He met his
father; he would not look at him, he could not speak to him. It seemed
there was no living creature but must have been swift to recognise that
imminent animosity; but the hide of the Justice-Clerk remained
impenetrable. Had my lord been talkative, the truce could never have
subsisted; but he was by fortune in one of his humours of sour silence;
and under the very guns of his broadside, Archie nursed the enthusiasm
of rebellion. It seemed to him, from the top of his nineteen years'
experience, as if he were marked at birth to be the perpetrator of some
signal action, to set back fallen Mercy, to overthrow the usurping devil
that sat, horned and hoofed, on her throne. Seductive Jacobin figments,
which he had often refuted at the Speculative, swam up in his mind and
startled him as with voices: and he seemed to himself to walk
accompanied by an almost tangible presence of new beliefs and duties.
On the named morning he was at the place of execution. He saw the
fleering rabble, the flinching wretch produced.
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