An old gentleman, he said, had come into the room and spoken angrily to her; while, with astonishing precision, the boy acted over the whole scene, recapitulated some of the language they had used, and described how his mother had hung to him with frantic eagerness, saying she would promise anything, if she might only retain her child; how the stranger, who was very tall, and wore a black coat, had spoken again with angry vehemence before he left the room; and how his mother, when left alone, had prayed and wept over him with looks of agonized and desolate grief, until he had been carried away to bed by the maid, who administered some medicine to him, which she said the doctor had ordered.
He spoke much also of a large room, hung with pictures, in which his earliest days had been passed, and of a small dark apartment close beside it, into which he had often been precipitately hurried, apparently for concealment, and where toys and sweetmeats had been always provided to keep him quiet, while he was punished with the utmost severity, for making the slightest noise; and he still remembered with looks of apprehension, the gentleman dressed in black, who most frequently visited him there, and often caused his mother to weep bitterly.
Sarah Davenport was then recalled, and rigidly cross-examined, respecting the gentleman who had visited at the house; but she doggedly asserted her entire ignorance respecting his rank in life, or connections, and pertinaciously maintained that the lady's death had been her own voluntary act, and that the sleeping potion had been given to the boy by his mother's own imperative orders, as she did not herself know even what it contained.
During a long and anxious consultation of the jury, there was a hushed and intense silence in the court, so still and unbroken, that the breathing of an infant would have been audible, while every eye perused the countenance of the prisoner, with an intensity that brought a hectic flush, burning like fire, upon her cheek, and she gazed around with a glance of anger that caused her beauty for the moment to look like that of a fiend or a fury.
At length, after arduously scrutinizing every atom of evidence that could be gathered, the jury, though morally certain of the prisoner's being an accomplice in the crime, felt unwillingly obliged to bring in a verdict of "not proven," and she was immediately liberated, after which, amidst the yells, jeers, and execrations of the populace who were convinced of her criminality, she hurried from the court, and was seen no more.
Nothing is half so attractive as a mystery, and many crowded at first, with a temporary enthusiasm, to see the beautiful boy, so strangely bereaved, and so cruelly abandoned; but the interest and excitement of hearing and relating his story were soon superseded by greater wonders and fresher news. In a world where all are rushing on headlong in pursuit of novelty, and where events, great or small, are speedily hurried into one common oblivion, people were tired at last of thinking or talking about young Henry and his concerns.
Every one of the Admiral's friends hinted that he could have managed the whole affair ten times better than Sir Arthur; all blamed him for many things, and praised him for very few; the Admiral was wondered at, criticised, discussed, admired, pitied, and censured, more than he remembered to have been for many years before; and the givers of advice were lavish of propositions and objections, all which were borne by their venerable friend with good-humored indifference, whether adopted or not. At length some perfectly new murders from London came on the tapis in society; those who liked reading in the Jack Sheppard style were satiated with studies from the life; the Mording Post assumed a terrifying interest; and the lady of fashion who consulted Sir Henry Halford about her appetite, because she could no longer enjoy her murders and robberies at breakfast, would have thought, when they were coming out hot and hot every week, that it was a wearisome repetition to speculate another hour upon a murder nearly a month old.
In short, "the Portobello story" ceased to be told or listened to. Henry had had his day. There is no such thing now as a nine days' wonder, because nothing lasts so long. Young De Lancey had been talked of as much as any reasonable being could expect to be talked of; and now it was universally voted a bore whenever the subject occurred in conversation; for, as Lady Towercliffe remarked, with a very long-drawn yawn, when, for the last time, it was alluded to in her presence, "It was a shocking, barbarous, and really startling affair; but all stories should be allowed to die out like an echo, which grows fainter and fainter at every repetition. One cannot be for ever talking of the same thing."
When Henry De Lancey lost one parent, he certainly gained another in Sir Arthur, who often afterwards remarked, that in no instance could virtue be more obviously its own parent, than in the case of any kindness he had shown to this fascinating boy, whose gay, joyous spirits became a source of perpetual amusement to him, while the Admiral seemed to derive new life from watching the frolicsome gambols of his young companion, occasionally enlivened by the gleeful vivacity of his niece Marion, when she escaped a single day from the trammels of school, bringing generally in her train two of her favorite juvenile companions, Clara Granville and Caroline Smythe, both several years older than herself.
On many occasions the sensibility of Henry De Lancey seemed already to have attained almost the depth and intensity of manhood, so strong were the bursts of natural feeling with which he occasionally spoke or acted, while it was deeply affecting to trace throughout the extraordinary progress thus early made in his education, the careful culture given to his remarkable abilities—the pains bestowed by his solitary parent to strengthen his mind for future difficulties and sorrows, the earliest and worst of which she could so little have foreseen or apprehended.