From the account which this seemingly well-informed speaker proceeds to give, it would appear that the information contained in the ill-spelt, undated letter of Edmund’s nurse, was, as far as it was intelligible, true: so much so, indeed, that we recommend a second perusal of the precious document to all who may have forgotten any part of its contents.
Fitz-Ullin was, it seems, the title of the great family alluded to anonymously by the nurse. Edmund had, as the letter stated, been stolen when an infant in arms off the lawn by a strolling beggar, at a time when the family were from home. His nurse had substituted her own child, at first, to avoid blame. Afterwards, she had grown too fond of seeing her son bringing up to be a young lord, to seize, or inform against, the bold vagrant when she discovered her, as mentioned in the letter, carrying the stolen child about.
The smiling boy, described in the letter as flinging his cake out of the carriage window to poor Edmund, when on crutches, and apparently with but one leg, he begged before it, was no other than our hero’s after friend, Ormond, now proved to be the nurse’s child. And the lady, who had sat with the smiling boy on her knee, thinking him her own son, and looked out, with but a passing feeling of compassion on the one little bare foot of the mendicant child, half sunk in the wet mud of the street, its little shoulders almost forced out of their sockets by its crutches, and its poor little features wearing the wan expression of premature misery, was no other than that mendicant child’s own mother, the first Lady Fitz-Ullin. This was some years after he had been stolen. Soon after this it was that poor little Edmund had been carried over to Cumberland by the said vagrant, in company with a ship-load of reapers. After the harvest he had been led about at Keswick Regatta, to excite the compassion of the company; and after the Regatta, abandoned, as we have described, by his then supposed mother, the beggar woman; who, when caught in the fact of stealing linen from a hedge, was obliged to have recourse to hasty flight.
The narrator next proceeded to recount, what we already know, the particulars of how poor Edmund, on the evening of the day he had been thus abandoned, and nearly perishing with cold and hunger, was found on the borders of the lake, by Mrs. Montgomery’s daughter, Lady L.; brought home by her; and, ever since, cherished and protected by the whole family.
“And was the gentleman who is now dancing with Lady Julia L.,” inquired a young lady, “that poor little boy that was begging under the carriage window; and who is now Lord Fitz-Ullin? How curious!”
“Precisely so, madam,” replied our sable orator.
When it was mentioned that the present Lord Fitz-Ullin, during all the years from childhood upwards, had, as Edmund Montgomery, been the constant, intimate companion of Lord L.’s daughters, the Colonel, addressing Lady D. aside, laid claim to some discernment.
“Well, I declare,” continued the young lady, “if I were Lord Fitz-Ullin, I should be always quite afraid I might turn out to be somebody else, some other time.”
“The proofs of his Lordship’s identity, madam,” said the important man in black, “had been carefully preserved by wretches, who hoped to have made a market of the secret; and who indeed would, as it has lately appeared, have done so, had it not been for the upright and honourable feelings of the poor young man himself.”
“But, sir,” enquired Lady D., “does Lord Fitz-Ullin intend to marry the lady, who figured in the papers lately as the cause of all the fracas?”