Dashall congratulated Fitzroy on his resolution, in having cut the dangerous connexion, and expressed a hope that in due process of time he would emancipate himself from the trammels of dissipation generally.
“That,” rejoined Fitzroy, “is already in a considerable degree effected.”
“In the higher and middle classes of society,” says a celebrated writer, “it is a melancholy and distressing sight to observe, not unfrequently, a man of a noble and ingenuous disposition, once feelingly alive to a sense of honor and integrity, gradually sinking under the pressure of his circumstances, making his excuses at first with a blush of conscious shame, afraid to see the faces of his friends from whom he may have borrowed money, reduced to the meanest tricks and subterfuges to delay or avoid the payment of his just debts, till ultimately grown familiar with falsehood, and at enmity with the world, he loses all the grace and dignity of man.”—
“Such,” continued Fitzroy, “was the acmé of degradation to which I was rapidly advancing, when an incident occurred to arrest the progress of dissipation, and give a stimulus to more worthy pursuits.
“One morning having visited a certain nunnery in the precincts of Pall-Mail, the Lady Abbess introduced me to a young noviciate, a beautiful girl of sixteen.
“When we were left alone, she dropped on her knees, and in attitude and voice of the most urgent supplication, implored me to save her from infamy!”
“I am in your power,” she exclaimed, “but I feel confident that you will not use it to my dishonor.—I am yet innocent;—restore me to my parents,—pure and unsullied,—and the benediction of Heaven will reward you!”—
She then told me a most lamentable tale of distress;—that her father was in prison for a small debt; and that her mother, her brothers and sisters, were starving at home.—Under these disastrous circumstances she had sought service, and was inveighd into that of mother W. from whence she had no hope of extrication, unless through my generous assistance! She concluded her pathetic appeal, by observing, that if the honorable Frederick Fitzroy had listened to the call of humanity, and paid a debt of long standing, her father would not now be breaking his heart in prison, her family famishing, nor herself subject to destruction.
“And I am the Author of all!” I exclaimed, “I am the dis-honorable Frederick Fitzroy, who in the vortex of dissipation, forgot the exercise of common justice, and involved a worthy man and his suffering family in misery! But I thank heaven, the injury is not irreparable!”
“I immediately explained to Mother W. the peculiarly distressing situation of this poor girl, rescued her from meditated perdition,—restored the husband to his family, with improved circumstances,—and by a continuance of my support, I trust, in some degree to atone for past transgression.”