Another feeling more powerful than filial or maternal love—more absorbing—more ruthlessly adhesive, was the love she could not conquer for the man who had been the first cause of all the misery and wrong against which she was struggling. It was the one passion of a life-time—the love of a warm, impulsive heart—of a vivid intellect, and, say what we will, this is a love that never changes—never dies. It may be perverted—it may be wrestled with and cast to the earth for a time; but such love once planted in a woman's bosom, burns there so long as a spark is left to feed its vitality; burns there, it may be, for ever and ever, a blessing or a curse.
To Ada Leicester it was a curse, for it outlived scorn. It crushed her self-respect—it fell like a mildew upon all the good resolutions that, about this time, began to spring up and brighten in her nature. You would not have supposed that proud, beautiful woman so humble in her love—her hopeless love—of a bad man, and that man the husband whom she had wronged! Yet so it was. Notwithstanding the past: notwithstanding all the perfidy and cruel scorn with which he had deliberately urged her on to ruin, she would have given up anything, everything for one expression of affection, such as had won the love of her young heart. But even here, where the accomplishment of her wish would surely have proved a punishment, her affections were flung rudely back.
And now, when all her efforts were in vain, when no one could be found to accept her penitence, or return some little portion of the yearning tenderness that filled her heart, she plunged recklessly into the world again. The arrow was in her side; but she folded her silken robes over it, and strove to feed her great want with the husks of fashionable life; alas, how vainly! To persons of her passionate nature, the very attempt thus to appease the soul's hunger is a mockery. Ada Leicester felt this, and at times she grew faint amid her empty splendor. She had met with none of the usual retributions which are the coarser and more common result of faults like hers. No disgrace clung to her name: she had wealth, beauty, position, homage. But who shall say that the punishment of her sin was not great even then? for there is no pain to some hearts so great as a consciousness of undeserved homage. Still this was but the silver edging to the cloud that had begun to rise and darken over her life. Her own proud, warm heart was doomed to punish itself to the utmost.
CHAPTER XIII. THE MORNING LESSON.
Like some poor cherub gone astray,
From out his native paradise,
Her gentle soul had lost its way,
And fed itself on tears and sighs.
Jacob Strong was alone in Mr. Leicester's chamber. His master had gone out hurriedly, and left the room in considerable disarray. Papers were scattered about loose upon the table. The small travelling desk, which usually stood upon it, was open, and on the purple lining lay an open letter, bearing a Southern post-mark, that had evidently arrived by the morning mail.