第73章

"It was nearly three years after this unhappy period before I returned to England.My first care, when I DID arrive, was of course to seek for her;but the search was as fruitless as it was melancholy.

I could not trace her beyond her first seducer, and there was every reason to fear that she had removed from him only to sink deeper in a life of sin.Her legal allowance was not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her comfortable maintenance, and I learnt from my brother that the power of receiving it had been made over some months before to another person.He imagined, and calmly could he imagine it, that her extravagance, and consequent distress, had obliged her to dispose of it for some immediate relief.

At last, however, and after I had been six months in England, I DID find her.Regard for a former servant of my own, who had since fallen into misfortune, carried me to visit him in a spunging-house, where he was confined for debt;and there, the same house, under a similar confinement, was my unfortunate sister.So altered--so faded--worn down by acute suffering of every kind! hardly could Ibelieve the melancholy and sickly figure before me, to be the remains of the lovely, blooming, healthful girl, on whom I had once doted.What I endured in so beholding her--but I have no right to wound your feelings by attempting to describe it--I have pained you too much already.

That she was, to all appearance, in the last stage of a consumption, was--yes, in such a situation it was my greatest comfort.Life could do nothing for her, beyond giving time for a better preparation for death;and that was given.I saw her placed in comfortable lodgings, and under proper attendants; I visited her every day during the rest of her short life: I was with her in her last moments."Again he stopped to recover himself; and Elinor spoke her feelings in an exclamation of tender concern, at the fate of his unfortunate friend.

"Your sister, I hope, cannot be offended,"said he, "by the resemblance I have fancied between her and my poor disgraced relation.Their fates, their fortunes, cannot be the same; and had the natural sweet disposition of the one been guarded by a firmer mind, or a happier marriage, she might have been all that you will live to see the other be.But to what does all this lead? I seem to have been distressing you for nothing.

Ah! Miss Dashwood--a subject such as this--untouched for fourteen years--it is dangerous to handle it at all!

I WILL be more collected--more concise.She left to my care her only child, a little girl, the offspring of her first guilty connection, who was then about three years old.

She loved the child, and had always kept it with her.

It was a valued, a precious trust to me; and gladly would I have discharged it in the strictest sense, by watching over her education myself, had the nature of our situations allowed it; but I had no family, no home;and my little Eliza was therefore placed at school.

I saw her there whenever I could, and after the death of my brother, (which happened about five years ago, and which left to me the possession of the family property,) she visited me at Delaford.I called her a distant relation;but I am well aware that I have in general been suspected of a much nearer connection with her.It is now three years ago (she had just reached her fourteenth year,)that I removed her from school, to place her under the care of a very respectable woman, residing in Dorsetshire, who had the charge of four or five other girls of about the same time of life; and for two years I had every reason to be pleased with her situation.But last February, almost a twelvemonth back, she suddenly disappeared.

I had allowed her, (imprudently, as it has since turned out,) at her earnest desire, to go to Bath with one of her young friends, who was attending her father there for his health.I knew him to be a very good sort of man, and I thought well of his daughter--better than she deserved, for, with a most obstinate and ill-judged secrecy, she would tell nothing, would give no clue, though she certainly knew all.He, her father, a well-meaning, but not a quick-sighted man, could really, I believe, give no information; for he had been generally confined to the house, while the girls were ranging over the town and making what acquaintance they chose; and he tried to convince me, as thoroughly as he was convinced himself, of his daughter's being entirely unconcerned in the business.

In short, I could learn nothing but that she was gone;all the rest, for eight long months, was left to conjecture.

What I thought, what I feared, may be imagined; and what Isuffered too."