“Through devious lonely paths I stray,
“Thy presence shall my pains beguile,
“The barren wilderness shall smile.”
Think not that I misapply these lines; for my God will not refuse the worship of a heart, because still alive to those affections he implanted there as his most precious gift. Farewell! once more I conjure you by the tenderness and compassion which this will awaken in your bosom, to banish all regrets. Thou wast a widow, Harriet, from the hour that Duncan’s honour received its deadly wound. Thy vows were absolved from the hour thou wast taught to believe me capable of deserting thee, even to secure my own life. I have no doubts to clear away. Thou wast in the hands of a monster; and heaven has been merciful, in extricating thee from the snares of vice and infamy, which that monster had prepared for thee.
Farewell, Charles Duncan.
P.S. Judge of my resolution! I have heard that Flamall is daily expected at the hall. I have heard him execrated as the tyrant who rules there. I have heard my Harriet pitied! Yet will I forbear. Duncan shall not be his own avenger; for there is a God “to whom vengeance belongeth,” and he will not be mocked. I fly from the temptation of infringing his sacred rights. Your peace is the shield which I oppose to my just, my everlasting enmity with this demon. Again I promise, that this hand shall not be raised against your brother; for were it, my injuries would give it strength, and justice would guide it. Once more farewell! Think not of the lost Charles. He is only an atom.
Lady Maclairn in continuation.
From the hour that Maclairn’s wife has had this evidence of the triumph of villainy over a man, graced and endowed with every requisite to awe it, and to subject its designs by the power of the virtue inherent in his soul, she has been a stranger to peace.
My conscience, lulled to repose by the fond hope of being necessary to your comforts, my dear Maclairn, as being the sharer of your sorrows, and the companion and friend in whose presence you sometimes solaced your woes, and as one whom you ever saw without trouble or disquietude, had ceased to upbraid me for crimes, to which I had been betrayed, by the authority of my brother and my own timidity. Had I, in the first hour, listened to my self-reproaches on discovering that I had been deceived, and that there still existed a witness against me able, in a moment, to render me the object of your scorn and detestation, I should not have shrunk from an open avowal of the infamy I had incurred; for I felt that the woman who is dishonoured in her own eyes, and condemned by her own conscience, can meet with no encrease to her misery from the contempt of the world. But as I was Malcolm Maclairn’s mother and the ostensible guardian of his father’s honour and unsullied name, I have been dumb, and have sustained my burden with patience for their sakes.
But the time is not far remote, when Heaven, in compassion to my contrition and sorrows, will release me. You, my beloved Maclairn, will acknowledge that I have been faithful; and Malcolm will honour his mother’s grave with a tear, and he will say, “she has expiated her offence by her sufferings, and has proclaimed that she loved the truth, from which she was so fatally led away by a Flamall. Let me, O heaven, depart in this hope! or be, as though I had never lived to those for whom I have lived. Oh spare to them the pang of pronouncing Harriet unworthy of the name of Maclairn!