Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/96

 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!

Darrell heard no more of Matilda, till, not long afterwards, her death was announced to him. She had died from exhaustion shortly after giving birth to a female child. The news came upon him at a moment; when, from other causes--(the explanation of which, forming no part of his confidence to Alban, it will be convenient to reserve)--his mind was in a state of great affliction and disorder--when he had already buried himself in the solitudes of Fawley--ambition resigned and the world renounced--and the intelligence saddened and shocked him more than it might have done some months before. If, at that moment of utter bereavement, Matilda's child had been brought to him--given up to him to rear--would he have rejected it? would he have forgotten that it was a felon's grandchild?

I dare not say. But his pride was not put to such a trial. One day he received a packet from Mr. Gotobed, enclosing the formal certificates of the infant's death, which had been presented to him by Jasper, who had arrived in London for that melancholy purpose, with which he combined a pecuniary proposition. By the death of Matilda and her only child, the sum of L10,000 absolutely reverted to Jasper in the event of Darrell's decease. As the interest meanwhile was continued to Jasper, that widowed mourner suggested "that it would be a great boon to himself and no disadvantage to Darrell if the principal were made over to him at once. He had been brought up originally to commerce. He had abjured all thoughts of resuming such