“Oh, George, I did love you so much,” and she laid her poor, tired head upon the chair as if it had been his lap. “I loved you so much, but it is over now, or it soon will be. I feel its death struggles at my heart. You are worse than I believed. You have made me an outcast, and Willie ——” The sentence ended with the wailing cry—“My boy, my boy! that such a heritage should be yours.”
Adah could not pray then, although she tried, but the fitting words would not come, and with her head still resting on his chair, she looked the terrible reality in the face, and saw just where she stood. Heretofore the one great hope, that she was really a wife, had buoyed her up when everything else was dark. Like a drowning person grasping at a straw, she had clung to that, even against her better judgment, but now it was swept away, and with it the semblance of a name. He had deceived her even there, and she had accepted the Hastings as something tangible. He was a greater villain than she had imagined a man could be, and again her white lips essayed to curse him, but the rash act was stayed by the low words whispered in her ear, “Forgive as ye would be forgiven.”
“If it were not for Willie, I might, but oh! my boy, my boy disgraced,” was the rebellious spirit’s answer, when again the voice whispered, “And who art thou to contend against thy God? Know you not that I am the Father of the fatherless.”
There were tears now in Adah’s eyes, the first which she had shed.
“I’ll try,” she murmured, “try to forgive the wrong, but the strength must all be thine,” and then, though there came no sound or motion; her heart went out in agonizing prayer, that she might forgive even as she hoped to be forgiven.
She did not ask that the dead love might ever return again. She had no desire for that, but she asked to feel kindly towards him, that the resentful feeling might be removed, that God would show her what to do and where to go, for she could not stay there now, in his home, whither he would bring his bride ere many days were gone. She must go away, not to Spring Bank, not anywhere where he or ’Lina could ever find her. She would far rather die. But Willie! what would she do with him, her tender, innocent boy?
“God tell me what to do with Willie?” she sobbed, starting suddenly as the answer to her prayer seemed to come at once. “Oh can I do that?” she moaned; “can I leave him here?”
At first her whole soul recoiled from it, but when she remembered Anna, and how much she loved the child, her feelings began to change. Anna would love him more when she knew he was poor Lily’s and her own brother’s. She would be kind to him for his father’s sake, and for the sake of the girl she had professed to like. Willie should be bequeathed to Anna. It would break her heart to leave him, were it not already broken, but it was better so. It would be better in the end. He would forget her in time, unless sweet Anna told him of her, as perhaps she might. Dear Anna, how Adah longed to fold her arms about her once and call her sister, but she must not. It might not be well received, for Anna had some pride, as her waiting-maid had learned.
“A waiting-maid!” Adah repeated the name, smiling bitterly as she thought, “A waiting-maid in his own home! Who would have dreamed that I should ever come to this, when he painted the future so grandly? Be still, my heart, or I shall hate him yet, and I’m going to forgive him.”
Then there came over her the wild, yearning desire to see his face once more, to know if he had changed, and why couldn’t she? They supposed her gone to the office, and she would go there now, taking the depot on the way. She would go closely veiled, and none would suspect her errand. Rising mechanically, she donned her cloak and hood, and stealing down the stairs which led from Anna’s room into the garden, she was soon out beneath the starry sky, inhaling the cool night air, so grateful to her heated brain.