“Then you forgive me!” cried the nobleman, pressing her hand tenderly, while joy beamed in his eyes hitherto dim with the glazing influence of a mortal enervation:—“then you forgive me!” he repeated, his voice becoming stronger.
“Yes—oh! yes—a thousand times yes!” she exclaimed; and bending over him, she pressed her lips upon his cold forehead. “But do you pardon me likewise?” she asked, after a few moments’ pause.
“It was I who provoked all that has occurred—I who was the unhappy means of blighting the pure affections of your youth,” returned the Marquis; “and therefore—whatever may have been the consequences—I am bound to pardon and forget. Alas! Sophia, often and often—and with feelings of ineffable pain and anguish—have I thought of that fatal day when, long years ago, I levelled at you a terrible accusation. But I was a coward—and I was cruel thus to have taxed you with a fault which at that period my jealous suspicions alone——”
“To what do you allude?” demanded the Marchioness, inwardly shocked, and with her heart bleeding as she asked the question: for she divined too well to what her husband did allude—and she was almost crushed with a devouring sense of shame.
“Oh! if you can have forgotten that fatal day,” exclaimed the Marquis, whose sight was too dim, and whose mental powers of perception were too weak to enable him to understand rightly his wife’s present emotions,—“then are you happy indeed! For, alas! I referred to the day on which we separated, sixteen or seventeen years ago—I cannot now remember accurately how many have passed since then——”
“And why allude to that unhappy epoch?” asked the lady, in a low and tremulous tone.
“Because I wish to convince you that I am indeed repentant for all the share which I took in sealing our misery,” replied the nobleman. “On that memorable day, I accused you of infidelity towards me—and yet subsequent reflection has convinced me that you were innocent then! Oh! never—never shall I forget that tone in which you breathed the fatal words—‘All is now at an end between you and me! We part—for ever!’ I have thought since—aye, and I have said that you resembled what would be a sculptor’s or an artist’s conception of Injured Innocence; and then, when I adjured you in the name of your infant daughter to stay, you uttered a wild cry and fled! That cry rings in my ears now—has vibrated in my brain ever since——”
“Oh! in the name of heaven, proceed not thus!” murmured the Marchioness, covering her face with her hands and sobbing bitterly.
But wherefore, did she thus weep?—wherefore were her emotions so powerful? Why was her heart thus wrung until every fibre appeared to be stretched to its utmost power of tension? It was because on the occasion to which the Marquis referred, guilt and not innocence had made her voice hollow and thick as she breathed the words which decreed an eternal separation!—it was because that wild cry had been wrung from her by the appeal that was made in the name of the infant child whom she knew to be the offspring of her amour with Sir Gilbert Heathcote! But there are times when Conscious Guilt so much resembles Injured Innocence, that the most keen observer may be deceived;—and such was the fact in the case now alluded to.
A long pause ensued—during which the Marquis, still totally ignorant of the real nature of his wife’s emotions, gazed upon her with an affectionate interest that was rapidly growing into a resuscitated love.