Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 70, No. 431, September 1851

A dull sound as of the clapper of a large bell boomed overhead. There was silence for about a minute, and again it was repeated.

"Here is a clue, at all events!" cried the officer. "My life on it, there is some one in the belfry."

We hastened up the narrow stairs which led to the tower. Half way up, the passage was barred by a stout door, double locked, which the officers had some difficulty in forcing with the aid of a crow-bar. This obstacle removed, we reached the lofty room where the bell was suspended; and there, right under the clapper, on a miserable truckle bed, lay the emaciated form of Mr Pettigrew.

"My poor uncle!" said Jack, stooping tenderly to embrace his relative, "what can have brought you here?"

"Speak louder, Jack!" said Mr Pettigrew; "I can't hear you. For twelve long days that infernal bell has been tolling just above my head for hockey and other villanous purposes. I am as deaf as a doornail!"

"And so thin, dear uncle! You must have been most shamefully abused."

"Simply starved; that's all."

"What! starved? The monsters! Did they give you nothing to eat?"

"Yes – broccoli. I wish you would try it for a week: it is a rare thing to bring out the bones."

"And why did they commit this outrage upon you?"

"For two especial reasons, I suppose – first, because I would not surrender my whole property; and, secondly, because I would not marry Miss Latchley."

"My dear uncle! when I saw you last, it appeared to me that you would have had no objections to perform the latter ceremony."

"Not on compulsion, Jack – not on compulsion!" said Mr Pettigrew, with a touch of his old humour. "I won't deny that I was humbugged by her at first, but this was over long ago."

"Indeed! Pray, may I venture to ask what changed your opinion of the lady?"

"Her works, Jack – her own works!" replied Uncle Peter. "She gave me them to read as soon as I was fairly trapped into the Agapedome, and such an awful collection of impiety and presumption I never saw before. She is ten thousand times worse than the deceased Thomas Paine."

"Was she, then, party to your incarceration?"

"I won't say that. I hardly think she would have consented to let them harm me, or that she knew exactly how I was used; but that fellow Hyams is wicked enough to have been an officer under King Herod. Now, pray help me up, and lift me down stairs, for my legs are so cramped that I can't walk, and my head is as dizzy as a wheel. That confounded broccoli, too, has disagreed with my constitution, and I shall feel particularly obliged to any one who can assist me to a drop of brandy."

After having ministered to the immediate wants of Mr Pettigrew, and secured his effects, we returned to Southampton, leaving the deserted Agapedome in the charge of a couple of police. In spite of every entreaty Mr Pettigrew would not hear of entering a prosecution against Hyams.

"I feel," said he, "that I have made a thorough ass of myself; and I should not be able to stand the ridicule that must follow a disclosure of the consequences. In fact, I begin to think that I am not fit to look after my own affairs. The man who has spent twelve days, as I have, under the clapper of a bell, without any other sustenance than broccoli – is there any more brandy in the flask? I should like the merest drop – the man, I say, who has undergone these trials, has ample time for meditation upon the past. I see my weakness, and I acknowledge it. So Jack, my dear boy, as you have always behaved to me more like a son than a nephew, I intend, immediately on my return to London, to settle my whole property upon you, merely reserving an annuity. Don't say a word on the subject. My mind is made up, and nothing can alter my resolution."

On arriving at Southampton we considered it our duty to communicate immediately with Miss Latchley, for the purpose of ascertaining if we could render her any temporary assistance. Perhaps it was more than she deserved; but we could not forget her sex, though she had done everything in her power to disguise it; and, besides, the lucky blow with the life-preserver, which she administered to Hyams, was a service for which we could not be otherwise than grateful. Jack Wilkinson was selected as the medium of communication. He found the strong Lavinia alone, and perfectly composed.

"I wish never more," said she, "to hear the name of Pettigrew. It is associated in my mind with weakness, fanaticism, and vacillation; and I shall ever feel humbled at the reflection that I bowed my woman's pride to gaze on the surface of so shallow and opaque a pool! And yet, why regret? The image of the sun is reflected equally from the Bœotian marsh and the mirror of the clear Ontario! Tell your uncle," continued she, after a pause, "that as he is nothing to me, so I wish to be nothing to him. Let us mutually extinguish memory. Ha, ha, ha! – so they fed him, you say, upon broccoli?

"But I have one message to give, though not to him. The youth who, in the nobility of his soul, declared his passion for my intellect – where is he? I tarry beneath this roof but for him. Do my message fairly, and say to him that if he seeks a communion of soul – no! that is the common phrase of the slaves of antiquated superstition – if he yearns for a grand amalgamation of essential passion and power, let him hasten hither, and Lavinia Latchley is ready to accompany him to the prairie or the forest, to the torrid zone, or to the confines of the arctic seas!"

