Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/315

 to his chamber, and never left his bedside during his illness; though my grief for Dumont was so violent that nothing less than my care for my brother's life could have supported my spirits under such an affliction, or have hindered my following him to the grave. And, indeed, the day he was buried I had like to have died; but it pleased God to preserve me beyond my own strength, and to make me a means of preserving the unfortunate Stainville. "We had some great friends at court, to whom I applied so effectually, setting forth the strong appearances by which he had been deceived, that they obtained his grace of the king, no friend of Dumont's having appeared to solicit against me; for, in truth, my brother was so much an object of compassion to all men, that none could think of desiring to punish him more than he had punished himself. "I durst not acquaint him with the tragical end of his wife till his health seemed to be fully restored; and even then I would have concealed from him the shocking circumstance of her having poisoned herself, but he was unluckily told it by her servant. This extremely affected him; and, joined to the horror he felt for the death of Dumont, threw him into so deep a melancholy, that he talked of nothing but renouncing the pardon we had obtained for him, delivering himself up to all the rigour of the law, and dying upon a scaffold, the better to expiate the death of his friend. But at last the religious impressions his mind had received got the better of all other sentiments; he took a sudden resolution to quit the world, and turn Carthusian, having first made over all his estate, in equal proportions, to me and the mother of poor Dumont.

"I would have also gone into a nunnery, and resigned the whole to her; but all my relations were so averse to it, and begged me so earnestly to continue among them, that I gave way to their