“Great Heaven! this is most horrible! But then—but then—if this story is true, the communication that you made to my unhappy son, upon that fatal night which drove him in madness from his home, a fugitive and a wanderer over the face of the earth, and turned the fair home into a Gehenna of remorse and despair was false—must have been utterly false!” exclaimed the baron, in uncontrollable agitation between the horror he felt at being told that the criminal he had just condemned to death was his own discarded daughter, and the joy that rushed upon him with the thought that another and a deeper curse was removed from his house.
His condition between these two excessive and antagonistic emotions bordered upon insanity.
“Ah!” muttered the woman to herself, with an expression of perplexity and pain traversing her fine features as she passed her hand over her brow; “I did not mean to betray that fact; but my brain! my brain; I am not well!”
“Harriette!” exclaimed the baron, excited beyond all measure, as he arose and dropped his hand upon her shoulder, “Harriette, as you hope for God’s pardon in your dying hour—”
“I do not hope for his pardon!” interrupted the woman, gloomily.
“Tell me, who is she that lies doomed to death in yonder cell?” demanded the baron, without noticing her interruption.
“I have told you! your daughter and mine! the rightful heiress of Elverton, if justice had been done!”
“And she whom my son married—”
“I have unwillingly betrayed that secret too I take it, since you have it! Your son’s wife is the daughter of the late General de la Compte, by his first wife, and was, therefore, not within the prohibited degree of kindred according to the marriage code. Our daughter never married; she was destined to another doom; to work her mother’s will; to avenge her mother’s wrongs. For this I kept her always near me; won her whole heart; absorbed her will; mastered her spirit. Whatever she has done in this world has been done for me, and often blindly by her. She had but one human affection—filial love. To-day the daughter stood before the father’s face to receive from him the doom of death. But the doom was unmerited.”
“Woman! what do you tell me?”