Into circles such as those of which the dim outline is here so imperfectly sketched, Jasper Losely niched himself, as le bel Anglais. (Pleasant representative of the English nation!) Not that those circles are to have the sole credit of his corruption. No! Justice is justice! Stand we up for our native land! Le bel Anglais entered those circles a much greater knave than most of those whom he found there. But there, at least, he learned to set a yet higher value on his youth, and strength, and comeliness—on his readiness of resource—on the reckless audacity that browbeat timid and some even valiant men—on the six feet one of faultless symmetry that captivated foolish, and some even sensible women. Gaming was, however, his vice by predilection. A month before Arabella met him, he had had a rare run of luck. On the strength of it he had resolved to return to London, and (wholly oblivious of the best of creatures till she had thus startled him) hunt out and swoop off with an heiress. Three French friends accompanied him. Each had the same object. Each believed that London swarmed with heiresses. They were all three fine-looking men. One was a Count,—at least he said so. But proud of his rank?—not a bit of it: all for liberty (no man more likely to lose it)—all for fraternity (no man you would less love as a brother). And as for egalite!—the son of a shoemaker who was homme de lettres, and wrote in a journal, inserted a jest on the Count’s courtship. “All men are equal before the pistol,” said the Count; and knowing that in that respect he was equal to most, having practised at poupees from the age of fourteen, he called out the son of Crispin and shot him through the lungs. Another of Jasper’s travelling friends was an enfant die peuple—boasted that he was a foundling. He made verses of lugubrious strain, and taught Jasper how to shuffle at whist. The third, like Jasper, had been designed for trade; and, like Jasper, he had a soul above it. In politics he was a Communist—in talk Philanthropist. He was the cleverest man of them all, and is now at the galleys. The fate of his two compatriots—more obscure it is not my duty to discover. In that peculiar walk of life Jasper is as much as I can possibly manage.
It need not be said that Jasper carefully abstained from reminding his old city friends of his existence. It was his object and his hope to drop all identity with that son of a convict who had been sent out of the way to escape humiliation. In this resolve he was the more confirmed because he had no old city friends out of whom anything could be well got. His poor uncle, who alone of his relations in England had been privy to his change of name, was dead; his end hastened by grief for William Losely’s disgrace, and the bad reports he had received from France of the conduct of William Losely’s son. That uncle had left, in circumstances too straitened to admit the waste of a shilling, a widow of very rigid opinions; who, if ever by some miraculous turn in the wheel of fortune she could have become rich enough to slay a fatted calf, would never have given the shin-bone of it to a prodigal like Jasper, even had he been her own penitent son, instead of a graceless step-nephew. Therefore, as all civilisation proceeds westward, Jasper turned his face from the east; and had no more idea of recrossing Temple Bar in search of fortune, friends, or kindred, than a modern Welshman would dream of a pilgrimage to Asian shores to re-embrace those distant relatives whom Hu Gadarn left behind him countless centuries ago, when that mythical chief conducted his faithful Cymrians over the Hazy Sea to this happy island of Honey.
[Mel Ynnys—Isle of Honey. One of the poetic names given to England in the language of the ancient Britons.]
Two days after his rencontre with Arabella in the Green Park, the soi-disant Hammond having, in the interim, learned that Darrell was immensely rich, and that Matilda was his only surviving child, did not fail to find himself in the Green Park again—and again—and again!
Arabella, of course, felt how wrong it was to allow him to accost her, and walk by one side of her while Miss Darrell was on the other. But she felt, also, as if it would be much more wrong to slip out and meet him alone. Not for worlds would she again have placed herself in such peril. To refuse to meet him at all?—she had not strength enough for that! Her joy at seeing him was so immense. And nothing could be more respectful than Jasper’s manner and conversation. Whatever of warmer and more impassioned sentiment was exchanged between them passed in notes. Jasper had suggested to Arabella to represent him to Matilda as some near relation. But Arabella refused all such disguise. Her sole claim to self-respect was in considering him solemnly engaged to her—the man she was to marry.
