Richard Dowling - The Duke's Sweetheart - A Romance

She never heard from him nor saw him afterwards.

He got to England safely, and reached Anerly, made an ineffectual attempt to bribe Goolby, left Anerly that day, and died within a couple of days. His death made a final settlement with his creditors, and whether he had married or not was no longer a matter of the least consequence to them.

At Brussels, Cheyne's child was born months afterwards. The mother, whose stock of money had by this time dwindled down to almost nothing, had saved a twenty-pound note, and this she gave to a woman whom she knew she could trust to bring her baby-boy to Wyechester to her mother; for she was dying, and knew it. She sent a very brief note with the boy, saying he had not been christened, that his name was Charles Augustus Cheyne, that she was dying, that she had been legally married, but that owing to circumstances the fact of her marriage could not be divulged. Then she appealed to her mother in very pathetic terms to be kind to the boy and provide for him, as she had no means, and had not heard of her husband for months. She also said she sent by bearer a sealed packet of letters and papers belonging to her husband, and begged her mother to keep it, and not to break the seals until some momentous occasion arose for doing so, as she was under important promises to her husband regarding certain matters reference to which was contained in the papers in the packet. Then there came a plea for forgiveness.

At first Mrs. Mansfield was filled with dismay. It was horrible to think of her daughter dying, deserted by the man who had taken her away, and dying in a foreign land too. There was of course an appeal for forgiveness in the letter; but to Mrs. Mansfield's mind the appeal came far too late, and even if it had come earlier it would have appeared an appeal to an affection of the flesh, which was in itself an offence against the spirit.

Mrs. Mansfield had tried to crush down Nature, but Nature was too strong for her; and when the messenger threw back the covering from the face of the infant, the tears, tears of the flesh, stood in her eyes, and her hand trembled. For that small, white, contented, sleeping baby-face reminded her of the time when her own infant lay in her own arms, and she speculated as to what her baby's future might be. And now here was her child's child; and the little one who had lain sleeping in her lap years ago, that seemed no farther off than yesterday, was dying in disgrace among strangers. Her own baby had come into the world sanctified, to her mind, by the very atmosphere in which it was born. Its father was an exemplar of what a man and a clergyman should be. There was every reason to suppose her baby would grow up into a woman who would be spoken of as a model of all a woman should be. Now here was her child's child. It was an unholy, an unrighteous child. There was no blessing or grace about it.

Ah, it was hard to hold that babe in her arms and think of her own child, and have a proper Christian feeling towards its father!

And the grandmother, who was not yet forty-five years of age, undid the baby's hood and passed her hand over the child's beating head, and touched the little fat double chin with her bent finger, softly pinched its white cheeks, and forgot for a while all that had happened since, and was back again in the old time.

Then all at once, as though God had taken pity on her, her tears began to fall, and she became less of a rigid Christian of the poor and narrow kind, and more of a Christian in light of the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the Good Samaritan. She said: "I'll take the boy and do my duty by him." She added after a pause: "I'll take the boy and do all I can for him," At that moment she did not so much want to do her own duty as to be good to him.

But when the messenger had gone, and she found herself alone with the baby, she receded somewhat from the advanced position she had taken. She had resolved for a few moments to keep the boy and live down the talk of idle tongues. Now that idea seemed no more than a temptation to give way to vainglory, and she resolved to send the boy away as speedily as possible.

She took the boy with her to a town a hundred miles from Wyechester, and had him there baptized Charles Augustus Cheyne. Subsequently she got a nurse for him, and, having made a liberal arrangement with the nurse, she said:

"I shall come and see you and him at irregular intervals; and whenever I come and find him looking well and comfortable, I will give you a guinea in addition to what I have arranged with you for."

By this she intended to secure the continual good treatment of the child; for though she had failed in her heroic resolve of living down talk of the idle tongues of Wyechester, she had made up her mind to be as good to the orphan as she could.

When she got home she found news awaiting her of the death of her daughter. She put away the thought of her daughter as much as she could from her mind; and, in a few years, when the boy was old enough to go to school, she went to that town again, and having requested an attorney to preserve secrecy in the matter, without giving him any reason for it, she asked the lawyer to find a school for the boy. Accordingly he was sent to the school kept by the old maid, and later to a college. Subsequently he was put to business in London; but from the time he left the place where he had been brought up, he had never seen his grandmother, and the early days at his nurse's had completely faded out of his memory.

The grandmother was now a very old woman. She still lived in her house at Wyechester. She had altered greatly in face and figure, but her nature had softened in no way with years. She was still as stiff and intellectually assured as ever she had been. She had the willing power of one hundred and fifty pounds a year; the other seventy died with her; and she had made this will in favour of Charles Augustus Cheyne, of Long Acre, in London. Although he had never within his memory heard her name, she had always taken care to know what he was doing, and how he was getting on.

She had even so far given way to worldliness as to read the publications to which he contributed; and as she read them she thought of how strange it should be that his grandfather was younger than his grandson when he died, and here was she now reading what the grandson had written!

But in all that Charles Augustus Cheyne had ever written, there was nothing so surprising as would have been the result of bringing together the sealed packet held by his grandmother, the registry of Anerly Church, and Charles Augustus Cheyne.

The bodily and mental conditions of the Marquis of Southwold, which forbade him living ashore any length of time, were many and almost insurmountable. The greatest doctors had of course been consulted, but without being able to afford any relief. They had called his lordship's symptoms by a number of very learned names, seldom heard in the medical profession. They could go no further than that. They had tried every resource of their art, and had failed. Men at the top of the profession can afford to confess failure much better than their brethren of a less degree. When the greatest doctors declare a patient must die soon, the sooner that patient dies the better for conventional decency.

The doctors had not said that Lord Southwold must die soon; but they had declared him incurable, and advised him to try the sea. He tried the sea, and the remedy was most successful. On shore his eyes were tender and dim, his limbs dumb and nerveless, his appetite failed, and his spirits sank almost to melancholia. But no sooner did he go on board a ship than all these symptoms began to abate. His eyes grew stronger, his sight improved, the lassitude lessened, he could eat with relish, and his spirits gradually returned.