Maria was dead!
Twice of the thrice he had seen this dreadful fiend in human shape; each visitation was (as she had foretold) to surpass the preceding ones in its importance of horror.—What could surpass this?
There, before the afflicted parents, lay their innocent child stretched in the still sleep of death; neither of them believed it true—it seemed like a dreadful dream. Harding was bewildered, and turned from the corpse of his beloved to the window he had just left.—Martha was gone—and he heard her singing a wild and joyous air at the other end of the street.
The servants were summoned—medical aid was called in—but it was all too late! and the wretched parents were doomed to mourn their loved, their lost Maria! George, her fond and affectionate brother, who was at Oxford, hastened from all the academic honours which were awaiting him, to follow to the grave his beloved sister.
The effect upon Frederick Langdale was most dreadful: it was supposed he would never recover from a shock so great, and at the moment so unexpected; for, although the delicacy of her constitution was a perpetual source of uneasiness and solicitude, still the immediate symptoms had taken rather a favourable turn during the last few days of her life, and had re-invigorated the hopes which those who so dearly loved her entertained of her eventual recovery. Of this distressed young man I never indeed heard anything, till about three years after, when I saw it announced in the papers that he was just married to the only daughter of a rich west-country baronet, which event, if wanted to work another proverb here, would afford me a most admirable opportunity of doing so.
The death of poor Maria, and the dread which her father entertained of the third visitation of Martha, made a complete change in the affairs of the family. By the exertion of powerful interest, he obtained an appointment for his son to act as his deputy in the office which he held, and having achieved this desired object, resolved on leaving England for a time, and quitting a neighbourhood in which he must be perpetually exposed to the danger which he was now perfectly convinced was inseparable from his next interview with the weird woman.
George, of course, thus checked in his classical pursuits, left Oxford, and at the early age of nineteen commenced active official life, not certainly in the particular department which his mother had selected for his debût; and it was somewhat observable, that the Langdales, after the death of Maria, not only abstained from frequent intercourse with the Hardings during their stay in England, but that the mighty professions of the purse-proud citizen dwindled by degrees into an absolute forgetfulness of any promise, even conditional, to exert an interest for their son.
Seeing this, Mr. Harding felt that he should act prudentially, by endeavouring to place his son where in the course of time, he might perhaps attain to that situation, from whose honourable revenue he could live like a gentleman, and ‘settle comfortably.’
All the arrangements which the kind father had proposed, being made, the mourning couple proceeded on a lengthened tour of the continent; and it was evident that his spirits mended rapidly, when he felt conscious that his liability to encounter Martha had decreased. The sorrow of mourning was soothed and softened in the common course of nature, and the quiet domesticated couple sat themselves down at Lausanne, ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot,’ except by their excellent and exemplary son, whose good qualities, it seems, had captivated a remarkable pretty girl, a neighbour of his, whose mother seemed to be equally charmed with the goodness of his income.
There appeared, strange to say, in this love affair, no difficulties to be surmounted, no obstacles to be overcome; and the consent of the Hardings (requested in a letter, which also begged them to be present at the ceremony, if they were willing it should take place,) was presently obtained by George; and at the close of the second year, which had passed since their departure, the parents and son were again assembled in that house, the sight of which recalled to their recollection their unhappy daughter, and her melancholy fate, and which was still associated most painfully in the mind of Mr. Harding with the hated Gipsy.