And, after the second time they thus met, she said to Matilda, who had not questioned her by a word-by a look: “I was to be married to that gentleman before my father died; we are to be married as soon as we have something to live upon.”
Matilda made some commonplace but kindly rejoinder. And thus she became raised into Arabella’s confidence, so far as that confidence could be given, without betraying Jasper’s real name or one darker memory in herself. Luxury, indeed, it was to Arabella to find, at last, some one to whom she could speak of that betrothal in which her whole future was invested—of that affection which was her heart’s sheet-anchor—of that home, humble it might be and far off, but to which Time rarely fails to bring the Two, if never weary of the trust to become as One. Talking thus, Arabella forgot the relationship of pupil and teacher; it was as woman to woman—girl to girl—friend to friend. Matilda seemed touched by the confidence—flattered to possess at last another’s secret. Arabella was a little chafed that she did not seem to admire Jasper as much as Arabella thought the whole world must admire. Matilda excused herself. “She had scarcely noticed Mr. Hammond. Yes: she had no doubt he would be considered handsome; but she owned, though it might be bad taste, that she preferred a pale complexion, with auburn hair;” and then she sighed and looked away, as if she had, in the course of her secret life, encountered some fatal pale complexion, with never-to-be-forgotten auburn hair. Not a word was said by either Matilda or Arabella as to concealing from Mr. Darrell these meetings with Mr. Hammond. Perhaps Arabella could not stoop to ask that secrecy; but there was no necessity to ask; Matilda was always too rejoiced to have something to conceal.
Now, in these interviews, Jasper scarcely ever addressed himself to Matilda; not twenty spoken words could have passed between them; yet, in the very third interview, Matilda’s sly fingers had closed on a sly note. And from that day, in each interview, Arabella walking in the centre, Jasper on one side, Matilda the other—behind Arabella’s back-passed the sly fingers and the sly notes, which Matilda received and answered. Not more than twelve or fourteen times was even this interchange effected. Darrell was about to move to Fawley. All such meetings would be now suspended. Two or three mornings before that fixed for leaving London, Matilda’s room was found vacant. She was gone. Arabella was the first to discover her flight, the first to learn its cause. Matilda had left on her writing-table a letter for Miss Fossett. It was very short, very quietly expressed, and it rested her justification on a note from Jasper, which she enclosed—a note in which that gallant hero, ridiculing the idea that he could ever have been in love with Arabella, declared that he would destroy himself if Matilda refused to fly. She need not fear such angelic confidence in him. No! Even
Had he a heart for falsehood framed,
He ne’er could injure her.”
Stifling each noisier cry—but panting—gasping—literally half out of her mind, Arabella rushed into Darrell’s study. He, unsuspecting man, calmly bending over his dull books, was startled by her apparition. Few minutes sufficed to tell him all that it concerned him to learn. Few brief questions, few passionate answers, brought him to the very worst.
Who, and what, was this Mr. Hammond? Heaven of heavens! the son of William Losely—of a transported felon!
Arabella exulted in a reply which gave her a moment’s triumph over the rival who had filched from her such a prize. Roused from his first misery and sense of abasement in this discovery, Darrell’s wrath was naturally poured, not on the fugitive child, but on the frontless woman, who, buoyed up by her own rage and sense of wrong, faced him, and did not cower. She, the faithless governess, had presented to her pupil this convict’s son in another name; she owned it—she had trepanned into the snares of so vile a fortune-hunter an ignorant child: she might feign amaze—act remorse—she must have been the man’s accomplice. Stung, amidst all the bewilderment of her anguish, by this charge, which, at least, she did not deserve, Arabella tore from her bosom Jasper’s recent letters to herself—letters all devotion and passion—placed them before Darrell, and bade him read. Nothing thought she then of name and fame—nothing but of her wrongs and of her woes. Compared to herself, Matilda seemed the perfidious criminal—she the injured victim. Darrell but glanced over the letters; they were signed “your loving husband.”
“What is this?” he exclaimed; “are you married to the man?”
“Yes,” cried Arabella, “in the eyes of Heaven!”
