Pectus praeceptis
format amicis.
—Horace.
Est quodam prodire
tenus, si non datur ultra.
—Horace.
With all my love of enterprise and adventure, I cannot
say that I should have particularly chosen the project
before me for my evening’s amusement, had I
been left solely to my own will; but Glanville’s
situation forbade me to think of self, and so far from
shrinking at the danger to which I was about to be
exposed, I looked forward with the utmost impatience
to the hour of rejoining Jonson.
There was yet a long time upon my hands before five
o’clock; and the thought of Ellen left me in
no doubt how it should be passed. I went to Berkeley-square;
Lady Glanville rose eagerly when I entered the drawing-room.
“Have you seen Reginald?” said she, “or
do you know where he has gone to?”
I answered, carelessly, that he had left town for
a few days, and, I believed, merely upon a vague excursion,
for the benefit of the country air.
“You reassure us,” said Lady Glanville;
“we have been quite alarmed by Seymour’s
manner. He appeared so confused when he told us
Reginald left town, that I really thought some accident
had happened to him.”
I sate myself by Ellen, who appeared wholly occupied
in the formation of a purse. While I was whispering
into her ear words, which brought a thousand blushes
to her cheek, Lady Glanville interrupted me, by an
exclamation of “Have you seen the papers to-day,
Mr. Pelham?” and on my reply in the negative,
she pointed to an article in the Morning Herald, which
she said had occupied their conjectures all the morning—it
ran thus:—
“The evening before last, a person of rank and
celebrity, was privately carried before the Magistrate
at—. Since then, he has undergone an examination,
the nature of which, as well as the name of the individual,
is as yet kept a profound secret.”
I believe that I have so firm a command over my countenance,
that I should not change tint nor muscle, to hear
of the greatest calamity that could happen to me.
I did not therefore betray a single one of the emotions
this paragraph excited within me, but appeared, on
the contrary, as much at a loss as Lady Glanville,
and wondered and guessed with her, till she remembered
my present situation in the family, and left me alone
with Ellen.
Why should the tete-a-tete of lovers be so uninteresting
to the world— when there is scarcely a
being in it who has not loved. The expressions
of every other feeling comes home to us all—the
expressions of love weary and fatigue us. But
the interview of that morning, was far from resembling
those which the maxims of love at that early period
of its existence would assert. I could not give
myself up to happiness which might so soon be disturbed,
and though I veiled my anxiety and coldness from Ellen,
I felt it as a crime to indulge even the appearance
of transport, while Glanville lay alone, and in prison,
with the charges of murder yet uncontroverted, and
the chances of its doom undiminshed.
