They each slightly looked up, as I was ushered into the apartment; they saluted me with a graceful and condescending bend of the head, such as we are accustomed to use to an inferior whom we are willing to put at his ease. What were my sensations, a father, disguised and unknown, in the presence of his children! I attempted to stand, as is usual for a tradesman, when he waits on his customers at their own house. I attempted to speak. My tongue refused its office; my legs tottered as if sustaining an unusual weight. Louisa observed me, and desired me to be seated. I had no power of choice; I accepted her civility. No sooner was I seated, than in spite of myself a flood of tears gushed from my eyes. She was astonished; she begged to know if I were indisposed; she requested me to make use of every assistance the house could afford. I now found my speech. I apologised for my behaviour; said I had felt suddenly ill, but that the tears I shed would prove the most effectual relief to me. My appearance, it may be proper to mention, was not that of a vulgar pedlar; it was tall, graceful, and ingenuous, with a certain air of refinement and politeness; my Armenian dress, though formed of uncostly materials, was such as to display my person to considerable advantage. Both the young ladies showed themselves interested in the symptoms of my distress. After a few minutes internal struggle, I rose, made an excuse for the abruptness of my departure, and requested permission to repeat my visit in the afternoon, when I should have something not unimportant to communicate to them.
I had seen two of my daughters; I had been satisfied that they still existed; I had witnessed their exterior health and beauty. As I withdrew, I laid my hand upon my heart, and congratulated myself: “Thus far,” said I, “it is well!” I felt relieved from part of the weight that lay there. With my right hand I struck upon my forehead: “but, oh, where,” cried I, “is my other daughter?” The thought came over me with the force of a demonstration: she is dead! A servant was attending me to the door; I requested to speak to the housekeeper; I was introduced to Mariana Chabot. She was struck with my appearance, as I believe my daughters had been, as if my features were those of some person with whom she was intimately acquainted. She would probably have mistaken me for my own son, but that I looked considerably too young. I intreated her to pardon my curiosity; but, I assured her, I had a particular reason to interest myself in the family of Monsieur St. Leon, and I therefore requested that she would have the goodness to inform me of their affairs, as far as she could with propriety communicate them to a person who was not so happy as to be in the catalogue of their acquaintance. I told her that I had just seen two of her ladies, but that I had understood there had been three, and I particularly desired some information as to the young lady who had not made her appearance in the parlour. My presentiment was true; the impression that smote me when I left the parlour, was her funeral knell; my beloved Julia was dead; she had been dead four years! If it had not been for the agitation of my mind when I visited the tomb of my venerable parent, I should have discovered her monument near that of her grandmother. That would have been too overwhelming a mode of learning the painful intelligence; I was glad at least to have escaped that!
In this and some subsequent conversations I held with this respectable matron, I learned a variety of particulars respecting my daughters. Madame Chabot expressed herself sorry that she had nothing pleasing to communicate. Her young ladies had been pursued by a train of misfortunes, though, heaven knew, they had merited every happiness. A few years after they had been settled at St. Leon, Julia had been addressed by a lover in every sense worthy of her. He was rich, noble, of a gallant spirit, of a cultivated understanding, and a truly kind and affectionate heart. Their attachment had been long and tried; habit and experience of each other’s virtues had caused it to take a deep root. The father of the young man had destined him to marry the daughter of a duke and peer of the kingdom; but, finding his affections unalterably fixed, he had at length yielded, and sanctioned their mutual passion with his consent. Every thing was now prepared for the nuptials; a day was fixed, and the appointed time was fast approaching. Just at this juncture, the father changed his mind, and became more obstinate and inexorable than ever. A report had begun to be circulated that monsieur St. Leon, the father of the young ladies, was still alive. Madame Chabot expressed her fear that this report had originated in some indiscretion of Bernardin, who, however, had always proved himself a most zealous and faithful servant, and who had since paid the debt of nature. Be that as it might, the father of the lover of Julia was found no longer accessible to expostulation or entreaty. He was of an avaricious disposition, and he regarded the fortune of the young lady, which would otherwise have been considerable, as entirely alienated and annihilated by this flaw in the title. But what was more material, it by no means accorded with his ideas of nobility and honour, that the father-in-law of his only son should be a fugitive and a wanderer, with whose residence no one was acquainted, and of whom no one could tell whether he were living or dead. The manner in which the ladies had entered into the repossession of their paternal estate, when minutely investigated, was thought to have something in it of an ambiguous and unpleasant nature. It