a
shoe, thus causing delay, and separation of the brothers on the road.
Eustace went on forward, whilst John Inglesant was detained behind,
filled with strange, and awesome forebodings. Eventually he reached the
inn at Mintern ; and was told by the host that his brother and a
foreign gentleman were upstairs in the parlour ; he had thought they
were having some words a while ago, but they were quiet now. John
Inglesant told the host to follow him up the two flights of oak stairs
; at top of which they entered the room over the hall, and porch. It
was a large and narrow room, and was seemingly empty. Opposite them, in
the high window, and on the great carved chimney to the right, running
greyhounds coursed each other, as it seemed to Inglesant, round the
room. A long table hid the hearth as they came in. With a faint
certainty, Inglesant, as if mechanically, walked round it towards the
fire, the others with him, where they stopped, sudden and still. On the
white hearthstone—his hair and clothes steeped in blood—lay Eustace
Inglesant, the Italian's stiletto in his heart. It should be remembered
that Eustace Inglesant, having detected the base pretensions, and
criminal villainy of this wily Italian, was an object to him of hatred,
and of immediate danger in his crafty path.
In
a previous chapter of this powerful Romance,— veritable in its main
incidents,—we learn that the " malade imaginaire" Quakeress, wife of
Eustace Inglesant, becoming daily more and more eccentric, and
crotchety about her health, straightway adopted every new remedy, and
every fresh religious notion which was brought before her. She " filled
her house with quacks, (of whom Van Helmont was chief), mountebanks,
