“My daughter, rise and leave, I command you,” said Major Helmstedt, giving his hand to assist her.
But she clung to his knees and groveled at his feet, crying:
“Father! father! pardon and hear me; hear me for my dead mother’s sake! hear your Marguerite’s orphan girl! do not make her a widow before she is a wife! My father, do not, oh, do not meet my betrothed in a duel! He was your oldest friend, your brother-in-arms, your promised son; he has stood by your side in many a well-fought battle; in camp and field you two have shared together the dangers and glories of the war. How can you meet as mortal foes? Crowned with victory, blessed with peace, you were both coming home—you to your only daughter, he to his promised bride—both to a devoted girl, who would have laid out her life to make your mutual fireside happy; but whose heart you are about to break! Oh, how can you do this most cruel deed? Oh! it is so horrible! so horrible, that you two should thus meet. Dueling is wicked, but this is worse than dueling! Murder is atrocious, but this is worse than murder! This is parricide! this is the meeting of a father and son, armed each against the other’s life! A father and a son!”
“Son! no son or son-in-law of mine, if that is what you mean.”
“Father, father, do not say so! He is the sworn husband of your only child. My hand, with your consent, was placed in his by my dying mother’s hand. He clasped my fingers closely, promising never to forsake me! A promise made to the living in the presence of the dying! A promise that he has never retracted, and wishes never to retract. My soul’s salvation upon Ralph Houston’s honor!”
“Margaret Helmstedt! put the last seal to my mortification, and tell me that you love this man—this man whose family has spurned you!”
“I love him—for life, and death, and eternity!” she replied, in a tone vibrating with earnestness.
“You speak your own degradation, miserable girl.”
“This is no time, Heaven knows, for the cowardice of girlish shame. Father, I love him! For three long years I have believed myself his destined wife. Long before our betrothal, as far back, or farther, perhaps, than memory reaches, I loved him, and knew that he loved me, and felt that in some strange way I belonged finally to him. Long, long before I ever heard of courtship, betrothal, or marriage, I felt in my deepest heart—and knew he felt it too—that Ralph was my final proprietor and prince, that I, at last and forever, was his own little Margaret—ay! as your Marguerite was yours, my father. And always and ever, in all the changes of our life, in joy and in sorrow, in presence and in absence, I seemed to repose sweetly in his heart as a little bird in its nest, loving him too quietly and securely to know how deeply and strongly. But oh, my father, it has remained for the anguish of this day to teach me how, above all creatures, I love my promised husband, even as my mother loved hers. The blow that reaches Ralph’s heart would break my own. Father, I can conceive this globe upon which we live, with all its seas and continents, its mountains, plains and cities, its whole teeming life, collapsing and sinking out of sight through space, and yet myself continuing to live, somewhere, in some sphere of being; but, my father, I cannot conceive of Ralph’s death and my own continued life, anywhere, as possible! for there, at that point, all sinks into darkness, chaos, annihilation! Swift madness or death would follow his loss! Oh, my father, say, is he not my husband? Oh, my father, will you make your child a widow, a widow by her father’s hand?”
“Margaret, this is the very infatuation of passion!”