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Jack was a good fellow, a dear boy; and he added to his apparent amiabilities now by reiterating counsels of kindness and silence towards "poor dear sister Maria, whom he had been making the scape-goat all this time;" after which done, our stock-jobber feigned a pressing engagement with some fashionable friends, and left his father to ruminate upon his worth in lonely admiration.
They would not hesitate to try to make the old offender a scape-goat, and you know what sort of treatment he would receive in the hands of the police. Play the game, Guy; stick to the job. I'm not asking this of you for my own investigation. I have a dozen, a score of operatives who could each handle the branch you are working up just as well as you.
The scape-goat of popular wrath, he suffered less for his own faults, than for the evil results of a bad system; and at the present time when the silence of more than a hundred and thirty years rests upon his tomb Englishmen, with one voice, acknowledge the valuable qualities that raised him to eminence, and regret the proceedings which consigned him in his old age to humiliation and gloom.
But they may comfort themselves with this reflection that it will be a misfortune which will accompany me to my grave, that I suffered a chain of accidents to draw me into such measures and such company; that I have been obliged to defend myself against such accusations and such accusers; that by associating with so much folly and so much knavery I am become the victim of both; that I was distressed by the former, when the latter would have been less grievous to me, since it is much better in business to be yoked to knaves than fools; and that I put into their hands the means of loading me, like the scape-goat, with all the evil consequences of their folly.
Early in December, William Davison, gentleman-in-ordinary of her Majesty's household, arrived at the Hague; a man painstaking, earnest, and zealous, but who was fated, on more than one great occasion, to be made a scape-goat for the delinquencies of greater personages than himself. He had audience of the States General on the 8th December.
He deserved at least a word of honest thanks. Ignoble however was the demeanor of the Earl towards the man for whom he had but recently been unable to invent eulogies sufficiently warm so soon as he conceived the possibility of sacrificing his friend as the scape-goat for his own fault.
He now began to assemble his men, and to prepare in earnest for that part which he had long intended to adopt; "but," observes Sir Walter Scott, "with that machiavelism inherent in his nature, he resolved that his own personal interest in the insurrection should be as little evident as possible, and determined that his son, whose safety he was bound, by the laws of God and man, to prefer to his own, should be his stalking-horse, and in case of need his scape-goat."
He was, in truth, the scape-goat of the school, and it makes my blood boil, even whilst I write, to think how the poor friendless lad, far removed from either father or mother, was kicked, and cuffed, and beaten on the naked head, with a kind of stick between a horse-rod and a cudgel, until his poor face got pale, and he was forced to totter over to a seat in order to prevent himself from fainting or falling in consequence of severe pain.
And as it is never of the least use for a man to quarrel with his conscience, he could do nothing but make Perrote the scape-goat, unless, indeed, he had possessed sufficient grace and humility to accept and profit by the rebuke: which in his eyes, was completely out of the question. Had the Archbishop of York been the speaker, he might possibly have condescended so far.
I know now he wished to keep himself irresponsible for my imprisonment. She would have been the scape-goat, had any legal difficulties arisen. He was anxious to retain all his rights over me. I can see how subtle he was. Though my life was a daily torture, there was positively nothing I could put into words against him nothing that would have authorized me to seek a legal separation.
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