When Lieutenant Morris left India, he obtained permission to remain in England for three years; and it was about twelve months after his arrival that the marriage between him and Maria took place. He had still two years to spend in his native land, and he hired a secluded and neat cottage on the banks of the Annan for that period, for the residence of himself and his young and beautiful wife.
Twelve months after their marriage, Maria became the mother of twins—the twin brothers of our tale. But three months had not passed, nor had her infants raised their first smile towards their mother's face, when the sterile hand of death touched the bosom that supplied them with life. The young husband wept by the bed of death, with the hand of her he loved in his.
"William!" said the gentle Maria—and they were her dying words, for she spoke not again—"my eyes will not behold another sun! I must leave you, love! Oh my husband! I must leave our poor, our helpless infants! It is hard to die thus! But when I am gone, dearest—when my babes have no mother—oh, go to my mother, and tell her—tell her, William—that it was the dying request of her Maria, that she would be as a mother to them. Farewell, love!—farewell! If"—
Emotion and the strugglings of death overpowered her—her speech failed—her eyes became fixed—her soul passed away, and the husband sat in stupefaction and in agony, holding the hand of his dead wife to his breast. He became conscious that she stirred not—that she breathed not—oh! that she was not! and the wail of the distracted widower rang suddenly and wildly through the cottage, startling his infants from their slumber, and, as some who stood round the bed said, causing even the features of the dead to move, as though the departed spirit had lingered, casting a farewell glance upon the body, and passed over it again, as the voice it had loved to hear rose loud in agony.
The father of Maria came and attended her body to its last, long resting-place. But he did no more; and he left the churchyard without acknowledging that he perceived his grief-stricken son-in-law.
In a few months it was necessary for Lieutenant Morris to return to India, and he could not take his motherless and tender infants thither. He wrote to the parents of his departed Maria; he told them of her last request, breathed by her last words; he implored them, as they had once loved her, during his absence to protect his children.
But the hatred between Mr. Sim and Squire Morris had in no degree abated. The former would have listened to his daughter's prayer, and taken her twins and the nurse into his house; but his wife was less susceptible to the influence of natural feeling, and even, while at intervals she wept for poor Maria, she said—
"Take both of them, indeed! No, no! I loved our poor, thoughtless, disobedient Maria, Mr. Sim, as well as you did, but I will not submit to the Morrises. They have nothing to give the children; we have. But they have the same, they have a greater right to provide for them than we have. They shall take one of them, or none of them come into this house." And again she broke into lamentations over the memory of Maria, and, in the midst of her mourning, exclaimed—"But the child that we take shall never be called Morris."
Mr. Sim wrote an answer to his son-in-law, as cold and formal as if it had been a note added to an invoice; colder indeed, for it had no equivalent to the poor, hackneyed phrase in all such, of "esteemed favours." In it he stated that he would "bring up" one of the children, provided that Squire Morris would undertake the charge of the other. The unhappy father clasped his hands together on perusing the letter, and exclaimed—
"Must my poor babes be parted?—shall they be brought up to hate each other? Oh Maria! would that I had died with you, and our children also!"