Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/201

 and boxes. But, in spite of these delusive appearances, I could not conceal from myself that a hectic spot occasionally marked the inroads which disease was now making on her lungs.

January 17, 1838.—What a day of anxiety and sorrow for me, and of anguish for Lady Hester! From morning until midnight to see a melancholy picture of a never-dying spirit, in an exhausted frame, wrestling with its enemy, and daring even to set the heaviest infirmities of nature at defiance. Yet, who does not bend under the power of disease? Lady Hester held out as long as a human being could do; but at last her anguish showed that, like Prometheus bound, she was compelled to acknowledge the weight of a superior hand, and that resistance was vain.

The reflections she made on her abandoned situation, neglected by her friends and left to die without one relation near her, were full of the bitterness of grief. In these moments, as if the excess of her indignation must have some object to waste itself upon, she would launch out into the most fierce invectives against me, and tell me I was a cannibal and a vulture that tore her heart by my insensibility.

A day or two before, in defending myself against the accusation of coldness and want of feeling, I had inadvertently said that it was an insult to a person, whose intentions she could not but know were well