'I cannot believe I shall ever repent the confidence I am about to place in you. My heart assures me I shall not. Perhaps I may find that pity I dare no longer solicit from my own family; perhaps—but I must hasten to tell you my melancholy story, before its recollection again overwhelms me. Yet my fate has nothing in it very singular; numbers have been victims of the same calamity, but some have been more easily forgiven than I shall be.—Some are better able to bear infamy, and be reconciled to disgrace.
'My father, the late Earl of Westhaven, during the life of my grandfather, married, while he was making the tour of Europe, a very beautiful and amiable woman, the daughter of a man of rank in Switzerland; who having lost his life in the French service, had left a family without any provision, except for the eldest son. My grandfather, extremely disobliged by this marriage, made a will by which he gave to his only daughter every part of his extensive property, except what was entailed, and which went with the title; with this reserve, that his grandson should claim and inherit the whole, whenever he became Lord Westhaven. By this will, he disinherited my father for his life; and tho' he survived my father's marriage five years, and knew he had three children, the two younger of whom must be inevitably impoverished by such a disposition, he obstinately refused to alter the will he made under the first impulse of resentment, and died before his son could prevail upon him, by means of their general friends, to withdraw the maledictions with which he had loaded him.
'His death, not only hurt my father in his feelings, but irreparably in his fortune. His sister, who was married to a Scottish nobleman, took possession of estates to the amount of fifteen thousand a year; and all that remained to my father, to support his rank and his encreasing family, was little more than three thousand; and even that income he had considerably diminished, by taking up money, which he was obliged to do while my grandfather lived, for the actual maintenance of his family.
'These unhappy circumstances, while they injured the health and spirits of my father, diminished not his tenderness for his wife, whom he loved with unabated passion.
'To retrench as much as possible, he retired with her and his three children to an estate, which being attached to the title, belonged to him in Cumberland; in hopes of being able to live on the income he had left, and to clear off the burden with which he had been compelled to load his paternal estates. But a slow fever, the effect of sorrow, had seized on my mother, then far advanced in her pregnancy with me; my father, solicitous to save her in whom all his happiness was centered, sent to London for the best advice to attend her. But their assistance was vain; the fever encreased upon her, and she died three weeks after my birth, leaving my father deprived of every thing that could make life valuable in his estimation. He gave himself up to a despair equal to the violence of his love, and would probably have fallen a victim to it, had not the servants sent to Mr. Thirston, who had been his tutor, and for whom he had the greatest friendship and respect. This excellent man represented to him that it was his duty to live for the children of his deplored Adelina; and he consented to try to live.
'It was long before he could bear to see any of us; particularly me, whom he beheld with a mixture of tenderness and regret. The gloomy solitude in which he lived, where every object reminded him of her whose smiles had rendered it a paradise, was ill calculated to meliorate his affliction; but he could not be persuaded, for some months, to leave it, or could he be diverted from going every evening to visit the spot where lay the relicts of his Adelina.
'At length Mr. Thirston prevailed on him to go abroad. But he could not determine to leave my elder brother, then about five years old, of whom he was passionately fond. They embarked for Naples; and he remained abroad five years; while my sister, my brother William, and myself, were left at Kensington, under the care of a female relation, and received such instruction as our ages admitted.
'My father returned to England only to place his eldest son at Eton. Finding no relief from the sorrow which perpetually preyed on him, but in continual change of place, he soon afterwards went again abroad, and wandered over Europe for almost seven years longer, returning once or twice to England in that interval to satisfy himself of our health and the progress of our education.