Though so many persons were expected before night to share the hospitalities of Mowbray Park, that, notwithstanding the ample size of its mansion, both the lady and her housekeeper were obliged to exert considerable skill in arranging their accommodation, there was but one person besides the family present at the happy breakfast-table; and she was not a guest, but an inmate.
Rosalind Torrington was a young Irish girl from the province of Ulster, who had passed the first seventeen years of her life in great retirement, in a village not far distant from the coast, with no other society than the immediate neighbourhood afforded. Since that time her destiny had undergone a great change. She was an only child, and lost both father and mother in one of those pestilential fevers which so frequently ravage the populous districts of Ireland. Her father was one of that frightfully-wronged and much-enduring race of Protestant clergy, who, during the last few years, have suffered a degree of oppression and persecution unequalled for its barefaced injustice by any thing that the most atrocious page of history can record.
Her mother, of high English descent, had been banished from all intercourse with her patrician family, because she refused to use her influence with her exemplary husband to induce him to abandon his profitless and often perilous preferment in Ireland, where he felt he had the power as well the will to do good, in order to place himself in dependence upon his wife's brother, a bachelor viscount who had invited the impoverished family to his house, and promised some time or other to do something for him in his profession--if he could. This invitation was politely but most positively refused, and for the last three years no intercourse of any kind had taken place between them. At the end of that time, Mr. Torrington and his exemplary wife, while sedulously administering to the sick souls of their poor parishioners, caught the fever that raged among them, and perished. Mrs. Torrington survived her husband three days; and during that time her thoughts were painfully occupied by the future prospects of her highly-connected but slenderly-portioned girl.
All she could do for her, she did. She wrote to her haughty brother in such a manner as she thought, from her deathbed, must produce some effect: but lest it should not, she addressed another letter to Mrs. Mowbray, the favourite friend of her youth, entreating her protection for her orphan child.