Belinda

It is at this point, entirely by chance, that Hervey meets Mr. Moreton, a Good Samaritan minister Hervey helped years earlier when the minister’s reputation was sullied by the malicious wags of Lady Delacour’s inner circle. Moreton tells Hervey that he is trying to help a man named Hartley who came to his church in hope of finding his long-lost daughter. The man tells Moreton that the girl grew up nearby and was raised by the man’s mother. The man keeps a locket with his daughter’s portrait in it. Moreton tells a shocked Hervey that the girl in the miniature portrait bears a striking resemblance to his Virginia. Determined to find the man, Hervey uses his own portrait of the girl to locate Hartley. He uses the gallery to display the portrait and, against long odds, succeeds in finding the man.

Lady Delacour is moved by Hervey’s packet explaining his involvement with Virginia/Rachel. She recognizes, however, that Belinda and Vincent have entered into an engagement agreement. She suspects that Vincent, who is still lodging with the Percivals, is not the best choice for Belinda to marry. Vincent goes out almost every night. Rumors get back to Lady Delacour that Vincent is visiting a local gaming hall, where he has become addicted to EO, a variation of roulette, and been losing increasingly larger sums of money. The game is run by someone in Lady Delacour’s inner circle, a lady of disrepute, and Lady Delacour suspects it might actually be a rigged game. She is uncertain how to proceed. She asks Hervey to visit the gaming hall and see whether the game is on the up and up. Hervey visits the parlor and indeed sees Vincent playing and losing, badly. But Hervey also notices a peculiar tilt to the roulette wheel and suspects that the game is indeed fixed. In an effort to teach Vincent a difficult lesson about the dangers of his evident addiction, Hervey does not interfere or stop the game. Once a desperate and broke Vincent taps out, Hervey intervenes and tells the broken man that it is time to live up to the code of behavior expected from a man of his status and from a man engaged to be married.

It is a stern, harsh lesson, but Vincent promises to give up gaming. Before he can confess his moral transgression and his lies to Belinda, however, he contrives to try to recoup the money he lost that night, more than £15,000, by arranging an ill-advised loan from a shady loan shark. When the loan shark is caught in the Percival home and mistaken for a robber, the truth comes out. Belinda politely but firmly calls off the engagement.

With Vincent suddenly out of the picture, Lady Delacour returns to her original plan to get Hervey and Belinda together. The confirmation of Hervey’s engagement to the mysterious Virginia does little to distract her from finding out the young girl’s story. Through the bullfinch advertisement, and by using the help of Virginia/Rachel’s father, whom Hervey has located, Lady Delacour actually finds the young man, named Sunderland, whose portrait Virginia carries in her locket. He is a sailor who four years earlier saw a young Virginia through a telescope in the same woods as Hervey. The two chatted only for a moment (although that was long enough for young Rachel to fall in love and later produce the sketch she wears in her locket). Penniless at the time, Sunderland vowed to earn his fortune. He went off to sea and the lucrative opportunities of the West Indies. He earned money sufficient to marry the beautiful girl in the woods only to find that she was apparently now living as the mistress of Clarence Hervey.

Lady Delacour is determined to clear up this complicated misunderstanding and to get Hervey and Belinda together. She commissions a quick portrait of Sunderland and has Hervey show the girl the painting to see her reaction. Virginia/Rachel swoons and faints. When she comes to, she admits that this is the man she has long loved secretly. Far from being upset, Hervey expresses his profound relief. He tells the emotionally wrought girl that the man awaits her and that she is freed from her bond to marry him. He tells her that he is in fact in love with someone else. In quick order, Hervey brings in both Virginia/Rachel’s long-lost father (who had met Sunderland during his own time in the West Indies) and Sunderland himself, the man she adores. For a girl raised on the saccharine and often hokey narrative plots of popular romances, this highly charged emotional moment is almost too much to bear.

Now both freed of their commitments to people they did not love, Hervey and Belinda finally declare their love for each other. That love, tested and found to be true, promises a long life together because, as Lady Delacour herself sagely observes, “A declaration of love […] is only the beginning of things” (277).