To Darrell’s penetration there was no mistaking the significance of those words and that look; and his wrath redoubled. Anger in him, when once roused, was terrible; he had small need of words to vent it. His eye withered, his gesture appalled. Conscious but of one burning firebrand in brain and heart—of a sense that youth, joy, and hope were for ever gone, that the world could never be the same again—Arabella left the house, her character lost, her talents useless, her very means of existence stopped. Who henceforth would take her to teach? Who henceforth place their children under her charge?
She shrank into a gloomy lodging—she—shut herself up alone with her despair. Strange though it may seem, her anger against Jasper was slight as compared with the in tensity of her hate to Matilda. And stranger still it may seem, that as her thoughts recovered from their first chaos, she felt more embittered against the world, more crushed by a sense of shame, and yet galled by a no less keen sense of injustice, in recalling the scorn with which Darrell had rejected all excuse for her conduct in the misery it had occasioned her, than she did by the consciousness of her own lamentable errors. As in Darrell’s esteem there was something that, to those who could appreciate it, seemed invaluable, so in his contempt to those who had cherished that esteem there was a weight of ignominy, as if a judge had pronounced a sentence that outlaws the rest of life.
Arabella had not much left out of her munificent salary. What she had hitherto laid by had passed to Jasper—defraying, perhaps, the very cost of his flight with her treacherous rival. When her money was gone, she pawned the poor relics of her innocent happy girlhood, which she had been permitted to take from her father’s home, and had borne with her wherever she went, like household gods, the prize-books, the lute, the costly work-box, the very bird-cage, all which the reader will remember to have seen in her later life, the books never opened—the lute broken, the bird long, long, long vanished from the cage! Never did she think she should redeem those pledges from that Golgotha, which takes, rarely to give back, so many hallowed tokens of the Dreamland called “Better Days,”—the trinkets worn at the first ball, the ring that was given with the earliest love-vow—yea, even the very bells and coral that pleased the infant in his dainty cradle, and the very Bible in which the lips, that now bargain for sixpence more, read to some grey-haired father on his bed of death!
Soon the sums thus miserably raised were as miserably doled away. With a sullen apathy the woman contemplated famine. She would make no effort to live—appeal to no relations, no friends. It was a kind of vengeance she took on others, to let herself drift on to death. She had retreated from lodging to lodging, each obscurer, more desolate than the other. Now, she could no longer pay rent for the humblest room; now, she was told to go forth—whither? She knew not—cared not—took her way towards the River, as by that instinct which, when the mind is diseased, tends towards self-destruction, scarce less involuntarily than it turns, in health, towards self-preservation. Just as she passed under the lamp-light at the foot of Westminster Bridge, a man looked at her, and seized her arm. She raised her head with a chilly, melancholy scorn, as if she had received an insult—as if she feared that the man knew the stain upon her name, and dreamed, in his folly, that the dread of death might cause her to sin again.
“Do you not know me?” said the man; “more strange that I should recognise you! Dear, dear, and what a dress!—how you are altered! Poor thing!”
At the words “poor thing” Arabella burst into tears; and in those tears the heavy cloud on her brain seemed to melt away.
“I have been inquiring, seeking for you everywhere, Miss,” resumed the man. “Surely, you know me now! Your poor aunt’s lawyer! She is no more—died last week. She has left you all she had in the world; and a very pretty income it is, too, for a single lady.”
Thus it was that we find Arabella installed in the dreary comforts of Podden Place. “She exchanged,” she said, “in honour to her aunt’s memory, her own name for that of Crane, which her aunt had borne—her own mother’s maiden name.” She assumed, though still so young, that title of “Mrs.” which spinsters, grown venerable, moodily adopt when they desire all mankind to know that henceforth they relinquish the vanities of tender misses—that, become mistress of themselves, they defy and spit upon our worthless sex, which, whatever its repentance, is warned that it repents in vain. Most of her aunt’s property was in houses, in various districts of Bloombury. Arabella moved from one to the other of these tenements, till she settled for good into the dullest of all. To make it duller yet, by contrast with the past, the Golgotha for once gave up its buried treasures—broken lute, birdless cage!