was well known that monsieur St. Leon had left the country in consequence of his having ruined himself by the vice of gaming. “Surely,” said some, “it is a little mysterious, how his children came, after an interval of nine years, to be able to repurchase all he ever possessed.” In short, the more the old vicomte was reasoned with, the more furious he grew. At length he made use of the power which the government of France vests in the father of a family, and shut up his son in one of the royal prisons. This was a fatal blow both to the chevalier and his mistress. Disappointed in the object of his warmest affections, maltreated and disgraced by the severity of a father, his health sensibly declined. Nothing however could shake the inflexibility of the vicomte; he would release his son upon no other terms than a renunciation of his love, terms which the sense of dignity and honour in the young gentleman, equally with his passion, forbade him to accept. To all representations of the necessity of granting liberty to his son, if he would not make himself answerable for his death, the vicomte sternly replied, “that he preferred his dying to the idea of his connecting himself with a family of dishonour.” It was not till a few weeks before he expired, that the father had consented to his release from prison, and had removed him to one of his castles in a remote province. But the malady of the chevalier was found incurable; the vital principles of the system were fatally deranged. The lover died; and the consequences of this unhappy affair had put a premature close to the existence of the unfortunate Julia. Madame Chabot added that, the circumstance of this story having become a subject of public animadversion, it had had a most unfavourable effect on the prospects of the surviving sisters. They bore their situation with dignity; but they could not but feel the unhappy coincidence, which cut them off from the happiest condition of human life, an honourable and well assorted settlement in marriage.
While madame Chabot related to me the tragical history of Julia, I felt convulsed with passion, and more than once burst into an agony of tears. Fatal legacy! atrocious secrets of medicine and chemistry! every day opened to my astonished and terrified sight a wider prospect of their wasteful effects! A common degree of penetration might have shown me, that secrets of this character cut off their possessor from the dearest ties of human existence, and render him a solitary, cold, self-centered individual; his heart no longer able to pour itself into the bosom of a mistress or a friend; his bosom no longer qualified to receive upon equal terms the overflowing of a kindred heart. But no mere exercise of imagination, nothing short of the actual experience through which I had passed, could have adequately represented the mischiefs of a thousand various names, that issued from this Pandora’s box, this extract of a universal panacea. I regarded myself as the murderer of these two lovers, than whom I concluded, from my personal observation of the one, and all that I heard of the other, two purer and more affectionate beings, more singularly qualified to form each other’s happiness, had never existed. I felt as truly haunted with the ghosts of those I had murdered, as Nero or Caligula might have been; my wife, my son, my faithful negro; and now, in addition to these, the tender Julia and her unalterable admirer. I possessed the gift of immortal life; but I looked on myself as a monster that did not deserve to exist.
It is with difficulty that I shall be able to make the reader understand how much more severe the impression of this last catastrophe was made to me, by the place and time in which I received the intelligence. We are creatures of sensation: our worst calamities derive as much of their pungency from the accessories by which they are accompanied, as they do from their intrinsic evil. If I had heard this story at any other period, I am persuaded its effects would not have been half so painful. The idea of my daughters was faded in my sensorium, and whatever related to them, though really felt, and felt like a father, would have been felt with a less overpowering interest.
But now I had journeyed from Valladolid to the Garonne to behold them; I had surveyed the castle they inhabited; I had viewed the garden which they arranged with their hands; I had entered the parlour which they adorned with their presence. All this controlled the operation of absence and of distance; I felt at this moment as if I had been accustomed to see them every day, and to regard them as inseparable from my existence. I experienced, as it were, the united effect of familiarity and novelty; I felt the melancholy fate of Julia, with all the keenness of an inmate, and all the surprise of a long absent traveller. The very metamorphosis I had undergone gave new poignancy to my distress. Madame Chabot tortured me deliberately and at leisure, without the slightest consciousness of what she was doing; she believed she was pouring a tale of persons unknown into the ears of a native of the other hemisphere, at the moment that she was calling up in arms the strongest and most excruciating feelings of a father for his child. I on the other hand had the most violent struggle with myself, while I endeavoured to suppress the appearances of an emotion, which to the person who witnessed them must have been for ever unaccountable. As it was, and in spite of all my efforts, madame Chabot betrayed no little amazement at the agitation with which I listened to a story, in which, as she apprehended, I could have no personal interest.
