Bell went out in Governor
Crawley's time, and was very intimate with that gentleman in his later
years. And it was in Coventry Island, years after his own marriage, and
five years after he had heard of the birth of Helen's boy, that his own
daughter was born.
She was not the daughter of the first Mrs. Bell, who died of island fever
very soon after Helen Pendennis and her husband, to whom Helen had told
everything, wrote to inform Bell of the birth of their child. "I was old,
was I?" said Mrs. Bell the first; "I was old, and her inferior, was I?
but I married you, Mr. Bell, and kept you from marrying her?" and
hereupon she died. Bell married a colonial lady, whom be loved fondly.
But he was not doomed to prosper in love; and, this lady dying in
childbirth, Bell gave up too: sending his little girl home to Helen
Pendennis and her husband, with a parting prayer that they would befriend
her.
The little thing came to Fairoaks from Bristol, which is not very far
off, dressed in black, and in company of a soldier's wife, her nurse, at
parting from whom she wept bitterly.
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