Somewhere about two years after Matilda’s death, Arabella happened to be in the office of the agent who collected her house-rents, when a well-dressed man entered, and, leaning over the counter, said: “There is an advertisement in to-day’s Times about a lady who offers a home, education, and so forth, to any little motherless girl; terms moderate, as said lady loves children for their own sake. Advertiser refers to your office for particulars—give them!”
The agent turned to his books; and Arabella turned towards the inquirer. “For whose child do you want a home, Jasper Losely?”
Jasper started. “Arabella! Best of creatures! And can you deign to speak to such a vil—-”
“Hush—let us walk. Never mind the advertisement of a stranger. I may find a home for a motherless child—a home that will cost you nothing.”
She drew him into the street. “But can this be the child of—of—Matilda Darrell?”—
“Bella!” replied, in coaxing accents, that most execrable of lady-killers, “can I trust you?—can you be my friend in spite of my having been such a very sad dog? But money—what can one do without money in this world? ‘Had I a heart for falsehood framed, it would ne’er have injured you’—if I had not been so cursedly hard up! And indeed, now, if you would but condescend to forgive and forget, perhaps some day or other we may be Darby and Joan—only, you see, just at this moment I am really not worthy of such a Joan. You know, of course, that I am a widower—not inconsolable.”
“Yes; I read of Mrs. Hammond’s death in an old newspaper.”
“And you did not read of her baby’s death, too—some weeks afterwards?”’
“No; it is seldom that I see a newspaper. Is the infant dead?”
“Hum—you shall hear.” And Jasper entered into a recital, to which Arabella listened with attentive interest. At the close she offered to take, herself, the child for whom Jasper sought a home. She informed him of her change of name and address. The wretch promised to call that evening with the infant; but he sent the infant, and did not call. Nor did he present himself again to her eyes, until, several years afterwards, those eyes so luridly welcomed him to Podden Place. But though he did not even condescend to write to her in the mean while, it is probable that Arabella contrived to learn more of his habits and mode of life at Paris than she intimated when they once more met face to face.
And now the reader knows more than Alban Morley, or Guy Darrell, perhaps ever will know, of the grim woman in iron-grey,
CHAPTER X
“Sweet are the uses of Adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Bears yet a precious jewel in its head.”
MOST PERSONS WILL AGREE THAT THE TOAD IS UGLY AND VENOMOUS, BUT FEW INDEED ARE THE PERSONS WHO CAN BOAST OF HAVING ACTUALLY DISCOVERED THAT “PRECIOUS JEWEL IN ITS HEAD,” WHICH THE POET ASSURES US IS PLACED THERE. BUT CALAMITY MAY BE CLASSED IN TWO GREAT DIVISIONS— 1ST, THE AFFLICTIONS, WHICH NO PRUDENCE CAN AVERT; 2ND, THE MISFORTUNES, WHICH MEN TAKE ALL POSSIBLE PAINS TO BRING UPON THEMSELVES. AFFLICTIONS OF THE FIRST CLASS MAY BUT CALL FORTH OUR VIRTUES, AND RESULT IN OUR ULTIMATE GOOD. SUCH IS THE ADVERSITY WHICH MAY GIVE US THE JEWEL. BUT TO GET AT THE JEWEL WE MUST KILL THE TOAD. MISFORTUNES OF THE SECOND CLASS BUT TOO OFTEN INCREASE THE ERRORS OR THE VICES BY WHICH THEY WERE CREATED. SUCH IS THE ADVERSITY WHICH IS ALL TOAD AND NO JEWEL. IF YOU CHOOSE TO BREED AND FATTEN YOUR OWN TOADS, THE INCREASE OF THE VENOM ABSORBS EVERY BIT OF THE JEWEL.
Never did I know a man who was an habitual gambler, otherwise than notably inaccurate in his calculations of probabilities in the ordinary affairs of life. Is it that such a man has become so chronic a drunkard of hope, that he sees double every chance in his favour?
Jasper Losely had counted upon two things as matters of course.
1st. Darrell’s speedy reconciliation with his only child. 2nd. That Darrell’s only child must of necessity be Darrell’s heiress.
