This last argument seemed completely to dispel all Mr. Anthony Smithson's objections to being hanged; and after two or three exhortations to those virtues that Bow-street officers expect from thieves, the two children of Mercury went on to visit the female prisoner. As, however, we have fully as great a disgust to scenes of low vice and misery as our readers can have, and only introduce them where compelled to do so in accordance with truth, we shall leave the officers to conduct their prisoners to England, and proceed to notice the events which occurred to Henry Beauchamp.
That gentleman then set off from Paris with all speed, as soon as he had seen the prisoners safely consigned to the Bow-street officers. He well knew that such adventures as those in which he had lately been engaged could not fail to find their way into the mouth of rumor; and for many reasons he wished to reach London ere that lady was ready to go a trumpeting before him, like the man with the box on his back, who walks before Punch.
He succeeded tolerably well; so that the fact of Henry Beauchamp being living instead of dead, upon dry land instead of under the sea, was not known to above fifty thousand people when he arrived in London. Out of this number about a thousand had congratulated Lord Ashborough on the resuscitation of his nephew; but the noble lord had so impressed upon his mind that his nephew was dead, that he would not believe a word of the story, gravely saying, that he would give it implicit credence as soon as he heard it from any one who would say that they had seen Henry Beauchamp with their own eyes.
As none of those could be met with, and as the story could be traced to no authentic source, Lord Ashborough held fast his conviction; and, up to the hour of Beauchamp's arrival, continued in the same belief.
It was late at night, or rather early in the morning, when Beauchamp did once more reach the capital; and as he imagined that he was not likely to find any thing prepared for his accommodation in the house of a dead man, he directed the post boys to drive to a hotel, rather than his own dwelling. It was later the next morning when he rose than he had purposed over night; but nevertheless, as soon as he was up, he set forth for Lord Ashborough's, and walked immediately into the drawing-room, where, although the earl himself had breakfasted and gone out, Beauchamp had soon the pleasure of holding his sister in his arms.
Although Maria Beauchamp was not in the least surprised to see him, as she had long before received convincing assurances of his safety--and though she was as light a hearted girl as ever danced through life, unconscious of its sorrows--yet when she first met her brother, after all the dangers he had encountered, the tears rose up in her eyes, from the more vivid impression which his presence produced upon her mind of the loss she would have suffered had the report of his death been true.
The conversation between Henry and Maria Beauchamp was long, and to them highly interesting; and had the world ever been known to forgive those who write dialogues between brothers and sisters, it should have been here transcribed for general edification. In the course of it, Maria made herself acquainted with a great many of the secrets of her brother's heart, and, in return, gave him a far more clear and minute insight into all the views and designs of Lord Ashborough and his worthy agent, Mr. Peter Tims, than Beauchamp had imagined so gay and careless a girl could have been shrewd enough to obtain. From her quick-sightedness in all those particulars, however, in which the interests of William Delaware were concerned, Beauchamp concluded--a result which his sister certainly neither wished nor anticipated--that the surmise of his good lawyer, Mr. Wilkinson, was not so far wrong as he had at first imagined; and he paused, musing with a smile over all the events that yet might be in the wheel of fortune.
The anatomy of a smile is sometimes a curious thing, and that which then played upon Beauchamp's lip was not without its several parts and divisions. In the first place, the idea of his gay, smart, and dashing sister falling in love with a frank, straightforward, simple-hearted sailor, who had neither rank nor fortune to offer her, made him smile. In the next place, he felt the slightest possible shade of disappointment at the idea of Maria Beauchamp not marrying the marquis of this, or the earl of that; and the very absurdity of such a feeling in his bosom, of all the bosoms in the world, made him smile at himself; and the two smiles blended together. The third part of the smile, and which was the purest part too, proceeded from many a sweet feeling and bland hope which rose up when he suffered his mind's eye to gaze on into futurity, and thought of the varied sorts of happiness it might be in the power of him and his to bestow on a noble and generous race, weighed down by long misfortunes.
As soon as all these feelings had had their moment and were gone, and he had given his sister an account of his wondrous accidents by flood and field--Beauchamp wrote a brief note to his uncle, informing him of his return, and then
"Nil actum reputans si quid superesset agendum."