"If my happiness in this world only were at hazard, I would venture all for your sake?" replied Clara, in a low, gentle, tremulous voice. "I feel grateful for your attachment—more than grateful; but marriage is so very awful and sacred a tie! to devote every early thought, every feeling, every hope, every hour of my life to one! I could not and dare not enter on such a duty, without a perfect and unalterable confidence. I feel that to be united in love and duty where I did not esteem is a misfortune I could not survive—which I could scarcely even wish to survive. In giving you my heart, as I have already done, I ventured my all of worldly happiness on that one stake, and have lost it; but there are better hopes and higher duties, which bind me to follow them, even though death were the consequence."
Sir Patrick clenched his hands vehemently together, while his countenance burned, and muttering a curse between his teeth, which chilled the blood of Clara in her veins, he walked about the room with rapidly-increasing excitement, till at length stopping before her, he said, in accents of angry reproach, "You have spoken my doom, Clara, and only from your own lips would I have believed it."
Clara buried her face in her hands, and feeling that her high-wrought fortitude was giving way, she hurried towards the door; but as she tremblingly endeavored to open it, Sir Patrick again seized her hand, saying, "You are mine, Clara; you are bound by a promise that must not be broken!"
"I shall never give myself to another," said she, still hastening away. "Be happy in making others happy. May you yet find one who loves you as I have done, and who shall not hereafter find the same reasons for giving you up. I shall pray for you, and rejoice in all the good I hear. Farewell."
No words could do justice to the silent agony of Clara's young heart, when, in solitary grief, she retraced her whole intimacy with Sir Patrick, and reflected that she had bid a last adieu to one whom she must not esteem, and yet could not but love. All that this world could offer she had rejected for conscience sake. A cold frost seemed to gather around her spirit, while, trembling and depressed, she viewed the desolation of all her lately cherished hopes; and amidst the ruined fabric of her happiness, she now seemed like some solitary pillar, surrounded by the broken fragments of what once supported and adorned it; yet summoning to her aid that Christian firmness, which in her amounted to heroism, she gazed on the shattered wreck without a wish to restore it at the sacrifice of principle, determined, as far as her sensitive nature would admit, to adopt the rule of an aged and experienced Christian, "Hope nothing, fear nothing, expect anything, and be prepared for everything!"
CHAPTER X.
Years having thus rolled on, bringing joy to some, and laying sorrow more or less on all, Marion Dunbar, fresh in the spring-tide of youthful bloom, had nearly completed her seventeenth year, and was hurrying on still in a whirlpool of education at Mrs. Penfold's, exerting herself more zealously for the credit of her teachers than she ever would have done for her own.
One evening about this time a message reached Marion, desiring that she would instantly hasten to Mrs. Penfold's private sitting-room, which was, on all extraordinary occasions, that lady's hall of audience, and a solemn summons to which was usually of ominous import. Marion, however, conscious that her own recent diligence had been quite pre-eminent, and her success most distinguished, heard the word of command with a flutter of pleasing anticipation, for to her the future was always full of hope. Too old now for medals and ribbons, she yet indulged in the gay recollection of her former triumphs, and remembered with a smile, as she hurried up stairs, how often Sir Arthur had formerly declared, while pretending to frown upon her, that "he hated to see girls flouncing about with medals, and defying the world!" yet how silly, when she one day entered his drawing-room, with deepening color and a look of modest consciousness, half concealing and half displaying her honors, he had advanced to meet her, wearing his own Grand Cross of the Bath, to prove, as he said, that he was indeed fit company for so meritorious a young lady.
Humming a favorite air, with a buoyant, joyful step, and radiant smile, Marion hastened to the door of Mrs. Penfold's apartment, where, after trying to compose her features into a suitable expression of sober respect, with dimpling cheek, and still almost laughing eyes, she entered, making, as she had been taught, the usual respectful courtesy exacted by Mrs. Penfold, such as might have been suitable for an introduction at Court, or for a public performer receiving the plaudits of a numerous audience, and then, with a bright, speaking look, full of hope and vivacity, she paused, to ascertain the object of her unexpected summons.
To Marion's astonishment and dismay, Mrs. Penfold was pacing about the room, evidently in a state of furious irritation; while in her hand she carried that endless bill, the growth of many years, for board, education, masters, and sundries, which had so often already greeted the unwilling eyes of her young pupil, whose whole inward spirit recoiled with shame and apprehension, while she silently measured the length and breadth of its contents, every item of which she already knew by heart, and could almost have recapitulated without a prompter.