In both these expectations the gambler was deceived. Darrell did not even answer the letters that Matilda addressed to him from France, to the shores of which Jasper had borne her, and where he had hastened to make her his wife under the assumed name of Hammond, but his true Christian name of Jasper.
In the disreputable marriage Matilda had made, all the worst parts of her character seemed suddenly revealed to her father’s eye, and he saw what he had hitherto sought not to see, the true child of a worthless mother. A mere mesalliance, if palliated by long or familiar acquaintance with the object, however it might have galled him, his heart might have pardoned; but here, without even a struggle of duty, without the ordinary coyness of maiden pride, to be won with so scanty a wooing, by a man who she knew was betrothed to another—the dissimulation, the perfidy, the combined effrontery and meanness of the whole transaction, left no force in Darrell’s eyes to the common place excuses of experience and youth. Darrell would not have been Darrell if he could have taken back to his home or his heart a daughter so old in deceit, so experienced in thoughts that dishonour.
Darrell’s silence, however, little saddened the heartless bride, and little dismayed the sanguine bridegroom. Both thought that pardon and plenty were but the affair of time a little more or little less. But their funds rapidly diminished; it became necessary to recruit them. One can’t live in hotels entirely upon hope. Leaving his bride for a while in a pleasant provincial town, not many hours distant from Paris, Jasper returned to London, intent upon seeing Darrell himself; and, should the father-in-law still defer articles of peace, Jasper believed that he could have no trouble in raising a present supply upon such an El Dorado of future expectations. Darrell at once consented to see Jasper, not at his own house, but at his solicitor’s. Smothering all opposing disgust, the proud gentleman deemed this condescension essential to the clear and definite understanding of those resolves upon which depended the worldly station and prospects of the wedded pair.
When Jasper was shown into Mr. Gotobed’s office, Darrell was alone, standing near the hearth, and by a single quiet gesture repelled that tender rush towards his breast which Jasper had elaborately prepared; and thus for the first time the two men saw each other, Darrell perhaps yet more resentfully mortified while recognising those personal advantages in the showy profligate which had rendered a daughter of his house so facile a conquest: Jasper (who had chosen to believe that a father-in-law so eminent must necessarily be old and broken) shocked into the most disagreeable surprise by the sight of a man still young, under forty, with a countenance, a port, a presence, that in any assemblage would have attracted the general gaze from his own brilliant self, and looking altogether as unfavourable an object, whether for pathos or for post-obits, as unlikely to breathe out a blessing or to give up the ghost, as the worst brute of a father-in-law could possibly be. Nor were Darrell’s words more comforting than his aspect.
“Sir, I have consented to see you, partly that you may learn from my own lips once for all that I admit no man’s right to enter my family without my consent, and that consent you will never receive; and partly that, thus knowing each other by sight, each may know the man it becomes him most to avoid. The lady who is now your wife is entitled by my marriage-settlement to the reversion of a small fortune at my death; nothing more from me is she likely to inherit. As I have no desire that she to whom I once gave the name of daughter should be dependent wholly on yourself for bread, my solicitor will inform you on what conditions I am willing, during my life, to pay the interest of the sum which will pass to your wife at my death. Sir, I return to your hands the letters that lady has addressed to me, and which, it is easy to perceive, were written at your dictation. No letter from her will I answer. Across my threshold her foot will never pass. Thus, sir, concludes all possible intercourse between you and myself; what rests is between you and that gentleman.”
Darrell had opened a side-door in speaking the last words—pointed towards the respectable form of Mr. Gotobed standing tall beside his tall desk—and, before Jasper could put in a word, the father-in-law was gone.
With becoming brevity, Mr. Gotobed made Jasper fully aware that not only all, Mr. Darrell’s funded or personal property was entirely at his own disposal—that not only the large landed estates he had purchased (and which Jasper had vaguely deemed inherited and in strict entail) were in the same condition—condition enviable to the proprietor, odious to the bridegroom of the proprietor’s sole daughter; but that even the fee-simple of the poor Fawley Manor House and lands were vested in Darrell, encumbered only by the portion of L10,000 which the late Mrs. Darrell had brought to her husband, and which was settled, at the death of herself and Darrell, on the children of the marriage.
