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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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692 circumstances already detailed. With a shattered limb, a body severely bruised, a face disfigured by half-healed scars, and pallid from the exhaustion of recent pain and fever, Sir Mulberry Hawk lay stretched upon his back, on the couch to which he was doomed to be a prisoner for some weeks yet to come. Mr Pyke and Mr Pluck sat drinking hard in the next room, now and then varying the monotonous murmurs of their conversation with a half-smothered laugh, while the young lord-- the only member of the party who was not thoroughly irredeemable, and who really had a kind heart--sat beside his Mentor, with a cigar in his mouth, and read to him, by the light of a lamp, such scraps of intelligence from a paper of the day, as were most likely to yield him interest or amusement. ‘Curse those hounds!’ said the invalid, turning his head impatiently towards the adjoining room; ‘will nothing stop their infernal throats?’ Messrs Pyke and Pluck heard the exclamation, and stopped immediately: winking to each other as they did so, and filling their glasses to the brim, as some recompense for the deprivation of speech. ‘Damn!’ muttered the sick man between his teeth, and writhing impatiently in his bed. ‘Isn’t this mattress hard enough, and the room dull enough, and pain bad enough, but they must torture me? What’s the time?’ ‘Half-past eight,’ replied his friend. ‘Here, draw the table nearer, and let us have the cards again,’ said Sir Mulberry. ‘More piquet. Come.’ It was curious to see how eagerly the sick man, debarred from any change of position save the mere turning of his head from side |
