“Mother,” said Tahmeroo, rising from the ground, where she had cast herself, and winding her arms around Catharine, “oh, mother, comfort me—do comfort me, or my heart will break!”
Catharine pressed her lips upon the forehead of the young wife, and murmured:
“What troubles you, my child?”
She looked fondly and affectionately on the grieved face which lay upon her bosom as she spoke, and her heart ached when she saw how disappointments, regrets, and checked tenderness had worn upon its former rich beauty. The wrung heart had spread a sadness over those features, as the worm in the bosom of a flower withers all its surrounding leaves.
Tahmeroo burst into a passion of tears at her mother’s question.
“Did you not see him, mother?—how he pushed his own wife aside, as if she had been a wild animal—did you not see him thrust her away without a kiss, or one kind word? Oh, mother, my heart is growing hard. I shall hate him, mother.”
Catharine laid her hand on the throbbing forehead of her daughter, and remained in a solemn and serious thought. At length she spoke in a deep and impressive voice.
“No, my child, I did not see this rudeness, for my thoughts were on other things—but listen to me, Tahmeroo. Since the day that you were first laid in my bosom, like a young bird in the nest of its mother, my heart has hovered over yours, as that mother-bird guards its youngling. I have watched every new faculty as it has sprung up and blossomed in your mind. I have striven to guide each strong passion as it dawned in your heart; your nature has been to me as a garden, which I could enter and cultivate and beautify, when disgusted with the weedy and poisonous growth of human nature as I have found it in the world; as I have found it in my own heart; but there is one thing which I have not done. I have laid no foundation of religion and principle in this young soul; I had become an unbeliever in the faith of my fathers. I acknowledged no God, and resolutely turned my thoughts from a future. My spirit had erected to itself one idol—an idol which it was sin to love, and double sin to worship as I worshipped.
“I will not show to you, my child, the progress of a life—a wretched destiny which was regulated by one sin; a foible most men would call it, for human judgment fixes on acts, not on that more subtle sin, a train of unlawful thoughts; I will not show to you the working of that sin; it is the curse of evil that its consequences never cease; that thought is interlinked with thought, event with event, and that the effects of one wrong creep like serpents through the whole chain of a human life, following the perpetrator even in the grave.
“My own destiny would be a painful illustration of this truth—might be the salvation of many in its moral, but when did example save? When did the fall of one human being prevent the fall of another? Why should I expose my own errors, in hopes to preserve you, my child, from similar wrong? What you have just said startles and pains me; I know your nature, and know that you will never cease to love the man whom you have married; indifferent you will never be—a sense of wrong indignation, if indulged in, may make the love of your heart a pain—may sap away the good within you, engender all those regrets that poison the joy of affection.