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An hour passed in this still concentrated agony, and she could endure it no longer; she must be up and doing; she would wake Ernest; she would tell him the revelation she had made; upbraid him with her blighted life, and leave him. Let him send for his Sophie; what did she, the outcast, the rejected, there in his house? why should she nurse his father?
You feared by letting him know that you loved him to injure his future prospects, and you nearly blighted that future by the despair you caused him when he lost you.
And that royal ear was lent, and almost fatal was the distillment poured into its porches. The pith and marrow of the great Netherland enterprise was sapped by the slow poison of the ill-timed negotiation. The fruit of Drake's splendid triumphs in America was blighted by it.
But, alas! partly from his own bashfulness, partly owing to a strong and obvious disposition to risibility which pervaded the congregation upon his first attempt, he became totally incapable of proceeding in his intended discourse, gasped, grinned, hideously rolled his eyes till the congregation thought them flying out of his head, shut the Bible, stumbled down the pulpit-stairs, trampling upon the old women who generally take their station there, and was ever after designated as a 'stickit minister. And thus he wandered back to his own country, with blighted hopes and prospects, to share the poverty of his parents.
He had painted the soul of her, reading with his art what had been hidden from the man, as he had strayed through the labyrinth of her thoughts viewing the blighted blossom of her girlhood and wifehood and the neglected garden of her maturity. As she viewed the portrait now in the light of time and event, she saw, more clearly than ever, her soul and body as Markham had seen it.
In after years, when he frowned at any contradiction that she gave him, Lady Lovat used to exclaim, "Oh, boy! Dinna look that gate ye look so like your father." These words spoke volumes. The character of the lady whose best years were thus blighted by cruelty, and who was condemned through a long life to bear the name of her infamous husband, was one peculiarly Scotch.
His fondest hopes were blighted; he felt as one robbed of his very soul; he was wretched and dejected, and turned from the spot with the feelings of an outcast, an alien; or as a once powerful courtier, removed from the presence of his sovereign, to a perpetual expatriation. Strawberry Hill had for ever lost its interest to him; the only treasure it contained held out no prospect of possession.
What was the meaning of it all? Was it pure chance and accident or had a Living, Scheming, Purposeful Deity a great wise object in this that John Humphreyville Priddell should have been born and bred and nurtured in the Vale of Froom to be struck from lusty life to a death of agony in a few hours at Motipur in the cruel accursed blighted land of Ind?
Her eyes rested as lovingly on the blighted, solitary, ill-omened view before us, as if they saw the friendly hills of Cumberland in the dim and threatening sky. "Don't speak of Walter any more," I said, as soon as I could control myself. "Oh, Laura, spare us both the wretchedness of talking of him now!" She roused herself, and looked at me tenderly.
"'Two'n't do," retorted the other, in a painfully subdued tone; "there is much it cannot purchase. Am I not at this moment a banned and a blighted man scouted alike from the board of the profligate Cavalier, and the psalm-singing Puritan of this most change-loving country?
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