In the absence of marriage-settlements between Jasper and Matilda, that sum at Darrell’s death was liable to be claimed by Jasper, in right of his wife, so as to leave no certainty that provision would remain for the support of his wife and family; and the contingent reversion might, in the mean time, be so dealt with as to bring eventual poverty on them all.
“Sir,” said the lawyer, “I will be quite frank with you. It is my wish, acting for Mr. Darrell, so to settle this sum of L10,000 on your wife, and any children she may bear you, as to place it out of your power to anticipate or dispose of it, even with Mrs. Hammond’s consent. If you part with that power, not at present a valuable one, you are entitled to compensation. I am prepared to make that compensation liberal. Perhaps you would prefer communicating with me through your own solicitor. But I should tell you, that the terms are more likely to be advantageous to you in proportion as negotiation is confined to us two. It might, for instance, be expedient to tell your solicitor that your true name (I beg you a thousand pardons) is not Hammond. That is a secret which, the more you can keep it to yourself, the better I think it will be for you. We have no wish to blab it out.”
Jasper, by this time, had somewhat recovered the first shock of displeasure and disappointment; and with that quickness which so erratically darted through a mind that contrived to be dull when anything honest was addressed to its apprehension, he instantly divined that his real name of Losely was worth something. He had no idea of reusing—was, indeed, at that time anxious altogether to ignore and eschew it; but he had a right to it, and a man’s rights are not to be resigned for nothing. Accordingly, he said with some asperity: “I shall resume my family name whenever I choose it. If Mr. Darrell does not like his daughter to be called Mrs. Jasper Losely—or all the malignant tittle-tattle which my poor father’s unfortunate trial might provoke—he must, at least, ask me as a favour to retain the name I have temporarily adopted—a name in my family, sir. A Losely married a Hammond, I forget when—generations ago—you’ll see it in the Baronetage. My grandfather, Sir Julian, was not a crack lawyer, but he was a baronet of as good birth as any in the country; and my father, sir”—(Jasper’s voice trembled) “my father,” he repeated, fiercely striking his clenched hand on the table, “was a gentleman every inch of his body; and I’ll pitch any man out of the window who says a word to the contrary!”
“Sir,” said Mr. Gotobed, shrinking towards the bell pull, “I think, on the whole, I had better see your solicitor.”
Jasper cooled down at that suggestion; and, with a slight apology for natural excitement, begged to know what Mr. Gotobed wished to propose. To make an end of this part of the story, after two or three interviews, in which the two negotiators learned to understand each other, a settlement was legally completed, by which the sum of L10,000 was inalienably settled on Matilda, and her children by her marriage with Jasper; in case he survived her, the interest was to be his for life—in case she died childless, the capital would devolve to himself at Darrell’s decease. Meanwhile, Darrell agreed to pay L500 a year, as the interest of the L10,000 at five per cent., to Jasper Hammond, or his order, provided always that Jasper and his wife continued to reside together, and fixed that residence abroad.
By a private verbal arrangement, not even committed to writing, to this sum was added another L200 a year, wholly at Darrell’s option and discretion. It being clearly comprehended that these words meant so long as Mr. Hammond kept his own secret, and so long, too, as he forbore, directly or indirectly, to molest, or even to address, the person at whose pleasure it was held. On the whole, the conditions to Jasper were sufficiently favourable: he came into an income immeasurably beyond his right to believe that he should ever enjoy; and sufficient—well managed—for even a fair share of the elegancies as well as comforts of life, to a young couple blest in each other’s love, and remote from the horrible taxes and emulous gentilities of this opulent England, where out of fear to be thought too poor nobody is ever too rich.
