Chapter 35 - Page 2

the motion of the vessel, Jane
ventured with one of the ladies to attempt a walk round the deck of the
ship. Unaccustomed to such an uncertain foothold, the walkers were
prevented falling by the kind interposition of a gentleman, who for the
first time had shown himself among them at that moment. The accident, and
their situation, led to a conversation which was renewed at different
times during their passage, and in some measure created an intimacy
between our party and the stranger. He was addressed by the commander of
the vessel as Mr. Harland; and Lady Chatterton exercised her ingenuity in
the investigation of his history, by which she made the following
discovery:

The Rev. and Hon. Mr. Harland was the younger son of an Irish earl, who
had early embraced his sacred profession in that church, in which he held
a valuable living in the gift of his father's family. His father was yet
alive, and then at Lisbon with his mother and sister, in attendance on his
elder brother, who had been sent there in a deep decline a couple of
months before. It had been the wish of his parents to have taken all their
children with them; but a sense of duty had kept the young clergyman in
the exercise of his holy office, until a request of his dying brother, and
the directions of his father, caused him to hasten abroad to witness the
decease of the one, and to afford all the solace within his power to the
others.

It may be easily imagined that the discovery of the rank of their
accidental acquaintance, with the almost certainty that existed of his
being the heir of his father's honors, in no degree impaired his
consequence in the eyes of the dowager; and it is certain, his visible
anxiety and depressed spirits, his unaffected piety, and disinterested
hopes for his brother's recovery, no less elevated him in the opinions of
her companions.

There was, at the moment, a kind of sympathy between Harland and Jane,
notwithstanding the melancholy which gave rise to it proceeding from such
very different causes and as the lady, although with diminished bloom,
retained all her personal charms, rather heightened than otherwise by the
softness of low spirits, the young clergyman sometimes relieved his
apprehensions of his brother's death by admitting the image of Jane among
his more melancholy reflections.

The voyage was tedious, and some time before it was ended the dowager had
given Grace an intimation of the probability there was of Jane's
becoming, at some future day, a countess. Grace sincerely hoped that
whatever she became she would be as happy as she thought all allied to
John deserved to be.

They entered the bay of Lisbon early in the morning; and as the ship had
been expected for some days, a