What I heard from madame Chabot suggested to me a conduct, which I resolved to adopt under the present circumstances. In my next interview I told Louisa that I would now account to her for emotions which, at the time they occurred, must have appeared somewhat extraordinary. I owned that I had been acquainted with her father; I said that I had first met with him in a journey, in which I was then engaged through the province of Mesopotamia; that I had received from him, though a stranger, a singular obligation; that a sincere friendship between us had been the result of this event; that he died about two years since; that I had attended him in his last moments; that he had charged me with his dying recommendations and requests; and that my present journey into France had principally been instigated by a desire to visit his children. I then delivered into her hands various letters and papers, which I had counterfeited chiefly with the intention of supplying my daughters with legal evidence of the decease of their father.
Louisa listened to what I related with those marks of affection and sorrow, which are inseparable from the habits of a well constituted mind. The emotion she discovered led me farther than I first intended. I was urged by an irresistible impulse to practise, beyond what the occasion demanded, upon the feelings of her virtuous mind. I know not whether this is to be considered as a vain refinement and a criminal curiosity; but—I think—every generous spirit will excuse me, when it is recollected that this covert and imperfect proceeding was all that was left me to soothe the impatient cravings of a father’s heart. From time to time I reminded her of particulars that it was scarcely possible any one but her father should know; I conjured up past scenes; I made all the revolutions of her youth pass successively in review before her; I touched all the pulses of her soul. Sometimes she was fixed in mute astonishment at the exactness of my information, and was ready to do me homage as some aerial genius, who condescended to clothe himself in this earthly figure; at other times astonishment was swallowed up in feeling, her soul dissolved in tenderness, and she appeared ready to faint into my arms. It is scarcely possible to depict the pleasurable sensations I drew from these intercourses; I know not whether they were entirely innocent; but this I know, that in me they produced a sentiment of innocence, and a sentiment of paradise. I felt sometimes as if I could have wasted ages in this sort of gratification.
As the executor of their father, my daughters received me with every mark of respect; but, after having already protracted my visit to them for the space of many days, I felt that I should be guilty of something alike hostile to their decorum and reputation, if I did not speedily bring it to a termination. I was a person unknown and almost without a name; nor could it be proper for a young woman to continue to receive the visits of a person of her own age and a different sex, upon the intimate and confidential footing upon which my visits were paid, except in the case of him whom she intends to make her husband. To considerations of this sort I was obliged to sacrifice the gratifications in which I had lately been indulging. My principal concern at St. Leon, from the time in which madame Chabot had communicated to me the real nature of my daughter’s situation, was to remove those disadvantages in which my destiny and my errors had involved them: it would therefore have been the extreme of inconsistency in me, while I was healing one mischief, to prepare for them another. It is not indeed probable that I should long have been contented for myself with this anomalous and neutral situation, in which I more resembled a piece of furniture endowed with the faculty of noting the sensations of those around me, than the member of any human society. It was high time, as I thought, even in this point of view, that I should put an end to the inglorious scene, should appear in some real character, and engage in some real undertaking.
Influenced by these considerations, I now quitted the residence of my daughters. I had satisfied the longing curiosity of a father, had seen their situation, had witnessed their beauty, their accomplishments, and their virtues. If I had been afflicted at hearing of the premature fate of my eldest daughter, if I had been agonised by the reflection that I might justly regard myself as her murderer, who was so fitted to suffer this anguish as myself? The outcast of my species, what right had I to expect to be happy in my own person, or prosperous in any of my relations? The guilty cause of all this mischief, it was but suitable that it should be brought home to my own bosom, that it should tear and distract my own brain! Add to this, I was not without a hope that my journey would not be found useless to the survivors. By furnishing to them the proper documents to certify the death of their father, I flattered myself that I had cut them off more effectually than before from all connection with my unpropitious destiny, and had placed them nearly upon a footing with the other noble and unmarried heiresses of their native country. I have nothing further to relate in regard to these two amiable and excellent sisters. From the time that I quitted St. Leon upon this occasion, to the time in which I am now writing, the opportunity of making further enquiries respecting them has not occurred to me. If ever it does occur, I have only this one wish to entertain, which, if granted, will, I am sure, satisfy my fondest hopes,—May I find they have been as happy, as they so well deserve to be!