Matilda wrote no more to Darrell. But some months afterwards he received an extremely well-expressed note in French, the writer whereof represented herself as a French lady, who had very lately seen Madame Hammondwho was now in London, but for a few days, and had something to communicate, of such importance as to justify the liberty she took in requesting him to honour her with a visit. After some little hesitation, Darrell called on this lady. Though Matilda had forfeited his affection, he could not contemplate her probable fate without painful anxiety. Perhaps Jasper had ill-used her—perhaps she had need of shelter elsewhere. Though that shelter could not again be under a father’s roof—and though Darrell would have taken no steps to separate her from the husband she had chosen, still, in secret, he would have felt comparative relief and ease had she herself sought to divide her fate from one whose path downwards in dishonour his penetration instinctively divined. With an idea that some communication might be made to him, to which he might reply that Matilda, if compelled to quit her husband, should never want the home and subsistence of a gentlewoman, he repaired to the house (a handsome house in a quiet street) temporarily occupied by the French lady. A tall chasseur, in full costume, opened the door—a page ushered him into the drawing-room. He saw a lady—young-and with all the grace of a Parisieune in her manner—who, after some exquisitely-turned phrases of excuse, showed him (as a testimonial of the intimacy between herself and Madame Hammond) a letter she had received from Matilda, in a very heart-broken, filial strain, full of professions of penitence—of a passionate desire for her father’s forgiveness—but far from complaining of Jasper, or hinting at the idea of deserting a spouse with whom, but for the haunting remembrance of a beloved parent, her lot would be blest indeed. Whatever of pathos was deficient in the letter, the French lady supplied by such apparent fine feeling, and by so many touching little traits of Matilda’s remorse, that Darrell’s heart was softened in spite of his reason. He went away, however, saying very little, and intending to call no more. But another note came. The French lady had received a letter from a mutual friend—“Matilda,” she feared, “was dangerously ill.” This took him again to the house, and the poor French lady seemed so agitated by the news she had heard—and yet so desirous not to exaggerate nor alarm him needlessly, that Darrell suspected his daughter was really dying, and became nervously anxious himself for the next report. Thus, about three or four visits in all necessarily followed the first one. Then Darrell abruptly closed the intercourse, and could not be induced to call again. Not that he for an instant suspected that this amiable lady, who spoke so becomingly, and whose manners were so high-bred, was other than the well-born Baroness she called herself, and looked to be, but partly because, in the last interview, the charming Parisienne had appeared a little to forget Matilda’s alarming illness, in a not forward but still coquettish desire to centre his attention more upon herself; and the moment she did so, he took a dislike to her which he had not before conceived; and partly because his feelings having recovered the first effect which the vision of a penitent, pining, dying daughter could not fail to produce, his experience of Matilda’s duplicity and falsehood made him discredit the penitence, the pining, and the dying. The Baroness might not wilfully be deceiving him—Matilda might be wilfully deceiving the Baroness. To the next note, therefore, despatched to him by the feeling and elegant foreigner, he replied but by a dry excuse—a stately hint, that family matters could never be satisfactorily discussed except in family councils, and that if her friend’s grief or illness were really in any way occasioned by a belief in the pain her choice of life might have inflicted on himself, it might comfort her to know that that pain had subsided, and that his wish for her health and happiness was not less sincere, because henceforth he could neither watch over the one nor administer to the other. To this note, after a day or two, the Baroness replied by a letter so beautifully worded, I doubt whether Madame de Sevigne could have written in purer French, or Madame de Steel with a finer felicity of phrase. Stripped of the graces of diction, the substance was but small: “Anxiety for a friend so beloved—so unhappy—more pitied even than before, now that the Baroness had been enabled to see how fondly a daughter must idolise a father in the Man whom the nation revered!—(here two lines devoted to compliment personal)—compelled by that anxiety to quit even sooner than she had first intended the metropolis of that noble Country,” &c.—(here four lines devoted to compliment national)—and then proceeding through some charming sentences about patriot altars and domestic hearths, the writer suddenly checked herself—“would intrude no more on time sublimely dedicated to the Human Race—and concluded with the assurance of sentiments the most distinguees.” Little thought Darrell that this complimentary stranger, whom he never again beheld, would exercise an influence over that portion of his destiny which then seemed to him most secure from evil; towards which, then, he looked for the balm to every wound—the compensation to every loss!