“Tell me, Mark! tell me! Oh! I know that I have been guilty! but not wantonly guilty, as you think! God knoweth that I have not! One mad, impatient act—one frantic act—led to all the rest—ruined all my life and his!”
“Yet that act could not have been committed by any but an intensely selfish nature, India. I speak not to indulge in vain reproaches, but to recall you to a sense of what you have already caused others to suffer, and to a consciousness of what you owe to others. You cannot now recall the past, but you are very young, and the long future is all yours. Your husband is dead, your father imbecile, and there is no one to take the direction of affairs on this plantation. You must rouse yourself from vain regret and indolent self-indulgence. You were not created to sit still and be waited upon. You must engage in the active duties of life. You must redeem the past by the future. You cannot now bring back St. Gerald Ashley from his dishonoured grave, and restore him to the brilliant and distinguished position from which he fell—but you can do somewhat to save his memory from reproach. He died heavily in debt. You have property of your own. This seat of Cashmere was secured to you on your marriage, leaving your father a life interest in it. I do not, therefore, mean this. But you have other property in your own right—devote it to the liquidation of Ashley’s debts. And more; when you estranged him from your bosom, he sought sympathy and affection from a poor girl who lives in the pine forest. I need not tell you the story; doubtless, you know it. If you do not, the theme is, unhappily, so common, that you can easily imagine it. What I mean to say is this: this poor, fallen girl is unprovided for, desolate, and heart-broken; and what I have to enjoin upon you is, that you seek out that poor victim of St. Gerald’s sin, and make such a provision for herself and child as will save her from despair and deeper vice.”
“And if I do all this—if I spend all that I have in clearing St. Gerald’s memory from debt, and if I take this poor girl and her child under my protection—will you think of me more leniently than you do? Will you restore me your esteem?”
“My thoughts, my esteem, should be no motive with you. I never asked you to do this for my sake. I would not ask you to do it for heaven’s sake; but simply I enjoin you to do it because it is right, whether I ever remember your existence again or not.”
“Oh! Mark, I will do it. But you have not learned of Him, that divine, compassionate One, who would not break the bruised reed or quench the smoking flax!”
She raised her eyes tearfully, doubtingly, to his face.
“Is there anything else, Mark?” she asked.
“Yes, India, your people; remember, that if your life should be cut off before you emancipate them, when your soul is in the spiritual world, you will see those whom you have left on earth, doomed, with their children and their children’s children, to a bondage, from which you have no longer the power and the privilege to free them. Oh! I think, India, it is a fearful responsibility, it is an awful one, to die and leave them so—to let the power of righting their wrongs pass away from you forever.”
“To do all this it would require nearly all my means—it would leave me very poor.”
“Be poor! let all go but peace of mind.”