Villars tells Lady Howard that she foresaw the perplexity rightly, then asks her to write his answer. He will not intentionally offend Madame Duval. He has unanswerable reasons for keeping the granddaughter in England. The chief one is the earnest desire of a person to whose will the girl owes implicit duty. Duval may be assured that the child meets with the utmost attention and tenderness, and that her education, however short of his wishes, almost exceeds his abilities. When the time comes for her to pay her duty to her grandmother, he hopes Duval will find no cause to be dissatisfied.
He will be as brief as he can for Mrs Mirvan, because the transactions before the birth are no entertainment for a humane mind. He had been tutor to Mr Evelyn, the child's grandfather. On returning to England, Evelyn married Madame Duval, then a waiting-girl at a tavern, against the entreaties of his friends, Villars the most urgent. Shame followed him to France. He lived two years. On his deathbed he wrote Villars to forget resentment in favour of humanity: a father, trembling for his child, bequeathed her to that care. Evelyn left a thousand pounds and the guardianship of his daughter's person until she was eighteen, but he left her fortune dependent on her mother. Miss Evelyn grew up under Villars's roof and loved him as a father. At eighteen her mother, now married to Monsieur Duval, called her to Paris. There Duval, at her husband's instigation, tried to force a match with one of his nephews. When power failed, she threatened poverty and ruin. Without a witness, Miss Evelyn consented to a private marriage with Sir John Belmont, a profligate young man who had found his way into her favour. He promised to take her to England. Disappointed of the fortune by the Duvals' rancour, he burnt the certificate and denied that they had ever been united. She fled to Villars. Proofs of the marriage could not be got. Everyone believed her innocent. The same moment that gave birth to the infant ended the mother's life.
Duval's rage at the elopement did not abate while her daughter still breathed. News of the death brought her a severe illness. From her recovery until this letter, Villars had never heard that she asked after the circumstances of the death or the birth. He has cherished the child from infancy to her sixteenth year, and his fondest wish is to bestow her on someone who knows her worth, then rest in her arms. Father, daughter, and granddaughter have all been his to educate. Even if Duval had merited the charge, he could hardly bear the parting. Her former visits to Howard Grove already filled him with terror, because she does not quit his sight for a moment without apprehensions that almost overpower him. She is the only tie he has on earth. He asks Howard not to judge that weakness with severity. The refusal is ready for Howard to send. The next request for the girl has not yet been written.
Coming Up in Chapter 3
On 8 March, some months later, Lady Howard writes that Villars's long illness has lifted, and that everyone at Howard Grove wishes the recovery to last. She then asks if she takes advantage of that health by naming his pupil and Howard Grove in one breath, because Maria can barely hide her wish to meet the friend of her infancy.
