Henrietta Tindal

“ Lord Dalrie strictly preserved his incognito, until a visitor came into the vestry, who understood French and Latin, who spoke like an educated courteous gentleman to the lonely mourner, and it happened to be this person also who first recognised the changing features of the inmate of the rich coffin, and told the young widower what were the names which had once belonged to his beloved Catherine. Mr. St. George was immediately communicated with, and he learned the manner of his lost wife’s return to her native country, and her strange adventures since she had parted from him. ”

“ John Viscount Dalrie might have been about twenty-five years of age: he was the heir to an earldom, and his countess-mother descended from the house of “proud Argyle.” Her son was distinguished for personal grace and beauty; he possessed a highly cultivated exquisitely sensitive mind, and the hapless young nobleman proved himself as gravely enduring and courageously faithful as the stoutest and most chivalric knight in the long rolls of his ancestry. He met Mrs. St. George during one of his visits to London ”

“ The interview is said to have been “very moving,” and Lord Dalrie earnestly assured Mr. St. George of his entire innocence, and of the honest intentions which he had entertained throughout the affair; but even this discovery of Catherine’s guilt did not put his love to shame, nor shake his determination to attend upon her, even to the last. He accompanied the body to its interment at Stoke, followed by mutes and hired mourners muffled in crape and silk, and drawn by black-plumed horses. He gave this wretched woman the burial of a legitimate Lady Dalrie. ”

“ On her deathbed lay the lost wife, and among the terrible bloom and brightness of hectic fever the haunted soul looked out in the anxious intensity of her glowing brown eyes, and mental emotion and physical suffering were indicated by the painful working of her thin nostrils. A young man knelt beside her, listening and watching for every word, symptom, or look. ”

“ During the next four years they travelled over the greater part of Europe, never remaining long in any place, since Catherine was more restless than even in former days, and she now carried in her own bosom certain fierce pursuers, from whom there is no escape. Lord Dalrie’s confidence in her merit and truth was never clouded by suspicion or doubt ”

“ When exhaustion and unconsciousness would have been quieting human care in almost any other brain, that which worked under the pale high forehead before me was engaged in calculating the amount of her diminishing strength, and keeping watch lest death should surprise her before she had completed the work which she had reserved for the last minutes of her life ”

“ She speedily met with a powerful protector, and gained all that she had learned to covet in very early days; but nothing was heard of her at Stoke until the summer of 1752, and to find her again we must travel far away from the great farm, its corn lands and marine marshes; far from Mr. St. George’s parsonage on our eastern coast, to “Verona’s Champain,” as Dante and his faithful Carey have it, to a sick room in an Italian villa. ”

“ No children were born of her second worthless marriage, to give her a motive, colourable even to herself, for maintaining her successful deception. Maternal affection could not interpose to mask the enormity of any part of her guilt ”

“ It is not surprising that he should have “put himself into a passion,” as our printed authority states, nor, considering the social tone of the day, that he so far forgot his clerical obligations as “to threaten to run Lord Dalrie through the body.” ”

“ We gather these particulars from an old “Debrett’s Peerage” for 1814:—the very existence of John, Lord Dalrie, is passed over unrecorded in modern, and more popular “Peerages.” The name of this unhappy heir has been struck out of the history of his prosperous house. Mr. St. George took the evils of life more easily, but he never married again, and was laid in his quiet churchyard, on the 11th July, 1774. The family of Hancomb is extinct ”