If human skill can preserve her, I may yet have hopes; but
her disorder is on the lung and in the heart, and I fear the stroke
is sure. I am now sitting by her bedside, and writing what she
dictates to her husband, her son, and her daughter. Painful, you may
believe, is this task! I cannot, my dear Somerset, add more than my
hope of seeing you soon, and that you will join in prayers to Heaven
for the restoration of my inestimable friend, with your faithful and
affectionate
"Sobieski."
"Alas! unhappy, persecuted Sobieski!" thought Pembroke, as he closed
the paper; "to what art thou doomed! Some friends are torn from thee
by death; others desert thee in the hour of trouble."
He took out his pencil to answer this distressing epistle, but he
stopped at the first word; he durst not write that his father would
fulfil any one of those engagements which he had so largely promised;
and throwing away the pencil and the paper, he left a verbal
declaration of his sorrow at what had happened, and an assurance of
calling next day. Turning his back on a house which he had left on
the preceding night with so many joyful hopes, he remounted his
horse, and, melancholy and slow, rode about the country until
evening,--so unwilling was he to return to that home which now
threatened him with the frowns of his father, the tears of Mary
Beaufort, and the miserable reflections of his own wretched heart.
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