Harriet Brandt spent the time, after her lover had left her to think over and decide upon their mutual fate, in walking up and down the room. She was like a restless animal; she could not stay two moments in the same place. Even when night fell, and the inhabitants of the Langham Hotel had retired to rest, she still kept pacing up and down the room, without thinking of undressing herself or seeking repose, whilst her conscience wrestled in warfare with her inclinations. Her thoughts took her far, far back to the earliest remembrance of which her mind was capable. She thought of her hard, unfeeling, indifferent father—of her gross, flabby, sensual mother—and shuddered at the remembrance! What had she done?—she said to herself—wherein had she sinned, that she should have been cursed with such progenitors? How had they dared to bring her into the world, an innocent yet hapless child of sin—the inheritor of their evil propensities—of their lust, their cruelty, their sensuality, their gluttony—and worst of all, the fatal heritage that made her a terror and a curse to her fellow-creatures? How dared they? How dared they? Why had God’s vengeance not fallen upon them before they had completed their cruel work, or having accomplished it, why did He not let her perish with them—so that the awful power with which they had imbued her, might have been prevented from harming others?
Harriet thought of little Caroline; of her two nurses; of Sister Theodosia—of Mrs. Pullen’s baby; of Bobby Bates; until she felt as though she should go mad. No! no! she would never bring that curse upon her Beloved; he must go far away, he must never see her again, or else she would destroy herself in order that he might escape!
But if she persuaded Anthony to consent to her wishes—if she insisted upon a total separation between them, what would become of her? What should she do? She had no friends in England; Madame Gobelli had turned against her—she was all alone! She would live and die alone. How should she ever get to know people, or to obtain an entrance to Society. She would be a pariah to the end of her life! And if she did surmount all these obstacles, what would be the result, except a repetition of what had gone before? Strangers would come to know her—to like her—would grow more intimate, and she would respond to their kindness—with the same result. They would droop and fail, die perhaps, like Bobby and the baby—find out that she was the cause, and shun her ever after.
“Oh! God!” cried Harriet in her perplexity and anguish, “I am accursed! My parents have made me not fit to live!”
She passed that night through the agonies of Death—not the death that overtakes the believer in a God and a Future—but the darkness and uncertainty that enwraps the man who knows he is full of sin and yet has no knowledge that His Lord has paid his debt to the uttermost farthing—the doubt and anxiety that beset the unbeliever when he is called upon to enter the dark Valley. The poor child saw her destiny entangling her as in a net—she longed to break through it, but saw no means of escape—and she rebelled against the cruel lot that heredity had marked out for her.
“Why am I to suffer?” she exclaimed aloud; “I have youth and health and good looks, and money—everything, the world would say, calculated to make my life a pleasant one, and yet, I am tortured by this awful thought—that I must keep aloof from everybody, that I am a social leper, full of contagion and death! Doctor Phillips said that the more I loved a person, the more I must keep away from him! It is incredible! unheard-of! Could he have had any motive in saying such a thing?”
The remembrance of her flirtation with Ralph Pullen recurred to her mind, and she seized it, as a drowning man clutches at a straw.
“Was it a plant, after all? Did the old man want to put me off the track of Captain Pullen? Margaret Pullen is staying in the house—he said so—had she asked him to get rid of me if possible? After all, am I torturing myself by believing the story of my fatal power to be true, when it was only a ruse to get rid of me? The Baroness said the same thing, but she was mad about poor Bobby and would have said anything to annoy me—and, after all, what does it amount to? The baby died in teething—heaps of babies do—and Bobby was consumptive from the first—I have heard Miss Wynward say so, and would have died anyway, as he grew to be a man and had larger demands made upon his physical strength. And for the others—what happened to them, happens to all the world. It is fortune de guerre; people drop every day like rotten sheep;—everyone might accuse himself of causing the death of his neighbour. I have been frightening myself with a chimera. Anthony said so, and he must know better than I! And I can’t give up Tony—I can’t, I can’t, I can’t! It is of no use thinking of it! Besides, he wouldn’t let me! He would never leave me alone, until I had consented to marry him, so I may as well do it at the first as at the last.”
But the tide of triumphant feeling would be succeeded by a wave of despondency, which threatened to upset all her casuistry.
“But if—if—it should be true, and Anthony should—should—Oh! God! Oh! God! I dare not think of it! I will kill myself before it shall occur.”