"'Danger did come, my child, and death; but she had the satisfaction she sought. Her father and her husband were with her at the last hour, and she died forgiven, leaving me with a poor, helpless infant. The old man fled from the cottage almost in a state of madness, and my own mind was so troubled that for three days I forgot all the dangers of my situation. Those dangers were many, as I will soon explain to you; and to avoid them I was obliged to leave that cottage with the child as soon as the funeral was over, to consign the poor infant to the charge of a nurse, and to appear in the gay world of London with a calm face, and none of the external signs of that mourning which was sincerely in my heart.
"'I must now go back to tell some other events which had occurred. Like most young men of my day, I had been somewhat extravagant, and had lived a good deal beyond the income which my father allowed me. My debts amounted to between nine and ten thousand pounds when I first met with poor Mary Graves. My creditors were importunate; I had not the means of paying them; and, about seven months after my marriage, one of them applied to my father. He sent for me, and sternly demanded that I should give him an account of everything I owed. I did so; and, to my surprise, I found him much less enraged than I could have imagined. But it soon appeared that he had a project in his head which would compel me to disobey and offend him. He asked me if I had ever seen a young lady whom he named--in short, your own dear mother. I told him I had not, but that I had always heard her highly spoken of. He then informed me that he was acquainted with her father, and that, as she was an only child and heiress of considerable wealth, he had proposed to him a marriage between her and me. Your maternal grandfather had consented, upon the condition that the marriage should be agreeable to ourselves; and my father now said, "On condition of your marrying this young lady, I will at once pay your debts and settle a larger income upon you." I cannot minutely describe the scene that ensued. Of course, I was obliged to refuse; and I did so decidedly and at once. That was sufficient to excite great wrath; but my father smothered it in a degree, and requested me at least to see the young lady before I decided. I endeavoured, as humbly as I could, to represent to him that, by pursuing such a course, and then refusing to marry her, especially after what had taken place between him and her father, I should be grossly wronging and insulting her. But now the storm broke forth. He told me that a rumour had reached him, that I was either keeping or had married some low woman; that he had refused to believe such an assertion; but that my conduct gave such strong confirmation to the report that he would take means to ascertain, the fact; and if he found I had been guilty of so base a dereliction of my duty to him, and of my rank and station in society, he would cast me off for ever; would bequeath every farthing of the property which he could alienate--and that was nearly the whole--to strangers, and leave me what he justly called that most miserable of wretches, a titled beggar. He would not hear me utter a word, but drove me forth from his presence to seek comfort with my poor wife, from whom I was obliged to conceal the sorrows which my marriage with her had brought upon me.
"'Thus matters continued till her death--knowing that I was watched, and obliged to have recourse to a thousand stratagems to conceal my movements. Even after the poor girl's death, I knew my father too well to doubt that, if he discovered I had a son by such a marriage, he would carry his threat into execution; and in my difficulty and distress I applied to my friend Hayley, made him my confidant, and induced him to promise that he would acknowledge the child as his own and superintend his education, till such time as I should be enabled publicly to declare my marriage.
"'Some months after, I accidentally met with your mother in society, found her beautiful, amiable, and in every respect agreeable to me, and I took means to make myself agreeable to her. She was quite unconscious of what had previously taken place, and gave such encouragement as no well-educated woman would afford to a man whom she would afterwards reject. Her father, however, who was well aware of the whole, at first treated me very coldly; but as soon as I had made up my mind to offer her my hand, I thought it right to have an explanation with him; and I pointed out to him that I had acted honourably towards his daughter, in refusing to be introduced to her with such views, unless I were positively determined to carry them out. I soon overcame all his prejudices. He became attached to me. His daughter accepted my offered hand; and I wrote to my father, whom I had not seen for some months, hoping that my obedience, tardy as it was, would be accepted. He was not fond of writing, and he sent for me to come to him. When I went, my treatment was that which might have been shown towards a very lowly dependant. He told me that, if I wished to show myself dutiful, my submission came too late; that now I might marry your mother or not, as I pleased; that he approved of the match, but did not require it; and that, although he would allow me an income equal to my station and expectations, he would settle nothing upon me. He added, in a low but very menacing tone, "I have my doubts, young man--I have my doubts; and if ever I find that you have degraded your name or rank, I will leave you without one penny of which I can deprive you."
