I mean to send for K. I., to take leave of him, and forgive him, before I go. I 'm not sure that I 'd do so, Molly, if it wasn't for the opportunity of telling him my mind about all his cruelty to me, and that I know well what he's at, and that he'll be married again before six months. That's the treachery of men; but there's one comfort,--they are well paid off for it when they marry--as they always do--some young minx of nineteen or twenty. It's exactly what K. I. is capable of; and I mean to show him that I see it, and all the consequences besides.
The mixture is really of service to me, and I feel as if I could take a sleep. Mary Anne will seal this if I 'm not awake before post hour. #
LETTER XIII. FROM K. I. DODD TO THOMAS PURCELL, ESQ., OF THE GRANGE, BRUFF
My dear Tom,--Your reproaches are all just, but I really have not had courage to wield a pen these last three weeks, nor have I now patience to go back on the past. Perhaps when we meet--if ever that good time is to come round again--I may be able to tell you something of my final exit from Brussels; but now with the shame yet fresh, and the disgrace recent, I cannot find pluck for it.
Here we are at what they call the "Pavilion," having changed from the Hotel d'Angleterre yesterday. You must know, Tom, that this same city of Liège is the noisiest, most dinning, hammering, hissing, clanking, creaking, welding, smelting, and furnace-roaring town in Europe. Something like a hundred thousand tinkers are at work every day; and from an egg saucepan to a steam-boiler there is something to be hammered at by every capacity!
You would say that tumult like this might satisfy the most craving appetite for uproar; but not so: the Liégeois are regular gluttons for noise, and they insist upon having Verdi's new opera of "Nabuchodonosor" performed at their great theatre. Now, this same theatre is exactly in front of the Hôtel d'Angleterre, so that when, by dint of time, patience, and a partial dulness of the acoustic nerves, we were getting used to steam-factories and shot-foundries, down comes Verdi on us, with a din and clangor to which even the works of Seraing were like an _Æolian_ harp! Now, of all the Pretenders of these days of especial humbug, with our "Long ranges," Morison's pills and Louis Napoleons, I don't think you could show me a greater charlatan than this same Verdi. I don't pretend to know a bit about music; I only knew two tunes all my life, "God save the King" and "Patrick's Day," and these only because we used to stand up and take off our hats to them in the Dublin theatre; but modulated, soft sounds have always had their effect on me, and I never heard a country girl singing as she beetled her linen beside a river's bank, or listened to the deep bay of an old fox-hound of a clear winter's morning, without feeling that there was something inside of me somewhere that responded to the note. But this fellow is all marrow-bones and cleavers! Trumpets, drums, big fiddles, and bassoons are the softest things he knows. I take it as a providential thing that his music cracks every voice after one season; for before long there will be nobody left in Europe to sing him, except it be the steam-whistle of an express-train!