Longing earnestly for a temporary
sanctuary under his friend's paternal roof, in the quiet of its peace
and virtues, he trusted that the sympathy of Pembroke, the only
confidant of his past sorrows, would tend to heal his recent wounds
(though the nature of the most galling, he felt, must ever remain
unrevealed even to him!) and so fit him, should it be required, to
yet further brave the buffets of an adverse fate. Nor was Miss
Beaufort forgotten. If ever one idea more than another sweetened the
bitterness of his reflections, it was the remembrance of Mary
Beaufort. Whenever her image rose before him--whether he were
standing in the lonely clay with folded arms, in vacant gaze on the
valley beneath, or when lying on his watchful pillow he opened his
aching eyes to the morning light-still, as her angel figure presented
itself to his mind, he did indeed sigh, but it was a sigh laden with
balm; it did not tear his breast like those which had been wrung from
him by the hard hand of calamity and insult. It was the soft breath
of a hallowed love, which makes man dream of heaven, while he feels
sinking to an early grave. Thaddeus felt it delightful to recollect
how she had looked on him that day in Hyde Park, when she "bade him
take care of his own life, while so devoted to that of his dying
friend!" and how she "blessed him in his task," with a voice of
tenderness so startlingly sacred to his soul in its accents, that in
remembering her words now, when so near the moment of his again
seeing and hearing her, his soul expanded towards her, agitated,
indeed, but soothed and comforted.
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