"'I was obliged to bear these tidings to my future father-in-law; but, with a certain portion of ambition, he was a kind-hearted and affectionate man. He knew that his daughter loved me. He felt confident, from all he had seen, that I loved her, and his consent to our marriage was given--unwillingly, indeed, for he was sufficiently wealthy to look high for a match for his daughter, and to desire a settlement proportionate to her fortune. However, all objections were waived, and we were married. My allowance from my father was liberal. Her fortune was large, and eight months after, it was trebled by the death of her father. All that I possessed, however, and all that I should ever possess, except a very small portion, depended upon the earl's never discovering that I had contracted a previous marriage, and had had a son by a plebeian wife. My dear boy therefore remained under the care of Mr. Hayley, was brought home by him while yet almost an infant, acknowledged as his son, educated with great care, and displayed in person and mind, in character and demeanour----'
"But I need not read all that," said Henry. "After a few commendations on my boyhood, the letter goes on thus:--
"'You have seen him often, my dear Anne. You know him well, for I brought him up with you almost as a brother, intending to tell you that he actually was so, before you reached the age of womanhood. I loved him--oh, how dearly and how well! And you loved him too, I am sure, with that fraternal love which was exactly what I desired. No act, no thought, of his ever gave me a moment's pain; and without wishing for my own father's death, I longed to be able to tell you and your mother that this boy was my son.
"'At length I was suddenly summoned away to Belford, to attend upon my father, who had been seized with severe illness. I could have wished to remain in London or in its neighbourhood, for I knew that the affairs of Mr. Hayley were getting into sad disorder. I had already supplied him, more than once, with considerable sums of money, beyond the expenses of my dear boy's education and maintenance; and a new demand had been made upon my purse, accompanied by a vague and timid threat.
"'However, I was obliged to set out. My father died a week or two after; and I proceeded from Milford Castle to Caermarthen, to consign his remains to the family vault. On my way back, my carriage was overturned at the bridge at ----, and I was taken up insensible, with concussion of the brain. I remained ill for several weeks, and my recovery was slow and difficult. For a long time the medical men would not suffer me to read or write at all; but at length, one morning, after I had been permitted to go out once or twice, I took up the newspaper on the breakfast-table, and was struck with horror and dismay on reading a paragraph headed, "The Late Forgery." I cannot dwell on the particulars even now, my dear child. Suffice it to say, that that paragraph showed me that my son, your dear brother, had been accused of forgery to a large amount; that he had fled from the country, after having been traced down to Northumberland, and thence to Caermarthen, in search of me, it seems; and that the officer who had followed him to Ancona had there, by the monks, been shown a dead body which they solemnly declared to be his. My feelings were almost those of a madman. I knew my boy was not guilty. I saw it all in a moment: that Hayley, a bankrupt gambler as he had proved, had committed the forgery, and had induced the boy, who thought him his father, to fly, in order to screen his supposed parent. At the same time, a vague, wild hope--which haunts me yet--that my child might still be alive, that the officer might have been deceived by a pious fraud of the monks--took possession of my mind, and made me act upon the moment with a degree of fierceness and resolution which perhaps I might not have had the courage to display if I had paused to deliberate. I sent for the man Hayley, with a threat that if he did not come I would fetch him; and when he appeared before me, all pale and trembling, I accused him at once of what he had done, as if I had had a revelation of the whole facts. He was always a coward, and in his attempts to deny and equivocate he betrayed himself; but I wrung the whole from him, as if I had taken his false heart in my hand and crushed out the only drops of truth it contained. I told him that if he did not instantly, and at once, confess the whole, I would carry him from my house to the office of the magistrate; that I would prove, from his own letters to me, that he was a bankrupt and a beggar but a few days before that forgery was committed; that I would make him account for the possession of every penny which he had expended since, and leave the keen hounds of justice to follow out the scent. He did at length confess the whole, and put it down in writing, signing it in my presence and that of Alsager, the butler, upon the condition that I would not reveal the facts till after his death, unless my boy ever appeared in England again.
"'My hopes of such being the case have daily decreased, but they linger still. I have caused many inquiries to be made, and secret investigations to be carried on; but the only fact I have been able to discover, which keeps expectation alive, is that there were two lads, nearly of the same age, in the convent, at the time my poor boy was supposed to nave died at Ancona. In case he should appear again, before you arrive at the age of one-and-twenty, I have besought my dear old friend Charles Hargrave, of Detchton-Grieve, near Belford, to watch carefully the events that take place in London; and if Henry should come back, to desire you to open this letter at once. The confession of Hayley, with several other papers concerning my private marriage and the boy's birth and education, are in an ebony cabinet in my dressing-room at Milford Castle. It is sealed up, with an order written upon it, to the effect that it is only to be opened by yourself, after you have reached the age of one-and-twenty.