My timidity and conscious guilt hindered me from attempting to discover, by any direct means, the effects of my artifice. I was mortified extremely in finding no remarkable difference in their deportment to each other. Sometimes I feared I had betrayed myself; but no alteration ever afterwards appeared in their behaviour to me.
I know how little I deserve to be forgiven. Nothing can palliate the baseness of this action. I acknowledge it with the deepest remorse, and nothing, especially since the death of Mr. Talbot, has lessened my grief, but the hope that some unknown cause prevented the full effect of this forgery on his peace, and that the secret, carefully locked up in his own breast, expired with him. All my enmities and restless jealousy found their repose in the same grave.
You have come to the knowledge of this letter, and I now find that the fraud was attended with even more success than I wished it to have.
Let me now, though late, put an end to the illusion, and again assure you, madam, that the concluding paragraphs were written by me, and that those parts of it which truly belong to your daughter are perfectly innocent.
If it were possible for you to forgive my misconduct, and to suffer this confession to go no further than the evil has gone, you will confer as great a comfort as can now be conferred on the unhappy
M. JESSUP.
Letter XLIX
To James Montford
Philadelphia, December 9.
I WILL imagine, my friend, that you have read the letter [Footnote: The preceding one.] which I have hastily transcribed. I will not stop to tell you my reflections upon it, but shall hasten with this letter to Mrs. Fielder. I might send it; but I have grown desperate.