Lord Mountcarrol expected this visit, and received them courteously; while Mr. Seymour was so surprised at seeing the once healthy and handsome Clifford changed to an emaciated valetudinarian, and carrying in his face the marks of habitual intemperance, that his indignation was for a moment lost in pity. But recovering himself, he told his lordship that he came to demand justice for the outrage which he had committed, and in the name of the friend to whom Miss Fitzhenry had, in case of her sudden death, bequeathed her child, to insist on his being restored to her.
"We will settle that point presently," replied Lord Mountcarrol; "but first I conjure you to tell me all that has happened since we parted, to her whose name I have not for years been able to repeat, and whom, as well as this child, I have also for years believed dead."
"I will, my lord," answered Mr. Seymour; "but I warn you, that if you have any feeling it will be tortured by the narration."
"If I have any feeling!" cried his lordship: "but go on, sir; from you, sir—from you, as—as her friend, I can bear any thing."
Words could not do justice to the agonies of Lord Mountcarrol, while Mr. Seymour, beginning with Agnes's midnight walk to ——, went through a recital of her conduct and sufferings, and hopes and anxieties, and ended with the momentary recovery and death-scene of her father.
But when Lord Mountcarrol discovered that Agnes supposed his not making any inquiries concerning her or the child proceeded from brutal indifference concerning their fate, and that, considering him as a monster of inhumanity, she had regarded him not only with contempt, but abhorrence, and seemed to have dismissed him entirely from her remembrance, he beat his breast, he cast himself on the floor in frantic anguish, lamenting, in all the bitterness of fruitless regret, that Agnes died without knowing how much he loved her, and without suspecting that, while she was supposing him unnaturally forgetful of her and her child, he was struggling with illness, caused by her desertion, and with a dejection of spirits which he had never, at times, been able to overcome; execrating at the same time the memory of his father, and Wilson, whom he suspected of having intentionally deceived him.
To conclude—Pity for the misery and compunction of Lord Mountcarrol, and a sense of the advantages both in education and fortune that would accrue to little Edward from living with his father, prevailed on Mr. Seymour and the husband of Fanny to consent to his remaining where he was;—and from that day Edward was universally known as his lordship's son,—who immediately made a will bequeathing him a considerable fortune.
Lord Mountcarrol was then sinking fast into his grave, the victim of his vices, and worn to the bone by the corroding consciousness that Agnes had died in the persuasion of his having brutally neglected her.—That was the bitterest pang of all! She had thought him so vile, that she could not for a moment regret him!
His first wife he had despised because she was weak and illiterate, and hated because she had brought him no children. His second wife was too amiable to be disliked; but, though he survived his marriage with her two years, she also failed to produce an heir to the title. And while he contemplated in Edward the mind and person of his mother, he was almost frantic with regret that he was not legally his son; and he cursed the hour when with short-sighted cunning he sacrificed the honour of Agnes to his views of family aggrandizement.
But, selfish to the last moment of his existence, it was a consciousness of his own misery, not of that which he had inflicted, which prompted his expressions of misery and regret; and he grudged and envied Agnes the comfort of having been able to despise and forget him.