“Thank you,” said she, releasing herself from the sheltering folds that had enveloped her. “Hark!” she suddenly exclaimed, “whose voice is that I hear within? It is—it must be Louis. Dear, dear Louis!—so long absent!—so anxiously looked for!”
Even in that moment of joy, while bounding over the threshold with the fleetness of a fawn, the dreaded form of Clinton rose before the eye of her imagination, and arrested for a moment her flying steps. Again she heard the voice of Louis, and Clinton was forgotten.
CHAPTER XI.
“Go, sin no more! Thy penance o’er,
A new and better life begin!
God maketh thee forever free
From the dominion of thy sin!
Go, sin no more! He will restore
The peace that filled thy heart before,
And pardon thine iniquity.”—Longfellow.
“I am glad you came alone, brother,” cried Helen, when, after the supper was over, they all drew around the blazing hearth. Louis turned abruptly towards her, and as the strong firelight fell full upon his face, she was shocked even more than at first, with his altered appearance. The bloom, the brightness, the joyousness of youth were gone, leaving in their stead, paleness, and dimness, and gloom. He looked several years older than when he left home, but his was not the maturity of the flower, but its premature wilting. There was a worm in the calyx, preying on the vitality of the blossom, and withering up its beauty.
Yes! Louis had been feeding on the husks of dissipation, though in his father’s house there was food enough and to spare. He had been selling his immortal birth-right for that which man has in common with the brutes that perish, and the reptiles that crawl in the dust. Slowly, reluctantly at first, had he stepped into the downward path, looking back with agonies of remorse to the smooth, green, flowery plains he had left behind, striving to return, but driven forward by the gravitating power of sin. The passionate resolutions he formed from day to day of amendment, were broken, like the light twigs that grow by the mountain wayside.
He had looked upon the wine when it was red, and found in its dregs the sting of the adder. He had participated in the maddening excitement of the gaming-table, from which remorse and horror pursued him with scorpion lash. He had entered the “chambers of death”—though avenging demons guarded its threshold. Poor, tempted Louis! poor, fallen Louis! In how short a space has the whiteness of thy innocence been sullied, the glory of thy promise been obscured! But the flame fed by oxygen soon wastes away by its own intensity, and ardent passions once kindled, burn with self-consuming rapidity.
We have not followed Louis in his wild and reckless course since he left his father’s mansion. It was too painful to witness the degeneracy of our early favorite. But the whole history of the past was written on his haggard brow and pallid cheek. It need not be recorded here. He had thought himself a life-long alien from the home he had disgraced, for never could he encounter his father’s indignant frown, or call up the blush of shame on Helen’s spotless cheek.