“To Lady Maclairn.”
“The poor, the outraged, the vilified Charles Duncan lives to proclaim his wrongs! to pour forth his sorrows before the only being on earth who will pity him! He lives to redeem his honour from the disgrace and eternal infamy, of having deserted the woman, whom in the presence of his Maker, he vowed to cherish and protect. He lives to take vengeance on his oppressors! He lives to behold thee once more! and then death will close his account here! The grave will be his bed of repose! Heaven will, in its own time, explain to him, wherefore he existed; and to what purpose he has suffered!!!
“I am composed, my Harriet. I have seen thee, I have heard thy gentle voice! listened, in breathless silence, to the pure effusions of thy spotless mind; heard my Harriet, my wife, my all that Heaven has given me! speak to her son, praise his filial duty to his father; heard that that parent had been smitten, stricken by the hand of adversity! Heard her call him, “her dear Maclairn,” her helpless, her unfortunate husband! Was this the language to heal my broken spirit? No: but it was that which has fettered every tumultuous passion of my soul! I would not for worlds speak to you, Harriet; I would not for worlds approach you! No: I would refuse your offered love! What! brand with infamy thy spotless name! Sink the honourable wife, the virtuous mother to be the sharer of my wretched condition! The companion of a reputed robber, a worthless vagabond; of a being who can claim no affinity but to the earth he treads! No; Harriet, thy Duncan is not yet so poor, so abject! Scorned, and sunk as he may be in your eyes, he yet proudly maintains his claims to the recompense of long suffering and patience. This is not Duncan’s theatre of glory! But he has before him an inheritance, and a home; and he has only to press forward to attain it.”
“The wife of Sir Murdoch Maclairn; the mother of his children; the prop and comfort of his life is in my eyes, encompassed by an host of angels. Shall the wretched Duncan invade the blessings of another? No, Harriet. He has beheld you for the last time. Live and die a suitable inhabitant for a better world! Live to be reverenced by your children’s children! Live to be called the Matron’s pride, and your sex’s boast. Only think of me, as a man who was once thy love; as one incapable of forgetting you. Think of me as one, who would sooner have been what he has been cruelly believed to be, than have basely left thee to the tortures of doubt and suspense, and abandoned to an insulting world. Think of me only as an unfortunate man, as one whom you may pity, as one who will soon be removed: as one whose heart——
“Again I take up my pen. Again the tumult of my senses is calmed. I can now weep. I can thank God that your brother is absent. I can pray, my Harriet! I can see the God of mercy allaying the storm, and smoothing my passage to himself. Farewell: I have only to see, that you are in possession of my justification; and then shall seas again separate us, whilst my soul still fondly clings to thee. Farewell! Farewell!
“Charles Duncan.”
“You have not forgotten the hour of our separation, Harriet! You cannot have obliterated from your memory my agonies, on trusting to the winds and waves my wife, my hopes, my all! You cannot have forgotten my vows of love, of fidelity, of truth. What must have been the artifices, the machinations employed to beguile you of your confidence in Charles Duncan! But have I not before me an evidence of that subtle mischief which man, when lost to all that is manly, can effect? Was thy innocence a match for villany? Thy weakness an armour against cruelty? What have not been the means employed to ruin thee as well as myself! Oh Being of infinite justice! to thee do I look up for a solution of all my doubts! Let me still hold fast my only consolation; my Harriet, my wife stands blameless in thy sight, and in my bosom. She is still cherished as the faithful, but deluded, perhaps fatally deluded, victim of baseness and cruelty.
“Again farewell!”
This letter had evidently been written after my alarm in the avenue by the wretched writer’s sudden disappearance. His narrative was detached from it, and bore several dates, as will appear; may heaven in its mercy lend a portion of its never-failing compassion to those to whom the miserable Harriet now consigns it! May they pause from time to time, and contemplate the noble ruin thus exhibited to their view! For Maclairn’s justice will acknowledge it to be such; and he will applaud the woman, who, although shrinking from the consciousness of guilt, dares to avow her veneration, and love for virtue. She must indeed be sunk, who could erase from her memory a man like Charles Duncan; and Maclairn will understand and fret, that the heart would be unworthy of his, which should not have room for suffering and oppressed innocence, and a memory faithful in its tribute of sorrow and sympathy, gratitude and admiration, for a man, who not only loved her, but also her fame, better than himself. Yes: he will acknowledge that his Harriet, even in these tears, which she gives to suffering and departed worth—but let me hasten to the conclusion of a task which duty prescribes, before my sinking spirits faint.