He went on at a rapid pace through several fields, his heart and soul full of those remembrances, and the direful echoes to them he had met in England. Stopping a moment at the boundary-gate of the Harrowby domains,—the property of a disgraceful owner of a name that might have been his, had not his nobler mother preserved to him that of Sobieski,—he stretched out his arms to the heavens, over which a bleak north-west wind was suddenly collecting dark and spreading clouds, and exclaimed, in earnest supplication, "Oh, righteous Power of Mercy! in thy chastening, grant me fortitude to bear with resignation to thy will the miseries I may yet have to encounter, Ah!" added he, his heart melting as the images presented themselves even as visions to his soul, "teach me to forget what I have been. Teach me to forget that on this dreadful October night twelve months ago I clasped the dying body of my revered grandfather in these arms!"
He could not speak further. Leaning his pale face against the gate, he remained for a few minutes dissolved in all a son's sorrow; then, recovering himself by a sudden start, he proceeded with hurried steps through the further extending meadows until they conducted him by a short village-lane into the high road.
It was on the 10th of October, 1795, that the Count Sobieski commenced this lonely and melancholy journey. It was the 10th of October in the preceding year that he found the veteran palatine bleeding to death in the midst of a heap of slain. The coincidence of his renewed banishment and present consequent mental sufferings with those of that fatal period powerfully affected him, recalling, in the vivid colors of an actual existence, scenes and griefs which the numerous successive events he had passed through had considerably toned down into dream-like shades.
But now, when memory, by one unexpected stroke, had once conjured up the happy past of his early life and its as early blighting, true to her nature, she raised before his mind's eye every hope connected with it and his present doom, till, almost distracted, he quickened his speed. He then slackened it; he quickened it again; but nothing could rid him of those successive images which seem to glide around him like mournful apparitions of the long-lamented dead.
When the dawn broke and the sun rose, he found himself advanced several miles on the south side of Ponton Hill. The spiry aisles of Harrowby Abbey were discernible through the mist, and the towers of Somerset Castle, from their height and situation, were as distinctly seen as if he had been at their base. Neither of these objects were calculated to raise the spirits of Thaddeus. The sorrows of the countess, whose eyes he so recently had closed, and the treatment which he afterwards received from the man to whom he owed his life, were recollections which made him turn from the Abbey with a renewed pang and fix his eyes on Somerset. He looked towards its ivied battlements with all the regret and all the tenderness which can overflow a human heart. Under that roof he believed the eyes of his almost, indeed, worshipped Mary were sealed in sleep; and in an instant his agitated soul addressed her as if she had been present.
"Farewell, most lovely, most beloved! The conviction that it is to ensure the peace of my now only friend on earth, my faithful Pembroke, that I resign the hope of ever beholding thee again in this life, will bring me one comfort, at least, in my barren exile!"
Thus communing with his troubled spirit, he walked the whole day on his way to London. Totally absorbed in meditation, he did not remark the gaze of curiosity which followed his elegant yet distressed figure as he passed through the different towns and villages. Musing on the past, the present, and the future, he neither felt hunger nor thirst, but, with a fixed eye and abstracted countenance, pursued his route until night and weariness overtook him near a cross-road, far away from any house.
Thaddeus looked around and above. The sky was then clear and glittering with stars; the moon, shining on a branch of the Ouse which divides Leicestershire from Northamptonshire, lit the green heath which skirted its banks. He wished not for a more magnificent canopy; and placing his bag under his head, he laid himself down beneath a hillock of furze, and slept till morning.
When he awoke from a heavy sleep, which fatigue and fasting had rendered more oppressive than refreshing, he found that the splendors of the night were succeeded by a heavy rain, and that he was wet through. He arose with stiffness in his limbs, pain in his head, and a dimness over his eyes, with a sense of weakness which almost disabled him from moving. He readily judged that he had caught cold; and every moment feeling himself grow worse, he thought it necessary to seek some house where he might procure rest and assistance.
Leaning on his closed umbrella, which, in his precarious circumstances of travelling, he used in preference to a walking- stick, and no longer able to encumber himself with even the light load of his bag, he cast it amongst the brambles near him. Thinking, from the symptoms he felt, that he might not have many more hours to endure the ills of life, he staggered a few yards further. No habitation appeared; his eyes soon seemed totally obscured, and he sunk down on a bank. For a minute he attempted to struggle with the cold grasp of death, which he believed was fastening on his heart.