She reluctantly withdrew, and left the proud mourner, who could not brook that even his child should look upon his bitter, sombre, remorseful grief.
“I have killed her, I have killed her!” he groaned in the spirit. “I have killed her as surely as if my dirk’s point had reached her breast! I crushed that strong, high heart under the iron heel of my pride! I have killed her! I have killed her! I have killed her in her glorious prime, ere yet one silver thread had mingled with her ebon locks! And I! What am I now? Ah, pride! Ah, devil pride! do you laugh now to see to what you have driven me? Do you laugh to see that I have done to death the noblest creature that ever stepped upon this earth? Yes, laugh, pride! laugh Satan! for that is your other name.”
Oh! terrible is grief when it is mixed with remorse, and more terrible are both when without hope—without God! They become despair—they may become—madness!
It was late that evening when Mr. Helmstedt rejoined the family in the drawing-room of Plover’s Point. And his sombre, reserved manner repelled those kind friends who would otherwise have sought means to console him.
The next day Mrs. Houston came to make another effort to recover her adopted daughter.
Mr. Helmstedt met the bosom friend of his late wife with deep yet well-controlled emotion.
He begged for a private interview, and, in the conversation that ensued, apologized for the necessity, and questioned her closely as to the details of his wife’s last illness.
Mrs. Houston told him that Marguerite’s health had steadily declined, and that the proximate cause of her death was a trifle—the intrusion of a fugitive British soldier whom she had relieved and dismissed; but whose strange or rude behavior was supposed to have alarmed her and accelerated and aggravated an attack of the heart to which she had of late grown subject, and which, in this instance, proved fatal.
“An attack of the heart—yes, yes—that which is the most strained the soonest breaks,” said Philip Helmstedt to himself, with a pang of remorse.
Again and again begging pardon for his persistence, he inquired concerning the last scenes of her life, hoping to hear some last charge or message from her to himself. There was none, or, at least, none trusted to Mrs. Houston’s delivery. Ah! Philip Helmstedt, could you imagine that the last words of your dying wife to her absent husband could be confided to any messenger less sacred than her child and yours, when she was at hand to take charge of it?