"Dear Pembroke," replied Miss Beaufort, wiping the gliding tears from her burning cheek, "after the confession which you drew from me yesterday, I will not deny that to be this to your friend would render me the happiest of created beings; but I cannot believe what your sanguine affection tells me. I cannot suppose, situated as I was at Lady Dundas's, surrounded by frivolous and contemptible society, that he could discover anything in me to warrant such a vanity. Every way embarrassed as I was, disliking my companions, afraid of my own interest in him, a veil was drawn over my mind, through which he could neither judge of my good nor bad qualities. How, then, can I flatter myself, or do the Count Sobieski so great an injury, as to imagine that he could conceive any preference for so insignificant a being as I must have appeared?"
It was some time before Pembroke could shake this prepossession of a sincere humility from Miss Beaufort's mind. But after having set in every possible light the terms with which his friend had spoken of her, he at length convinced her of what her heart so earnestly wished to believe—that the love of Sobieski was indeed hers.
Mr. Somerset's next achievement was to overcome her scruples against sanctioning him with the commission he was bent on communicating to Thaddeus. But from the continual recurrence of her apprehensions, that the warm affection of her cousin had too highly colored the first part of his representation, this latter task was not more easy to accomplish than the former.
In vain she remonstrated, in vain she doubted, in vain demurred. Pembroke would not be denied. He saw her heart was with him; and when with faltering lips she assented to the permission, which he almost extorted, she threw her arms round his neck, and implored him, "by all he loved and honored, to be careful of her peace; to remember that she put into his charge all that was most precious to woman—the modesty of her sex and her own self-esteem !"
Delighted at this consent, notwithstanding he received it through the medium of many tears, he fondly and gratefully pressed her to his bosom, uttering his own soul's fervent conviction of a future domestic happiness to them all. Having stood till he saw her re-enter the house from a door on the terrace, he mounted his horse and set off on the spur towards Harrow by Hill.
CHAPTER XLIV.
LETTERS OF FAREWELL.
When Thaddeus recovered from the reverie into which he fell on the departure of Mr. Somerset, he considered how he might remove out of a country in which he had only met with and occasioned distress.
The horrid price that Pembroke's father had set on the continuance of his son's friendship with a powerless exile was his curse. Whatever might have been the injury any individual of now annihilated Poland could, in its palmy days of independence, and sometimes pride, inflict on this implacable Englishman, of a nature that appeared to have blinded him to even human feeling, Thaddeus felt so true an indignation against such cruel injustice, and so much of a contrary sentiment towards the noble son of this hard parent, that he determined to at once relieve the warring mind of Pembroke of any further conflict on his account by immediately quitting England. Averse to a second interview with a friend so justly beloved, which could only produce them new pangs, he resolved on instant preparations—that another morn should not rise upon him in the neighborhood of Somerset Castle. Taking up a pen, with all the renewed loneliness of his fate brooding on his heart, he wrote two letters.
One he addressed to Mr. Somerset, bidding him that farewell which he confessed he could never take. As he wrote, his hand trembled, his bosom swelled, and he hastily shut his eyelids, to withhold his tears from showing themselves on the paper. His emotion, his grief, were driven back, were concealed, but the tenderness of his soul flowed over the letter. He forgave Pembroke's father for Pembroke's sake; and in spite of their personal disunion, he vowed that no earthly power should restrain his love from following the steps of his friend, even into the regions of eternity. He closed his melancholy epistle with informing Mr. Somerset that, as he should quit not only England directly, but Europe, any search after him which his generous nature might dictate would be in vain.