"I shall deliver your message, ma'am," said Jack, "as accurately as my abilities will allow." And he did so.

Rogers of ours writhed uneasily in his seat.

"I'll tell you what it is, my fine fellows," said he, "I don't look upon this quite as a laughing matter. I am really sorry to have taken in the old woman, though I don't see how we could well have helped it; and I would far rather, Jack, that she had fixed her affections upon you than on me. I shall get infernally roasted at the mess if this story should transpire. However, I suppose there's only one answer to be given. Pray, present my most humble respects, and say how exceedingly distressed I feel that my professional engagements will not permit me to accompany her in her proposed expedition."

Jack reported the answer in due form.

"Then," said Lavinia, drawing herself up to her full height, and shrouding her visage in a black veil, "tell him that for his sake I am resolved to die a virgin!"

I presume she will keep her word; at least I have not yet heard that any one has been courageous enough to request her to change her situation. She has since returned to America, and is now, I believe, the president of a female college, the students of which may be distinguished from the rest of their sex, by their uniform adoption of bloomers.

notes

1

Blackwood's Magazine, No. CCCXCIX., for January 1849.

2

"The word chasua signifies an expedition along the frontier, or rather across the frontier, for the capture of men and beasts. These slave-hunts are said to have been first introduced here by the Turks, and the word chasua is not believed to be indigenous, since for war and battle are otherwise used harba (properly a lance) and schàmmata. Chasua and razzia appear to be synonymous, corrupted from the Italian cazzia, in French chasse." —Feldzug von Sennaar, &c., p. 17.

3

These Kammarabs possess a tract on the left or south bank of the Atbara. The distribution of the different tribes, as well as the line of march and other particulars, are very clearly displayed in the appropriate little map accompanying Mr Werne's volume. Opposite to the Kammarabs, "on the right bank of the Atbara, are the Anafidabs, of the race or family of the Bischari. They form a Kabyle (band or community) under a Schech of their own. How it is that the French in Algiers persist in using Kabyle as the proper name of a nation and a country, I cannot understand." —Feldzug von Sennaar, p. 32.

4

Blackwood's Magazine, No. CCCCIV., for June 1849.

5

Fact. In a work by M. Gibert, a celebrated French physician, on diseases of the skin, he states that that minute troublesome kind of rash, known by the name of prurigo, though not dangerous in itself, has often driven the individual afflicted by it to – suicide. I believe that our more varying climate, and our more heating drinks and aliments, render this skin complaint more common in England than in France, yet I doubt if any English physician could state that it had ever driven one of his English patients to suicide.

6

It is seldom any action of a limb is performed without the concurrence of several muscles; and, if the action is at all energetic, a number of muscles are brought into play as an equipoise or balance; the infant, therefore, would be sadly puzzled amongst its muscular sensations, supposing that it had them. Besides, it seems clear that those movements we see an infant make with its arms and legs are, in the first instance, as little voluntary as the muscular movements it makes for the purpose of respiration. There is an animal life within us, dependent on its own laws of irritability. Over a portion of this the developed thought or reason gains dominion; over a large portion the will never has any hold; over another portion, as in the organs of respiration, it has an intermittent and divided empire. We learn voluntary movement by doing that instinctively and spontaneously which we afterwards do from forethought. We have moved our arm; we wish to do the like again, (and to our wonder, if we then had intelligence enough to wonder,) we do it.

7

It is desirable here to explain that the old constitution of Portugal, whose restoration is the main feature of the scheme of the National or Royalist party, (it assumes both names,) gave the right of voting at the election of members of the popular assembly to every man who had a hearth of his own – whether he occupied a whole house or a single room – in fact, to all heads of families and self-supporting persons. Such extent of suffrage ought surely to content the most democratic, and certainly presents a strong contrast to the farce of national representation which has been so long enacting in the Peninsula.

8

The principal Miguelite papers, A Nação (Lisbon,) and O Portugal (Oporto,) both of them highly respectable journals, conducted with much ability and moderation, unceasingly reiterate, whilst exposing the vices and corruption of the present system, their aversion to despotism, and their desire for a truly liberal and constitutional government.

9

The Marquis of Abrantes is descended from the Dukes of Lancaster, through Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of John I., one of the greatest kings Portugal ever possessed.

10

This remark, (regarding the press,) literally true in Spain, does not apply to Portugal.

11