Page:What will he do with it.djvu/492

482 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 Sévigné could have written in purer French, or Madame de Staël 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 idolize a father in the man whom a 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," etc.—(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 distinguées." 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; toward which, then, he looked for the balm to every wound—the compensation to every loss!

Darrell heard no more of Matilda, till, not long afterward, 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, inclosing 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 £10,000 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