I armed myself with resolution to tell him all. My father was in all probability far away on the billows of the Atlantic. My disclosures could not affect him now. My promise of secrecy did not extend into the future. I would gladly have withheld from my husband the knowledge of his degradation, for it was humiliating to the child to reveal the parent's shame. Criminal he knew him to be, with regard to my mother, but Ernest had said, when gazing on her picture, he almost forgave the crime which had so much to extenuate it. The gambler, the profligate, the lost, abandoned being, who had thrown himself so abjectly on my compassion: in these characters, the high-minded Ernest would spurn him with withering indignation. Yet as the interview had been observed, and his suspicions excited, it was my duty to make an unreserved confession,—and I did. Conscious of the purity of my motives, and assured that he must eventually acquit me of blame, I told him all, from the note he dropped into my lap at the theatre, to the diamond casket given in parting to his desperate hand. I told him all my struggles, my fears, my agonies,—dwelling most of all on the agony I suffered in being compelled to deceive him.
Silently, immovably he heard me, never interrupting me by question or explanation. He had seated himself on a sofa when I began, motioning me to sit down by him, but I drew forward a low footstool and sat at his feet, looking up with the earnestness of truth and the confidence of innocence. Oh! he could not help but acquit me,—he could not help but pity me. I had done him injustice in believing it possible for him to condemn me for an act of filial obedience, involving so much self-sacrifice and anguish. He would clasp me to his bosom,—he would fold me in his arms,—he would call me his "own, darling Gabriella."
A pause,—a chilling pause succeeded the deep-drawn breath with which I closed the confession. Cold, bitter cold, fell that silence on my hoping, trembling, yet glowing heart. He was leaning on his elbow,—his hand covered his brow.
"Ernest," at length I said, "you have heard my explanation. Am I, or am I not, acquitted?"
He started as if from a trance, clasped his hands tightly together, and lifted them above his head,—then springing up, he drew back from me, as if I were a viper coiling at his feet.
"Your father!" he exclaimed with withering scorn. "Your father! The tale is marvellously conceived and admirably related. Do you expect me to believe that that bold libertine, who made you the object of his unrepressed admiration, was your father? Why, that man was not old enough to be your father,—and if ever profligacy was written on a human countenance, its damning lines were traced on his. Your father! Away with a subterfuge so vile and flimsy, a falsehood so wanton and sacrilegious."
Should I live a thousand years, I never could forget the awful shock of that moment, the whirlwind of passion that raged in my bosom. To be accused of falsehood, and such a falsehood, by Ernest, after my truthful, impassioned revelation;—it was what I could not, would not bear. My heart seemed a boiling cauldron, whence the hot blood rushed in burning streams to face, neck, and hands. My eyes flashed, my lips quivered with indignation.
"Is it I, your wife, whom you accuse of falsehood?" I exclaimed; "dare you repeat an accusation so vile?"
"Did you not act a falsehood, when you so grossly deceived me, by pretending to go on an errand of benevolence, when in reality you were bound to a disgraceful assignation? What veteran intriguante ever arranged any thing more coolly, more deliberately? Even if the story of that man's being your father were not false, what trust could I ever repose in one so skilled in deception, so artful, and so perfidious?"
"Ernest, you will rue what you say now, to your dying day; you will rue it at the judgment bar of heaven; you are doing me the cruellest wrong man ever inflicted on woman."