“Ha! ha! ha! Well, what do you want to complain of? You got the kiss,” he exclaimed, in the most insulting manner.
“I have sold her birthright for a kiss! a serpent’s kiss! a Judas kiss!” cried Alice, wildly wringing her hands.
“Come, Mrs. Garnet, no hard words, if you please. Remember how you hung upon me this morning. You were so affectionate! I was quite flattered; grew ‘quite in favor with myself,’ and almost with you—only it is impossible to rekindle ashes.”
“Oh, fiend, fiend! remorseless fiend! I shall go mad! Oh, God! where sleep your thunderbolts?” cried Alice, rising, and walking distractedly up and down the floor.
“Come, madam. No more of this. I am tired of it. Resume your seat,” exclaimed General Garnet, leaving his scornful, taunting manner, and speaking in the deep, stern tones of haughty command.
But Alice heard him not, as she walked wildly up and down the room, crying:
“Oh, God! God! where rest your thunderbolts?”
“Do you hear me? Sit down, I say! or, by Heaven, I will send you in search of the thunderbolts!”
But Alice was not to be stopped now. Still wildly walking up and down the floor, distractedly wringing her hands, she was pouring forth the gathered bitterness of many years.
“I have borne so much, great God. I have borne so much. Oh, I have been a woman ‘of sorrows and acquainted with grief.’ And who is it that has made my life, my harmless life, one long pain? You, General Garnet, you. You married me by force, you know you did. In my young girlhood—nay, in my innocent childhood, when life opened to me with such a bright promise of usefulness and happiness with one I loved, with one to whom my faith was plighted, you tore me away from that one, and made his life a useless, barren waste, and married me yourself, for your own selfish purposes, and nearly broke my heart and crazed my brain. God knows I have no clear recollection now of the months that followed my marriage. Well! Well! Well! ‘Time and the hour beareth away all things,’ and as time passed, I learned to love you. Because you were my husband, and the father of my child, and because it was the great necessity of my nature to love, I loved you. God knows, I think there was no other reason. Oh, if Heaven gave me one idea purer and higher than all the rest, it was that of the beauty and holiness of marriage! And though mine was a miserable sacrifice, so great was my need to live in an atmosphere of love and piety, that I tried to make a sort of temple of it. It was a wild ruin. Oh, worse! it was a ridiculous failure! This hour has proved it. Ha! ha! ha! Hark! did I laugh? No, it was not I. I have nothing to laugh at in earnest, and I never laugh in scorn. But there are two spirits in me now, and one mocks at the other.”