Presidio gate, became so madly her lover, that he was like a man bereft of his senses.
I will be the one bereft, if you leave me. I am the only one who really needs you. I don't say I will go to the bad, as you may have very foolishly persuaded yourself your family will do without you, but I trust to your instincts to make you realize how unhappy, how inconsolable I shall be. I shall be the loneliest man on earth!"
The poor widow, half distracted at being thus suddenly bereft of house and home, spent the remainder of the day in vainly endeavoring to procure some tenement into which she could remove with her furniture, or with so much of it as might yet be saved.
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