to London to face the creditors.
Adversity had not lowered the admiration of the captain and his wife for
the magnificent host of those select and lofty entertainments which I
was led by my errand to examine in the skeleton, and with a wonder
as big as theirs, but of another complexion: They hung about him, and
perused and petted him quaintly; it was grotesque; they thought him
deeply injured: by what, by whom, they could not say; but Julia was
disappointed in me for refraining to come out with a sally on his
behalf. He had quite intoxicated their imaginations. Julia told me of
the things he did not do as marvellingly as of the things he did or had
done; the charm, it seemed, was to find herself familiar with him to
the extent of all but nursing him and making him belong to her. Pilgrims
coming upon the source of the mysteriously-abounding river, hardly
revere it the less because they love it more when they behold the
babbling channels it issues from; and the sense of possession is the
secret, I suppose. Julia could inform me rapturously that her charge had
slept eighteen hours at a spell. His remarks upon the proposal to fetch
a doctor, feeble in themselves, were delicious to her, because they
recalled his old humour to show his great spirit, and from her and from
Captain William in turn I was condemned to hear how he had said this and
that of the doctor, which in my opinion might have been more concise.
'Really, deuced good indeed!' Captain William would exclaim. 'Don't you
see it, Harry, my boy? He denies the doctor has a right to cast him out
of the world on account of his having been the official to introduce
him, and he'll only consent to be visited when he happens to be as
incapable of resisting as upon their very first encounter.'

The doctor and death and marriage, I ventured to remind the captain, had
been riddled in this fashion by the whole army of humourists and their
echoes.

He and Julia fancied me cold to my father's merits. Fond as they were
of the squire, they declared war against him in private, they criticized
Janet, they thought my aunt Dorothy slightly wrong in making a secret of
her good deed: my father was the victim. Their unabated warmth consoled
me in the bitterest of seasons. He found a home with them at a time when
there would have been a battle at every step. The world soon knew that
my grandfather had cast me off, and with this foundation destroyed, the
entire fabric of the Grand Parade