| | 1 | Author: | Simms
William Gilmore
1806-1870 | Add | | | Title: | Guy Rivers  | | | | Published: | 1997 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 | | | | Description: | The night began to wane, and still did Lucy
Munro keep lonely vigil in her chamber. How
could she sleep? Threatened herself with a connexion
so dreadful as to her mind was that proposed
with Guy Rivers—deeply interested as
she now felt herself in the fortunes of the young
stranger, for whose fate and safety, knowing the
unfavourable position in which he stood with the
outlaws, she had every thing to apprehend—it can
cause no wonder when we say sleep grew a stranger
to her eyes, and without retiring to her couch,
though extinguishing her light, she sat musing by
the window of her chamber upon the thousand
conflicting and sad thoughts that were at strife in
her spirit. She had not been long in this position
when the sound of approaching horsemen reached
her ears, and after a brief interval, during which
she could perceive that they had alighted, she heard
the door of the hall gently unclosed, and footsteps,
as if set down with a nice caution, passing through
the passage. A light danced for a moment fitfully
along the chamber, as if borne from the sleeping
apartment of Munro to that adjoining the hall in
which the family were accustomed to pursue their
domestic avocations. Then came an occasional
murmur of speech to her ears, and then silence.
Perplexed with these circumstances, and wondering
at the return of Munro at an hour something
unusual—prompted too by a presentiment of something
wrong, and apprehensive on the score of
Ralph's safety—a curiosity, not surely under these
circumstances discreditable, to know what was
going on, determined her to ascertain something
more of the character of the nocturnal visitation.
She felt assured from the strangeness of the occurrence
that evil was afoot, and solicitous for its prevention,
she was persuaded to the measure solely
with the view to good. Hastily, yet cautiously, but
with trembling hands, undoing the door of her
apartment, she made her way into the long and
dark gallery, with which she was perfectly familiar,
and soon gained the apartment already referred to.
The door fortunately stood nearly closed, and she
was therefore enabled to pass it by and gain the
hall, which immediately adjoined, and lay in perfect
darkness; without herself being seen, she was
enabled, through a crevice in the partition dividing
the two rooms, to survey its inmates, and to hear
distinctly at the same time every thing that was
uttered. As she expected, there were the two conspirators,
Rivers and Munro, earnestly engaged in
discourse; to which, as it concerns materially our
progress, we may well be permitted to lend our
attention. They spoke on a variety of topics entirely
foreign to the understanding of the half-affrighted
and nervously-susceptible, but still resolute
young girl who heard them; and nothing but
her deep anxieties for one, whose own importance
in her eyes at that moment she did not conjecture,
could have sustained her while listening to a dialogue
full of atrocious intention and development,
and larded throughout with a familiar and sometimes
foul phraseology that certainly was not altogether
unseemly in such association. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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