COLONEL FAIRLY AGAIN PRESENTS HIMSELF.
Not long after, when all the party was broke up from my little parlour, though not yet set out for Gloucester, who should again surprise me by entering but Mr. Fairly! I was quite rejoiced by his sight. He was better, though not well. His face is almost reduced to its natural size. He had a letter for her majesty from Lord Aylesbury, and had determined to venture bringing it himself.
He said he would carry it in to the queen, and then return to my parlour, if I would give him some breakfast.
You may suppose I answered “No!” But, afterwards, fearing he might be detained and fatigued, he asked me to present it for him, and only say he was waiting in my room for commands. I was forced to say “Yes,” though I had rather not.
Her majesty was much surprised to hear he was again out so unexpectedly, and asked if he thought of going to Gloucester?
“No,” I said, “I believed he was not equal to that.”
She bid me tell him she would see him before she went.
I returned with this message, and would then have ordered him fresh breakfast; but he declared if I was fidgety he should have no comfort, and insisted on my sitting quietly down, while he drew a chair by my side, and made his own cold tea, and drank it weak and vapid, and eat up all the miserable scraps, without suffering me to call for plate, knife, bread, butter, or anything for replenishment. And when he had done, and I would have made some apology, he affected me for him a good deal by gravely saying, “Believe me, this is the pleasantest breakfast I have made these six days.”
He then went on speaking of his late confinement, and its comfortless circumstances, in very strong terms, dwelling on its solitude and its uselessness, as if those only formed its disagreeability, and the pain went for nothing. Social and kind is his heart, and finely touched to the most exquisite sensations of sympathy; and, as I told Colonel Gwynn, I must needs wish he may yet find some second gentle partner fitted to alleviate his sorrows, by giving to him an object whose happiness would become his first study.
He brought me back the few books I had procured him but I had no fresh supply. He spoke again of the favourite “Letters,” and said he felt so sure I should be pleased with them, that he was desirous I should look at them, adding, “There is no person into whose hands I would not put them not even my daughter’s.”
It was now impossible to avoid saying I should be glad to see them: it would seem else to doubt either his taste or his delicacy, while I have the highest opinion of both. In talking them over he told me he believed them to be genuine; “But the woman,” he said, “throughout the whole correspondence, is too much the superior. She leaves the man far behind. She is so collected, so composed, so constantly mistress of herself, so unbiased by her passions, so rational, and so dignified, that I would even recommend her as an example to any young woman in similar circumstances to follow." He was summoned to her majesty, in the dining-parlour. But when they were all set out on the Gloucester expedition, he returned to my little parlour, and stayed with me a considerable time.
Grave he came back—grave quite to solemnity, and almost wholly immersed in deep and sad reflections, He spoke little, and that little with a voice so melancholy, yet so gentle, that it filled me with commiseration.
At length, after much silence and many pauses, which I never attempted to interrupt or to dissipate, continuing my work as if not heeding him, he led himself distantly, yet intelligibly—to open upon the immediate state of his mind.
I now found that the king’s staying on at Cheltenham a fifth week was scarcely supportable to him; that the 16th of next month was the mournful anniversary of his loss, and that he had planned to dedicate it in some peculiar manner to her memory, with his four children. Nothing of this was positively said; for,
“He feels the chastity of silent woe.”
But all of it was indubitably comprised in the various short but pointed sentences which fell from him.