to tell, no paper she was too timid to sign.
Jasper was going to London on some adventure of his own. He took the
infant--chanced on Arabella--the reader knows the rest. The indifference
ever manifested by Jasper to a child not his own--the hardness with
which he had contemplated and planned his father's separation from one
whom he had imposed by false pretexts on the old man's love, and whom
he only regarded as an alien encumbrance upon the scanty means of
her deluded protector--the fitful and desultory mode in which, when
(contrary to the reasonings which Gabrielle had based upon a very large
experience of the credulities of human nature in general, but in utter
ignorance of the nature peculiar to Darrell) his first attempt
at imposition had been so scornfully resisted by his indignant
father-in-law, he had played fast and loose with a means of extortion
which, though loth to abandon, he knew would not bear any strict
investigation;--all this is now clear to the reader. And the reader will
also comprehend why, partly from fear that his father might betray him,
partly from a compassionate unwillingness to deprive the old man of a
belief in which William Losely said he had found such solace, Jasper, in
his last interview with his father, shrank from saying, "but she is not
your grandchild!" The idea of recurring to the true relations of the
child naturally never entered into Jasper's brain. He considered them to
be as poor as himself. They buy from him the child of parents whore they
had evidently, by their letters, taxed themselves to the utmost, and in
vain, to save from absolute want! So wild seemed the notion, that he had
long since forgotten that relations so useless existed. Fortunately the
nurse had preserved the written statement of the singer--the letters
by Mrs. Vance and Frank--the certificate of the infant's birth and
baptism--some poor relics of Sophy's ill-fated parents-manuscripts of
Arthur's poems--baby-caps with initials and armorial crests, wrought,
before her confinement, by the young wife--all of which had been
consigned by the singer to the nurse, and which the nurse willingly
disposed of to Mrs. Crane, with her own formal deposition of the facts,
confirmed by her sister, Gabrielle's old confidential-attendant, and
who, more favoured than her mistress, was living peaceably in the rural
scenes of her earlier innocence, upon the interest of the gains she had
saved in no innocent service--confirmed yet m