My mother gently replied, "She has been afflicting herself, foolish child! I said, unwillingly I allow, what might have prepared her for an unavoidable evil; but she chooses to fancy, poor thing! that I am not mortal: yet, see here, Seymour!" As she said this she turned up her long loose sleeves, and showed him her once fine arm fallen away comparatively to nothing!
I never saw my husband much more affected: he seized that faded arm, and, pressing it repeatedly to his lips, turned away and burst into tears—then folding us in one embrace he faltered out, "My poor Helen! Well indeed might I find you thus!" But my mother solemnly promised that she would never so afflict me again.
In the midst of this scene a letter was brought to my mother. It was from Lord Charles, and was so like the man, that I shall transcribe it.
"Madam,
"I doubt not but you were amazed, and probably offended, at my quitting the house of your son-in-law without taking leave of you, as you are not a woman likely to think my silence at the moment of parting from you was to be attributed to the tender passion which I had conceived for your beauty and accomplishments. But, madam, if my silence was not attributable to love, so neither was it caused by hate; and I beg leave, hat in hand, and on bended knee, to explain whence my conduct proceeded. In the first place, madam, you had given me a blow, a stunning blow; and after a man has been stunned, he does not soon recover himself sufficiently to know what he is about, and how he ought to behave. In the next place, I endeavoured to remember how the great Earl of Essex behaved when Queen Elizabeth gave him a blow, or in other words a box on the ear (for blow I need not tell a lady of your erudition is the genus, and box on the ear the species). Now that noble Earl did not return the blow (which I own I was very much inclined to do), but he departed in silence from her presence, I believe; and so I in imitation of him from yours. Methinks I hear you exclaim 'The little lord is mad! I gave him no blow.' Not with your hand, I own; but with your tongue, 'that unruly member,' as St. James so justly calls it; you gave me a tingling blow on the cheek of my mind, which it still feels, and for which perhaps it may be the better. It is this consideration, and the belief that your motives were kind, though your treatment was rough, and that you only meant, like the bear in the fable, to guard me from a slight evil, though you broke my head in doing it; it is this belief, I say, that now throws me thus a suppliant at your feet, and makes me beg of you to excuse all my rudeness, and all my faults, whether caused by imitation of Lord Essex, or my own sinful propensities, and to raise me up to receive not the kiss of peace, for to that I dare not aspire, but to grasp and carry to my heart the white hand tendered to me in token of forgiveness.
"I am, madam, with the liveliest esteem, and the deepest respect, your obliged, though stricken servant,
"Charles Firebrand."
"Ridiculous person!" said my mother, when she had finished the letter, giving it to me at the same time.
When I had read it, I asked her to tell us what she had said to him. "And why," said Pendarves, "does he sign himself Charles Firebrand?"
"Oh! thereby hangs a tale," said my mother blushing, "which I, I assure you, shall not tell: therefore ask me no questions. If ever Lord Charles and I meet again, the white hand shall be tendered to him. Nay, perhaps I shall answer his letter."
And so she did; but we never saw what she wrote: however, I am convinced, that she had called him a firebrand, and reproved him for his evident desire of making mischief between my husband and me. Nor can I doubt but that the justice of her reproofs made them more stinging to the heart of the offender, and that he felt at the time a degree of unspeakable and unutterable resentment, on which his cooler judgment made him feel it impolitic to act; for he had, as my mother said, too much good sense not to value her acquaintance.
I must now return to Charlotte Jermyn. I forgot to say, that she wrote a very fawning letter of thanks to me after her return home, thanking me for my kindness to her, and hoping that I would send for her again whenever she could be of any service to me. I have reason to think that she also wrote more than once to my husband: but he never communicated what she wrote to me; and I had the mortification to find how vainly I had tried to give him those habits of openness and ingenuousness which can alone render the nearest and tenderest ties productive of confidence and happiness.
Now, after a silence of four months, she again wrote to me to inform me that she was married to a young ensign in a marching regiment quartered near her father's house; but as it was against her father's consent, she had been forced to go to Gretna Green, and that her father, Mr. Jermyn, continued inexorable.