"Not if she is beloved!" I exclaimed. "It seems to me that love should cover every fault, and jealousy be pardoned without an effort, since it is a proof of the strength and fervor of one's affection. Let me be loved,—I ask no more."
"You love my son, Gabriella?"
"Love him!" I repeated,—"oh that you could look into my heart!"
Blushing at the fervor of my manner, I turned my crimson face from her gaze. Then I remembered that he knew not yet what might place an insurmountable barrier between us, and I entreated Mrs. Linwood to tell him what I wanted courage to relate.
"I will, my child, but it will make no difference with him. His high, chivalrous sense of honor will make the circumstances of your birth but a new claim on his protection,—and his purposes are as immovable as his passions are strong. But let us talk no more to-night. It is late, and you need rest. We will renew the subject when you are more composed—I might say both. I could not give you a greater proof of my interest in your happiness, than the allusion I have made to my past life. Never before have I lifted the curtain from errors which death has sanctified. Let the confidence be sacred. Ernest and Edith must never know that a shadow rested on their father's virtues. Nothing but the hope of saving you from the sufferings which once were mine, could have induced me to rend the veil from the temple of my heart."
"How solemn, how chilling are your words," said I, feeling very faint and sad. "I wish I had not heard them. Do joy and sorrow always thus go hand in hand? In the last few hours I have known the two great extremes of life. I have been plunged into the depths of despair and raised to the summit of hope. I am dizzy and weak by the sudden transition. I will retire, dear madam, for my head feels strangely bewildered."
Mrs. Linwood embraced me with unusual tenderness, kissed me on both cheeks, and accompanied me to the door with a fervent "God bless you!"
CHAPTER XXVIII.
As soon as I reached my chamber, I threw myself on my bed, which seemed to roll beneath me with a billowy motion. Never had I felt so strangely, so wildly. Confused images crowded through my brain. I moved on an undulating surface. Now, it was the swelling and sinking of the blue gray waves of ocean,—then, the heaving green of the churchyard, billows of death, over which the wind blew damp and chill. I had left the lamp unextinguished, where its light reflected the rosy red of the curtains, and that became a fiery meteor shooting through crimson clouds, and leaving a lurid track behind it.