He looked up, and again their eyes met.
"If it were so, you can at least give me pity in exchange for pity!" she said, with gentle humility; "faith to the faithless cannot forbid this to me."
Ralph was silent; in the tumult of his thoughts he forgot to answer, and that moment Zillah entered the room.
CHAPTER LXX.
MABEL HARRINGTON AND HER SON.
Ben Benson was never at home now; he went into the woods daily to snare partridges, and set box-traps for rabbits, he said; and the inmates of General Harrington's mansion were too sad and disheartened even for smiles, at the idea of rabbits or partridges on New York island. Indeed, the old fellow was too unhappy for his usual avocations. He would not force himself to sit down at his nets, or touch the carpenter's tools with which the boat-house was garnished. A strange belief haunted him night and day, that Lina was somewhere in the wood, frozen to death, and buried in the snow drifts—or worse, perhaps, had fallen through some air-hole in the ice, and perished, calling in vain for help! The idea that she had deliberately left her home, never found a place in his belief for an instant.
Sometimes, in these wanderings, the old seaman saw Mabel Harrington taking her own solitary way through the woods, but he had no wish to address her; and, if she passed near him, would shrink behind some tree, or pretend to be busy with his traps; for the mere sight of her face, rigid and stern with a continued strain of thought, was enough to strike him mute.
Thus it was that Mabel appeared to her family now. The strength and the sunshine had departed from beneath that roof, and a dull, heavy depression lay everywhere about her. General Harrington rather made the old mansion a convenience than a home; half his time was spent at the club-house. He had of late taken rooms at one of those aristocratic up-town hotels, so foreign in all their appointments, that they might as well be in the Boulevards of Paris as in New York, and often remained in them all night; thus, without any apparent abandonment of his wife, he in reality made the separation between them more complete than it had yet been.
Did Mabel never inquire of herself the reason of all this? Alas! it is difficult to say what anxiety or idea fixed itself uppermost in that disturbed mind. The period was one of continued and heavy depression with her. She had ceased to struggle with her own heart, or with the dead, heavy weight of misery that settled each hour colder and more drearily about her life. She took no interest in the household, but left everything to the management of Agnes Barker. The very presence of the young woman was oppressive to her, yet so drearily had her high spirit yielded itself to the one numbing thought of James Harrington's absence, that she had no power even to repel this repulsion, much less cast its object off.
For a time, Ralph had broken up the monotony of this dead life, with his wild conjectures and bitter complaints. He spoke of his half-brother in wrath the more stern and deep, that his love for him had once been so full of tenderness. He was like a man whose old religious faith being once uprooted, believes that no other can exist, and that the Deity is unstable. In his wrath against this brother—in his weak distrust of Lina, the young man had recklessly cast away the brightest jewel of his nature, because they appeared faithless; he believed that all humanity was frail. Alas! when such gems of the soul drop away in youth, it is only with hard experience and keen suffering that they can be gathered back from the depths of life again.