"Probably life-long imprisonment. Had I known who the offender was, I would have prayed the winds and waves to bear him to Icelandic seas, rather than have had his crime published to the world. It is, however, the retribution of heaven; and we must submit."
"It seems so strange," said I, "to think of him alive, whose existence so long seemed to me a blank. When I was a child, I used to indulge in wild dreams about my unknown parent. I pictured him as one of the gods of mythology, veiling his divinity in flesh for the love of the fairest of the daughters of men. The mystery that wrapped his name was, to my imagination, like the cloud mantling the noonday sun. With such views of my lineage, which, though they became subdued as I grew older, were still exaggerated and romantic,—think of the awful plunge into the disgraceful truth. It seems to me that I should have died on my mother's grave, had not your arms of love raised me,—had you not breathed into my ear words that called me back from the cold grasp of death itself. In the brightness of the future I forgot the gloom of the past. Oh! had I supposed that he lived,—that he would come to bring on me public shame and sorrow, and through me, on you, my husband, I never would have exposed you to the sufferings of this night."
And I clung to him with an entireness of confidence, a fulness of gratitude that swelled my heart almost to bursting. His face, beaming with unclouded love and trust, seemed to me as the face of an angel. I cared not for obloquy or shame, since he believed me true. I remembered the words of the tender, the devoted Gertrude:—
"I have been with thee in thine hour
Of glory and of bliss,
Doubt not its memory's living power
To strengthen me in this."
But though my mind was buoyed up by the exaltation of my feelings, my physical powers began to droop. I inherited something of my mother's constitutional weakness; and, suddenly as the leaden weight falls when a clock has run down and the machinery ceases to play, a heavy burden of lethargy settled down upon me, and I was weak and helpless as a child. Dull pain throbbed in my brain, as if it were girdled by a hard, tightening band.
It was several days before I left my bed, and more than a week before I quitted my chamber. The recollection of Ernest's tender watchfulness during these days of illness, even now suffuses my eyes with tears. Had I been a dying infant he could not have hung over me with more anxious, unslumbering care. Oh! whatever were his faults, his virtues redeemed them all. Oh! the unfathomable depths of his love! I was then willing to die, so fearful was I of passing out of this heavenly light of home joy into the coldness of doubt, the gloom of suspicion.
Ernest, with all his proneness to exaggerate the importance of my actions, did not do so in reference to this unhappy transaction. Paragraphs were inserted in the papers, in which the initials of my name were inserted in large capitals to attract the gazing eye. The meeting in the Park, the jewels found in the possession of the forger, the abrupt manner in which they were taken from the jeweller's shop, even the gray shawl and green veil, were minutely described. Ernest had made enemies by the haughty reserve of his manners and the exclusiveness of his habits, and they stabbed him in secret where he was most vulnerable.
A brief sketch of the real circumstances and the causes which led to them, was published in reply. It was written with manly boldness, but guarded delicacy, and rescued my name from the fierce clutch of slander. Then followed glowing eulogiums on the self-sacrificing daughter, the young and beautiful wife, till Ernest's sensitive spirit must have bled over the notoriety given to her, whom he considered as sacred as the priestess of some holy temple, and whose name was scarcely to be mentioned but in prayer.
The only comment he made on them was,—
"My mother and Edith will see these."