Sketches | Page 6

those
passing travellers who occasionally claimed his protection and
hospitality, the chief, and certainly the most engaging pursuit of Major
Ponsonby, had been to assist the development of the lively talents of
his daughter, and to watch with delight, not unattended with anxiety,
the formation of her ardent and imaginative character: he had himself
imparted to her a skilful practice in those fine arts in which he himself
excelled, and a knowledge of those exquisite languages which he
himself not only spoke with facility, but with whose rich and
interesting literature he was intimately acquainted. He was careful, also,
that, although almost an alien from her native country, she should not
be ignorant of the progress of its mind; and no inconsiderable portion
of his income had of late years been expended in importing from
England the productions of those eminent writers of which we are
justly as proud as of the heroes under whose flag he had himself
conquered in Portugal and Spain.
The progress of the daughter amply repaid the father for his care, and
rewarded him for his solicitude: from the fond child of his affections
she had become the cherished companion of his society: her lively
fancy and agreeable conversation prevented solitude from degenerating
into loneliness: she diffused over their happy home that indefinable
charm, that spell of unceasing, yet soothing excitement, with which the
constant presence of an amiable, a lovely and accomplished woman can
alone imbue existence; without which life, indeed, under any
circumstances, is very dreary; and with which life, indeed, under any
circumstances, is never desperate.
There were moments, perhaps, when Major Ponsonby, who was not

altogether inexperienced in the great world, might sigh, that one so
eminently qualified as his daughter to shine even amid its splendour,
should be destined to a career so obscure as that which necessarily
attended the daughter of a Consul in a distant country. It sometimes
cost the father's heart a pang that his fair and fragrant flower should
blush unseen, and waste its perfume even in their lovely wilderness;
and then, with all a father's pride, and under all the influence of that
worldly ambition from which men are never free, he would form plans
by which she might visit, and visit with advantage, her native country.
All the noble cousins were thought over, under whose distinguished
patronage she might enter that great and distant world she was so
capable of adorning; and more than once he had endeavoured to
intimate to Henrietta that it might be better for them both that they
should for a season part: but the Consul's daughter shrunk from these
whispers as some beautiful tree from the murmurs of a rising storm.
She could not conceive existence without her father--the father under
whose breath and sight she had ever lived and flourished--the father to
whom she was indebted, not only for existence, but all the attributes
that made life so pleasant; her sire, her tutor, her constant company, her
dear, dear friend. To part from him, even though but for a season, and
to gain splendour, appeared to her pure, yet lively imagination, the
most fatal of fortunes; a terrible destiny--an awful dispensation. They
had never parted, scarcely for an hour; once, indeed, he had been absent
for three days; he had sailed with the fleet on public business to a
neighbouring port; he had been obliged to leave his daughter, and the
daughter remembered those terrible three days like a frightful dream,
the recollection of which made her shudder.
Major Ponsonby had inherited no patrimony--he possessed only the
small income derived from his office, and a slender pension, which
rewarded many wounds; but, in the pleasant place in which their lot
was cast, these moderate means obtained for them not merely the
necessaries, but all the luxuries of life. They inhabited in the town a
palace worthy of the high, though extinct nobility, whose portraits and
statues lined their lofty saloons, and filled their long corridors and
graceful galleries; and about three miles from the town, on a gentle
ascent facing the ocean, and embowered in groves of orange and olive

trees, the fanciful garden enclosed in a thick wall of Indian fig and
blooming aloes, was a most delicate casino, rented at a rate for which a
garret may not be hired in England; but, indeed, a paradise. Of this
pavilion Miss Ponsonby was the mistress; and here she lived amid fruit
and flowers, surrounded by her birds: and here she might be often seen
at sunset glancing amid its beauties, with an eye as brilliant, and a step
as airy, as the bright gazelle that ever glided or bounded at her side.
CHAPTER II.
A Fair Presentment
ONE summer day, when everybody was asleep in the little sultry city