Yet perhaps these unhappy women must
have sunk under their unparalleled calamities, had it not been for the
devotion of their companion. In the despair of his first emotions,
George Cadurcis was nearly plunging himself headlong into the wave
that had already proved so fatal to his house. But when he thought of
Lady Annabel and Venetia in a foreign land, without a single friend in
their desolation, and pictured them to himself with the dreadful news
abruptly communicated by some unfeeling stranger; and called upon,
in the midst of their overwhelming agony, to attend to all the
heart-rending arrangements which the discovery of the bodies of the
beings to whom they were devoted, and in whom all their feelings were
centred, must necessarily entail upon them, he recoiled from what he
contemplated as an act of infamous desertion. He resolved to live, if
only to preserve them from all their impending troubles, and with the
hope that his exertions might tend, in however slight a degree, not
to alleviate, for that was impossible; but to prevent the increase
of that terrible woe, the very conception of which made his brain
stagger. He carried the bodies, therefore, with him to Spezzia, and
then prepared for that fatal interview, the commencement of which we
first indicated.
Pages:
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665