“Death! death! do I see thee with weapon dread—
Art thou laying thy hand on his noble head?
Lo! the wife is here, with her sleepless eye,
To dispute each step of thy victory.
She doth fold that form in her soul’s embrace,
And her prayer swells high from its resting-place.”
In a quiet village of New York, Myra Whitney made her home with the man who had won her against so much opposition and amid so many trials. She had cast off the splendor of her old life, and, sharing the fortunes of her husband, began a new and still more noble existence; but directly came one to the little Eden with news that would henceforth and forever more drive quiet away from her home.
A man who was well acquainted with the frauds that had been practiced on the infant heiress, sought out the young bride and told her of the vast wealth illegally withheld from her by the executors of Daniel Clark’s estate—told her of that which stirred the proud blood in her veins more warmly than any idea of wealth could have done—the doubt that had been craftily thrown on her own legitimacy, and thus on the fair fame of her mother.
From that day all hope of repose fled from her happy home. A stern duty was before her—that of retrieving the wrongs heaped on her mother, and of wresting the honorable name of a father, whom she worshiped even in his memory, from the odium that had been fastened upon his actions. Joined to all this, was the natural ambition of a high-spirited and proud young woman to claim her true position in the world, and to endow the man of her choice with wealth justly her own, but of which he had been all unconscious at the time of their marriage; and now commenced that stern strife between justice and fraud which has for more than twenty years made the romance of our courts. With her young husband Myra went to New Orleans, and there gathered up those threads of evidence which laid the iniquity, which had darkened her whole life, bare before the world. There she found Madame De Gordette, her mother, the Zulima of our true story, and there, for the first time, she learned all the domestic romance of her own history. The anguish that had followed her mother, the remorse and solemn restitution that had marked the closing hours of her father’s life.
To a being ambitious and imaginative as Myra, this interview with her mother was calculated to make a painful and solemn impression. The one great idea of her life became a firm resolve; to that she was ready to sacrifice domestic peace and all those feminine aims which spring from highly cultivated tastes. Still womanly in all her acts, she took upon herself the research and duties of a man, not alone, but hand in hand with the husband whose happiness and aggrandizement would be secured by these exertions.