However, I said: 'Look you here, Mr.
Montagu; if my brother, Lord Walwyn, gave himself to you of
deliberate mind, with full health and faculties, you might think him
a gain indeed. Or if you like it better, he would have a claim to
the promises of your Church; but if you merely take advantage of the
weakness of a man at the point of death to make him seem a traitor to
his whole life, why, then, I should say you trusted, more than I do,
to what you call Divine promises.'
He told me--as they always do--that I knew nothing about it, and that
he should pray for me. But I had some trust that his English blood
would be guilty of no foul play. I was much more afraid of the
Dominican; only one good thing was that the man was not a priest. So
went by Good Friday and Easter Eve. They would not let me go to
church for fear I should speak to any one. Madame Croquelebois and
my mother's old smirking tire-woman, Bellote, took turns to mount
guard over me. I heard worse and worse accounts of my dear brother's
bodily state, but I had one comfort. One of the servants secretly
handed Tryphena this little note addressed to me, in feeble
straggling characters:--
'Do what they may to me my will does not consent. Pray for me. If
word were taken to the K. E. W. and R.'
It was some comfort that I should have that to prove what my brother
was to the last. I made me able to weep and pray--pray as I had
never prayed before--all that night and that strange sad Easter
morning, when all the bells were ringing, and the people flocking to
the churches, and I sat cut off from them all in my chamber,
watching, watching in dread of sounds that might tell me that my
dearest and only brother, my one hope, was taken from me, body and
soul, and by my fault, in great part.
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