Page:William Howitt.pdf/11

442 they were equally untrue in fact, we may reasonably infer from the circumstance, that they who knew her best still continued her firm and unflinching friends. Dr. and Mrs. Todd Thomson, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mr. Blanchard, General Fagan and his family, and many others; amongst them, Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, Miss Jane Porter, Miss Strickland, Miss Costello, and Mrs. and Miss Sheldon, whose inmate she had been for so many years; who began with prejudice against her, and who soon became, and continued to the last, with the very best means of observation, her sincere friends.

These calumnies, however, must for years have been a source of anguish to her, haunting, but, happily, not disabling her in the midst of her incessant exertions for the holiest of purposes. They put an end to one engagement of marriage: they very probably threw their weight into the decision which conducted her into the fatal one she ultimately formed.

The circumstances connected with her marriage and death are too well known to require narrating here. Time has thrown no clear light on the mystery. Mr. Laman Blanchard, in his memoir of her, has laboured hard to prove that she did not die by the poison of prussic-acid. His reasoning will not bear examination. That she died with a bottle in her hand, which contained it, he confesses is proved by other evidence than that of Mrs. Bailey, who first found her dead.

But the question still remains, whether she took it purposely; and it may be very strongly doubted that she did. From all that has transpired, it is more probable that she had taken it by mistake.

That she was likely to take this poison purposely, there is no ground to imagine. On the contrary, to the very last, her letters to England were full of a cheerfulness that has all the air of thorough reality. It is true, there are many circumstances that we could wish otherwise: that her husband had, it is believed, a family by a native Fantee woman; that he insisted on the marriage with Miss Landon in England remaining a secret till just before sailing, as if fearful of the news preceding him home; that he went on shore in the night, through the surf, and at great risk, as if to remove this woman from the spot, or to see that she was not on it; that the last two letters written to her family in England were detained by her husband; that the Mrs. Bailey, who attended on Mrs. Maclean, and was about to sail the next day with her husband for England, not only gave up these letters, but stayed there a year longer; and that she turned out to be anything but truthful in her statements. Besides these, there are other facts which surprise us. We are told that Mrs. Maclean married under the impression that she was not to go out to Cape Coast at all: that on discovering it, it was stipulated that she was to stay only three years. Mr. Maclean knew the position L. E. L. had held here—that she had been occupied with writing, and not with cooking. He must have been sensible that a woman who had been, for the greater part of her life, the cherished and caressed favourite of the most intelligent society of London, could not make, for the man of her choice, a more entire