drawn credentials of Mr. Williams, they refused to identify as a Hamburg merchant this gentleman in deep mourning, of very distinguished manners and figure, who declared that he could only speak French and Latin, and sat despondingly among his suspicious chests, resolutely declining to give any further account of himself or his baggage.
We must remember that only seven years had elapsed since the disastrous rebellion of ’45; there was a popular Pretender on the continent, and many intriguers on the alert at home. But setting aside this political aspect, and regarding the affair in a businesslike manner, it certainly became the duty of the officials to examine the contents of the traveller’s boxes, since not only did Cognac, Schiedam, and tobacco arrive there in an illicit manner, but French gloves and brocades, Mechlin and Lille laces, and costly trimmings of Court Point found their way into England under very curious disguises along our eastern coasts. We know of some valuable pieces of ornamental china that came from the Celestial Empire by way of Holland, plunged deeply in firkins of innocent butter, which passed unexamined through a Dashshire custom-house. Therefore, without paying the slightest attention to the French and Latin remonstrances of Mr. Williams, the revenue officers were proceeding to plunge their hangers into the largest chest, when the Hamburg merchant clapped his hand on his sword, and commanded them to desist, for therein was laid awaiting burial, at the place which she had appointed, the corpse of his dear wife; but this violent explanation, so far from giving the officials any confidence or increased satisfaction, only deepened and darkened their suspicions against this eccentric traveller. They now most probably held the clue to some terrible case of mysterious murder! They immediately broke into the case, wrenched off the lid of the coffin, and the boldest hand among them lifted the cere-cloths from the face of the embalmed body. The gentleman in whose possession the corpse had been found was then taken, with his supposed victim, to the vestry of the church at H, and detained there several days under strict surveillance: he was not to be allowed to bury his dead until he had cleared himself of all suspicion; and as the churchyard to which he was bound happened to be situated in the same county, it was hoped that the corpse, or its guardian, might be recognised by some one among the crowds of curious people from the town and neighbourhood, who came and went as they pleased, to see and consider the strange spectacle of this embalmed lady and the foreign gentleman who so faithfully attended upon her. He showed no inclination to abscond, and they pronounced him a “very genteel person,” and a “man of quality.” But as he sat there, the object of so much wonder and idle curiosity, Lord Dalrie sometimes burst into tears of passionate indignation at the unseemly exposure of his dear wife’s remains. An awful change had been passing over that beloved face ever since the light and air of the living world had been admitted to this citizen of the grave. We can remember no recorded instance of a similar ordeal of an equally prolonged duration. Though Iñes de Castro was raised from her coffin to receive the homage of the Portuguese nobles: her mouldering form was carried immediately afterwards to its marble resting-place in the Monastery of Alcobaça, and very brief was the visit which a crazy king of the adjoining realm paid to his entombed Louise.
Lord Dalrie strictly preserved his incognito, until a visitor came into the vestry, who understood French and Latin, who spoke like an educated courteous gentleman to the lonely mourner, and it happened to be this person also who first recognised the changing features of the inmate of the rich coffin, and told the young widower what were the names which had once belonged to his beloved Catherine. Mr. St. George was immediately communicated with, and he learned the manner of his lost wife’s return to her native country, and her strange adventures since she had parted from him. It is not surprising that he should have “put himself into a passion,” as our printed authority states, nor, considering the social tone of the day, that he so far forgot his clerical obligations as “to threaten to run Lord Dalrie through the body.” But when he had had time to consider the whole piteous truth, the deception which had been practised on this true nobleman, and the passionate constancy which had upheld him through his toilsome land journey, and the rude annoyances following his passage by sea, and still kept him at his post beside her coffin in the church at H, the first husband of Kitty Hancomb consented to meet the young Viscount, who yet persisted in calling her “his dear wife” also.
The interview is said to have been “very moving,” and Lord Dalrie earnestly assured Mr. St. George of his entire innocence, and of the honest intentions which he had entertained throughout the affair; but even this discovery of Catherine’s guilt did not put his love to shame, nor shake his determination to attend upon her, even to the last. He accompanied the body to its interment at Stoke, followed by mutes and hired mourners muffled in crape and silk, and drawn by black-plumed horses. He gave this wretched woman the burial of a legitimate Lady Dalrie. The pompous cortége staid for a few minutes before the gate of the vicarage at Stoke, and the young nobleman hurried into the house, from whence he presently reappeared leading forth Mr. St. George, clothed in weeds as deep as those worn by himself, and they both stood, the chief mourners, beside her grave on the 9th day of July, in the year of our Lord, 1752.
In great depression, apparently inconsolable. Lord Dalrie departed, declaring that he should leave England immediately, and for ever; since he could not bear to enter it again. He survived Kate Hancomb exactly three years, dying on the 11th of August, 1755; during the lifetime of the Earl, his father, who expired in the following November. We gather these particulars from an old “Debrett’s Peerage” for 1814:—the very existence of John, Lord Dalrie, is passed over unrecorded in modern, and more popular “Peerages.” The name of this unhappy heir has been