The Last of the Barons – Volume 10

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Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон. The Last of the Barons – Volume 10

BOOK X. THE RETURN OF THE KING-MAKER

CHAPTER I. THE MAID'S HOPE, THE COURTIER'S LOVE, AND THE SAGE'S COMFORT

CHAPTER II. THE MAN AWAKES IN THE SAGE, AND THE SHE-WOLF AGAIN HATH TRACKED THE LAMB

CHAPTER III. VIRTUOUS RESOLVES SUBMITTED TO THE TEST OF VANITY AND THE WORLD

CHAPTER IV. THE STRIFE WHICH SIBYLL HAD COURTED, BETWEEN KATHERINE AND HERSELF, COMMENCES IN SERIOUS EARNEST

CHAPTER V. THE MEETING OF HASTINGS AND KATHERINE

CHAPTER VI. HASTINGS LEARNS WHAT HAS BEFALLEN SIBYLL, REPAIRS TO THE KING, AND ENCOUNTERS AN OLD RIVAL

CHAPTER VII. THE LANDING OF LORD WARWICK, AND THE EVENTS THAT ENSUE THEREON

CHAPTER VIII. WHAT BEFELL ADAM WARNER AND SIBYLL WHEN MADE SUBJECT TO THE GREAT FRIAR BUNGEY

CHAPTER IX. THE DELIBERATIONS OF MAYOR AND COUNCIL, WHILE LORD WARWICK MARCHES UPON LONDON

CHAPTER X. THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY OF THE EARL—THE ROYAL CAPTIVE IN THE TOWER—THE MEETING BETWEEN KING-MAKER AND KING

CHAPTER XI. THE TOWER IN COMMOTION

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Fair are thy fields, O England; fair the rural farm and the orchards in which the blossoms have ripened into laughing fruits; and fairer than all, O England, the faces of thy soft-eyed daughters!

From the field where Sibyll and her father had wandered amidst the dead, the dismal witnesses of war had vanished; and over the green pastures roved the gentle flocks. And the farm to which Hastings had led the wanderers looked upon that peaceful field through its leafy screen; and there father and daughter had found a home.

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Sibyll had left Hastings by her father's side, and tripped lightly to the farther part of the house, inhabited by the rustic owners who supplied the homely service, to order the evening banquet,—the happy banquet; for hunger gives not such flavour to the viand, nor thirst such sparkle to the wine, as the presence of a beloved guest.

And as the courtier seated himself on the rude settle under the honeysuckles that wreathed the porch, a delicious calm stole over his sated mind. The pure soul of the student, released a while from the tyranny of an earthly pursuit,—the drudgery of a toil, that however grand, still but ministered to human and material science,—had found for its only other element the contemplation of more solemn and eternal mysteries. Soaring naturally, as a bird freed from a golden cage, into the realms of heaven, he began now, with earnest and spiritual eloquence, to talk of the things and visions lately made familiar to his thoughts. Mounting from philosophy to religion, he indulged in his large ideas upon life and nature: of the stars that now came forth in heaven; of the laws that gave harmony to the universe; of the evidence of a God in the mechanism of creation; of the spark from central divinity, that, kindling in a man's soul, we call "genius;" of the eternal resurrection of the dead, which makes the very principle of being, and types, in the leaf and in the atom, the immortality of the great human race. He was sublimer, that gray old man, hunted from the circle of his kind, in his words, than ever is action in its deeds; for words can fathom truth, and deeds but blunderingly and lamely seek it.

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