"It is no matter! Patrick adds a nail to my coffin every day, but I am the last wreck of an old generation, and have already outstaid the period intended for man! My head is whitened by the frost of more than eighty winters—my heart seared with the wear and tear of life—my very existence a perpetual miracle! It would people a city if all could be revived whom I have intimately known in those days when the dearest ties of life were clustered around me, but now I am a scathed and solitary ruin. How truly has it been said, that the remembrance of youth is a sigh, yet all has been ordered as it should be, and that wind is ever the best which will carry us most safely to the end of our voyage."
Sir Arthur paused with a look of solemn and inexpressible emotion, and Marion pressed her uncle's hand affectionately, hot tears coursed each other down her face, and she gazed earnestly at his countenance, while, looking at her with his usual expression of benignity and kindness, he continued, "You are the chief, or rather the only objects of my care, for all my wishes and hopes on my own account might now be contained in a nut-shell. I am a stranger in this altered world, soon—very soon to depart. There is one heart in my brother's family, Marion, that feels as his child ought to feel, and one eye that will be dimmed with sorrow when I am no more. For your sake, and yours only, need I wish to live! Well may the young weep for sorrow—they have long to endure it, but for me, the end of all earthly things is at hand. Many a warning bell has reached my ear already, and I would wish only to see you launched under safe protection in the stormy ocean of life. With no guardian but a brother worse than nobody, and an old, infirm uncle tottering into the grave, my dear girls, what are you to do?"
Marion glanced at Agnes, who tried to preserve her usual air of consequential indifference, and pulled her bouquet to pieces, with an expression of silent and majestic impatience, but she neither looked up nor answered.
"While I live, you can always confer a pleasure by taking shelter with me," continued Sir Arthur, in the warmest tone of kindness; "and all that an old man can do to make you happy shall be done, though that, I fear, is little or nothing."
Agnes, evidently not much delighted at this unexpected proposal of being located at what she always called "the Admiral's humdrummery," now assumed a pre-engaged look, while practising a particularly graceful attitude in the opposite mirror, and drawing out her long glossy ringlets with a cold, artificial smile, she answered, "Thank you, Sir Arthur! I am sure we are most excessively obliged. Probably now that Marion is so well disposed of, my brother may take me with him to Paris!"
"Reckoning without your host, Agnes!" whispered Sir Patrick, entering with a look of assumed bravado, but of evident embarrassment. "Wishes cost nothing; but how could such an idea ever enter your ingenious head? Pray strike a light and look for your senses! Ah! Sir Arthur! A hundred thousand welcomes. I am happy not to have missed your kind visit!"
"That would have been a mutual misfortune!" replied the Admiral, drily, and drawing himself up to his full height, while Sir Patrick bowed and smiled with an air of sarcastic gratitude. "Certainly, for some years past I am not owing you many visits."
"Why, no! I hate to see people running themselves into debt; therefore believing you might find it inconvenient to return my cards, I have not been very troublesome in the way of calling; but," continued Sir Patrick, stealing a look of laughing condolence at Agnes, "my sisters are exceedingly delighted by your very considerate offer of a home during my absence. The plan will suit admirably! They both want sea-bathing, and—society, Agnes?"
"In respect to society I can promise nothing. I would raise a regiment of beaux if possible, but my house is a mere Greenwich Hospital for years past, visited only by a few veterans as aged and broken as myself."
"I wish they had all gone down in the Royal George," muttered Agnes, whose face now looked like a thunder cloud. "A set of resuscitated mummies, with scarcely a complete set of limbs and features amongst them. I would rather live in the moon, where there is at least one entire man to be seen."