"Yes! yes! yes!" replied she, with frantic vehemence, while her eyes, glazed, and without moisture, were darkened by the shadow of deep despair. "You offered me everything but what you had promised, and what alone I would accept. You took from me every blessing of life, and offered me money! I hated you for supposing me mean enough to accept it. I would rather die in the street, or perish on a dung-hill, than receive your alms. My name branded with infamy, not a roof to cover me, and not a friend in all the earth to pity me; my brother now a terror and a reproach to all who know him; crazed myself in mind and heart, aloof from all earthly sympathy, branded and alone—what remains for me? Yet I would rather die in an hospital than owe the very air I breathe to you."
"Why, then, do I see you here?" asked Captain De Crespigny, endeavoring to steady the tremulousness of his voice. "I would serve you yet, if possible. I cannot entirely forget former times!"
"Former times!" exclaimed the miserable being, with a heavy sob, while a rush of agony poured itself out in her voice, and clasping her hands over her burning eyes, tears, such as she had not shed for ages, fell like rain over her face. "Who talks of former times! You! who made my whole life, past, present, and future, one long agony of suffering! Do you remind me of former times! Oh! bring them back—those days which now seem like a dream, when I was young, innocent, and happy! Who so gay then as I—whose step so joyous—whose eye so bright—who so admired; and," added she, her voice changing to a low, deep tone of anguish, "who so loved? It was the delirium of an hour, and what am I now? Of all the wretched outcasts on earth, the most wretched; while he who has made me so thinks it degradation to waste a thought upon one so lost."
There was a pause for some moments, and she added, in a deep, sepulchral voice,
"A wide gulph separates us now. I know and feel that. I do not even wish it otherwise. You are courted and admired in every house, while I wander like a solitary ghost upon the earth! A furnace of guilt and horror burns within me! No language is dark and dreadful enough to express what I endure. The fresh green turf, and the blue sky above, I dare not look upon; for they speak of days that are for ever past—of that short summer filled with hope and joy, which has been followed by this dreary, endless winter——"
Captain De Crespigny's eye quailed beneath the look of chilling despair fastened upon himself. The hurricane of her feelings had been exhausted, but there was an unearthly fixedness in the eye of Mary Anstruther. In her voice, too, a cold, calm, almost spectral solemnity of tone had succeeded to the wild expression of her manner. Her expression was that of a lull after a storm, the ground-swell that follows the hushing of a tempest; and she again stood as at first, pale as death, still and motionless as a corpse, while the long drapery of her cloak hung as a winding-sheet around her wasted limbs.
"If there be any thing on earth I can do for you, speak but the word, and it is done," said Captain De Crespigny, with undisguised emotion. "My purse, if you will yet accept it, is yours; but remember your very life is at stake in coming here. I have shut my eyes already too long! I cannot conceal from my own mind that the man who calls himself Howard, and lives with Sir Arthur Dunbar, must be your brother. He has hidden himself always from me, and I should scarcely even know him if we met, but this shall not last. Tell him he must go! Once,—and once only, I may for your sake connive at his escape from justice, but let Ernest cross my path again, and no earthly power shall induce me to neglect the sacred law that bids us deliver up the murderer to justice. You also at St. John's Lodge, would once have followed the example of your unhappy brother's crime. You escaped on that occasion, and I have tried to convince myself it could not be,—that you were already in another world,—but I will not, even for the sake of our early days, be made a participator in crime. Go, then, to some distant country together. The sword of the law is suspended over both your heads. Fly for your very lives. The means shall not be wanting,—and tell your guilty brother, as I tell you, that if he delays, cost what it may,—and I know the cost to me will be great indeed, justice shall have its course."
"Let me then drink my cup of sorrow to the dregs!" replied Mary, in a low deep whisper. "He will not go! No earthly power can rule him,—no terror in life intimidates him. For myself; I dread nothing now but a prolonged existence. The sooner it is ended by any hand but my own, the better. Yours is indeed the fittest. That will only complete the work which you began. Give us up then to justice. In remembrance of those days when among the green lanes of England you promised to love me,—me only till death,—deliver us up now to the rope and to the scaffold. Yes!" added she, with a look of fevered anguish, and a frightful hysterical laugh, "This is as it should be; cheated of innocence, blighted in affection, blistered in heart, trodden down with contempt, driven almost to madness, and delivered up to death. Such be the fate of all who ever trust in man."
"Leave me! leave me!" said Captain De Crespigny, visibly shuddering. "If you desire vengeance, the sight of you, Mary Anstruther, such as you are now, is more than I can bear. Leave me!"
"Vengeance!—No!—It was for a good purpose I came, and let me not forget it," said Mary, in a low, broken, bewildered voice, while a gleam like sun-light on the stormy wave seemed for a moment to restore the softness and beauty of youth to her countenance. "I would save you from death. My wretched brother long ago suspected that you were the author of my ruin. That secret he never could wring from me, and he never shall. Oh, no! I ask no revenge on you. I am grieved, even once to have reproached you; but it is done, and my tongue shall be silent in the grave before you hear it again. Ernest swore an oath,—a deep, deep oath, that if you had indeed deceived me, nothing should screen you from his vengeance. Already he was irritated, believing you wished to marry Miss Howard, and on that subject you know how long he has been crazed. Ernest never forgives, and never forgets. He lives but for revenge. He would make you drink a cup bitter as his own. On that fatal night to which I never dare to look back, the knife he used was yours,—yes! it was stolen for the very purpose, and you know its peculiar form. He intended, if detected, to accuse you as an accessary to the murder. His plans are skillfully laid, and he threatens thus to hurl you from the eminence on which you now stand in society——"