"Can you, will you, ever forgive me, aunt Emmeline? Your silence has almost broken my heart, for it seemed to say you never could; and when I look at my poor Ellen, and see how I have changed this happy home into sorrow and gloom and sin, for it is all my work—mine, whom you have loved, treated, trusted, as a son—I feel you can not forgive me; I ought to go from you; I have no right to pollute your home."
"Hush, Edward! do not give utterance or indulgence to any such thoughts. My poor unhappy boy! your errors have brought such fearful chastisement from the hand of God himself, it is not for me to treat you harshly. May His mercy avert yet severer trial! I will not hear your story now; you are too agitated to tell it, and I am not at this moment strong enough to hear it. I am satisfied that you have confided all to Mr. Howard, and will be guided by him. Only tell me how came you first to apply to Ellen? Did the thought never strike you, that in sending relief to you, she might be exposing herself to inconvenience or displeasure? Was there no consideration due to her?"
"I never seemed to think of her, except as glad and willing to help me, at whatever cost to herself," was his reply. "I feel now the cruel selfishness of the belief—but, oh, aunt Emmeline, it was fostered in me from my earliest childhood, grew with my growth, increased with my years, received strength and meaning from my poor mother's utter neglect of her, and too indulgent thought for me. I never thought so till now, now that I know all my poor sister's meek and gentle worth, and it makes me still more miserable. I never could think her my equal; never could fancy she could have a will or wish apart from mine, and I can not trace the commencement of the feeling. Oh! if we had been but treated alike! but taught to so love each other, as to think of each other's happiness above our own, as you taught my cousins!"
"Do you know any thing of the promise to which poor Ellen so constantly refers?" inquired Mrs. Hamilton, after gently soothing his painful agitation.
He did not; but acknowledged that from the time they had become inmates of Oakwood, Ellen had constantly saved him from punishment by bearing the penalty of his faults; recalling numerous incidents, trifling in themselves, but which had always perplexed Mrs. Hamilton, as evincing such strange contradictions in Ellen's childish character, and none more so than the disobedience which we related in our second part, and which Edward's avowal of having himself moved the flower-stand, now so clearly explained. He said, too, that Mr. Howard had thought it necessary, for Ellen's perfect justification, to examine her letters and papers, but that all his appeals to her had been destroyed but one—his last fatal inclosure, the exact contents of which he had so utterly forgotten, written, as they were, in a moment of madness, that he shuddered himself as he read it. He placed the paper in Mrs. Hamilton's hand, conjuring her not to recall her forgiveness when she read it; but she must see it, it was the only amends he could make his poor Ellen, to exculpate her fully. Was it any wonder it had almost driven her wild? or that she should have scarcely known the means she adopted to send him the relief, which, as he deserved, had never reached him.
Mrs. Hamilton read the letter, and as thought after thought rose to her mind, connecting, defining, explaining Ellen's conduct from her fifteenth birthday, the day she received it, to the discovery of her sin, and her devoted silence afterward, trifling incidents which she had forgotten returned to add their weight of evidence, and increase almost to agony her self-reproach, for not seeing the whole before, and acting differently. She remembered now Ellen's procrastination in writing to Edward, the illness which followed, and could well understand her dread lest the finding the notes should be traced to that day, and so throw a suspicion on her brother, and her consequent firmness in refusing to state the day she had found them.
That long interview was one of inexpressible comfort to Edward; but though his unfeigned repentance and full confession gave his aunt hope for him, it did but increase her individual trial, as she returned to Ellen's couch, and listened to wanderings only too painfully explained by the tale she had heard.