When Lindsay opened the letter, he found it to contain tidings of the victory at Camden, written by Tyrrel. After he had perused the contents, it was with a triumphant smile that he exclaimed, "And it is come so soon! Thank God, the omen has proved true! a calmer and a brighter hour at last opens upon us."
He left the study to communicate the news to his children, and spent the next hour with Mildred and Henry in the parlor. His feelings had risen to a happier key; and it was with some approach to cheerfulness, but little answered in the looks or feelings of his children, that he retired to his chamber at a late hour, where sleep soon came, with its sweet oblivion, to repair his exhausted spirits, and to restore him to the quiet of an easy mind.
CHAPTER XXXV.
MILDRED IN GRIEF.—SHE IS NEAR MAKING A DISCLOSURE.—A VISITOR ARRIVES AT THE DOVE COTE.
"Then in that hour remorse he felt,
And his heart told him he had dealt
Unkindly with his child."—Rogers.
On the following day Mildred confined herself to her chamber. She had passed a sleepless night, and the morning found her a pale, anxious, and distressed watcher of the slow approach of light. Her thoughts were busy with the fate of Butler. This topic overwhelmed all other cares, and struck deep and unmitigated anguish into her mind. The hints that had been so indiscreetly dropped by her father, more than if the whole tale had been told, had worked upon her imagination, and conjured up to her apprehension the certain destruction of her lover. In her interview with Lindsay, her emotions had been controlled by the extreme difficulty of her situation. The fear of rousing in her father that deep and solemn tone of passion, which had now become the infirmity of his mind, and almost threatened to "deprive his sovereignty of reason," and of which she was painfully aware, had subdued the strength of her own feelings—so far, at least, as to inculcate a more seeming moderation than, in other circumstances, she could have exhibited. It was the struggle between filial affection and duty on the one side, and an ardent, though tremblingly acknowledged, attachment on the other. The course that she had previously determined to pursue, in reference to the many earnest and assiduous efforts of Lindsay to persuade her from her love, was steadily to persevere in the open acknowledgment of her plighted vow, and endeavor to win her father's favor by a calm and gentle expostulation; or to seek, in a respectful silence, the means of averting the occasion of that gusty and moody outbreak of temper, which the peculiar exacerbation of his mind was apt to make frequent. She would have resorted to this silence in the late communion with Lindsay, if he had not, with an unusual bitterness, denounced Arthur Butler as the author of a hateful crime; a crime which she knew had been foully insinuated against him by a man of whose subtle wickedness she was persuaded, and whom, of all others, she most heartily execrated. She was, therefore, led indignantly, though temperately, to repel the slander by which her father's hatred had been artfully envenomed. But when, in the fierce fervor of his displeasure, Lindsay had announced to her the danger that had befallen Butler, the disclosure opened to her mind a world of misery. The late silence of her lover had already alarmed her fears, and this announcement suggested the worst of the many anxious conjectures which her brooding spirit had imagined as the cause of that absence of tidings. Her emotions upon this disclosure were those of a bursting heart that dared not trust itself with words; and when her father, seeing the unlooked-for mischief he had done, sought to temper his speech, and retract some of the harshness of his communication, by an explanation, the only effect was, for the moment, to take off the edge of her keenest grief. But when she left his presence, and recovered herself sufficiently to recall all that had passed, the dreadful thought of disaster to Butler, came back upon her imagination with all the horrors which a fond heart could summon around it. A weary hour was spent in sobs and tears; and it was only by the blandishments of her brother Henry's kind and earnest sympathy, when the youth found her in the parlor thus whelmed in sorrow, and by his manly and cheering reckoning of the many chances of safety that attend the footsteps of a prudent and a brave man, that she began to regain that resolute equanimity that was a natural and even predominating attribute of her character.
When Lindsay came into the parlor with the tidings of the victory at Camden, such was the state in which he found her; and whilst he announced to her that event which had given him so much joy, he was not unheedful of the pang he had previously inflicted, and now endeavored to make amends by throwing in some apparently casual, though intentional, reference to the condition of Butler, who, he doubted not, would now be disposed of on easy terms. "Perhaps," he continued, "as the war was drawing to a close, and the royal clemency had been singularly considerate of the mistaken men who had taken arms against their king, he would in a little while be discharged on his parole." This reluctant and forced crumb of comfort fell before one who had but little appetite to take it, and Mildred received it only in cold silence. Henry, however, made better use of the event, and by that assiduity which, in true and gentle friendships, never wearies, and never misses its aim, when that aim is to revive a sinking hope, succeeded in lifting both his father and sister into a kindlier climate of feeling. But solitude and her pillow ravelled all this work of charity. Fancy, that stirring tormentor of acute minds, summoned up all its phantoms to Mildred's waking fears, and the night was passed by her as by one who could not be comforted. In the morning she was ill, and therefore, as I have said, remained in her chamber.
Lindsay, ever solicitous for the happiness of his children, and keenly sensitive to whatever gave them pain, now that the turbid violence of his passion had subsided into a clearer and calmer medium, applied himself by every art which parental fondness could supply, to mitigate the suffering of his daughter. Like a man who, in a reckless and ungoverned moment, having done an injury which his heart revolts at, and having leisure to contemplate the wrong he has inflicted, hastens to administer comfort with an alacrity which even outruns the suggestions of ordinary affection, so did he now betake himself to Mildred's chamber, and, with sentiments of mixed alarm and contrition, seek her forgiveness for what he acknowledged a rash and unbecoming assault upon her feelings.