Henry pressed William’s hand on parting, wished him happy in his marriage, and supplicated, as the only favour he would implore, an interview with his uncle, to thank him for all his former kindness, and to see him for the last time.
William repeated this petition to his father, but with so little energy, that the dean did not grant it. He felt himself, he said, compelled to resent that reprobate character in which Henry had appeared; and he feared “lest the remembrance of his last parting from his brother might, on taking a formal leave of that brother’s son, reduce him to some tokens of weakness, that would ill become his dignity and just displeasure.”
He sent him his blessing, with money to convey him to the ship, and Henry quitted his uncle’s house in a flood of tears, to seek first a new protectress for his little foundling, and then to seek his fortune.
CHAPTER XXX.
The wedding-day of Mr. William Norwynne with Miss Caroline Sedgeley arrived; and, on that day, the bells of every parish surrounding that in which they lived joined with their own, in celebration of the blissful union. Flowers were strewn before the new-married pair, and favours and ale made many a heart more gladsome than that of either bridegroom or bride.
Upon this day of ringing and rejoicing the bells were not muffled, nor was conversation on the subject withheld from the ear of Agnes! She heard like her neighbours; and sitting on the side of her bed in her little chamber, suffered, under the cottage roof, as much affliction as ever visited a palace.
Tyrants, who have embrued their hands in the blood of myriads of their fellow-creatures, can call their murders “religion, justice, attention to the good of mankind.” Poor Agnes knew no sophistry to calm her sense of guilt: she felt herself a harlot and a murderer; a slighted, a deserted wretch, bereft of all she loved in this world, all she could hope for in the next.
She complained bitterly of illness, nor could the entreaties of her father and mother prevail on her to share in the sports of this general holiday. As none of her humble visitors suspected the cause of her more than ordinary indisposition, they endeavoured to divert it with an account of everything they had seen at church—“what the bride wore; how joyful the bridegroom looked;”—and all the seeming signs of that complete happiness which they conceived was for certain tasted.
Agnes, who, before this event, had at moments suppressed the agonising sting of self-condemnation in the faint prospect of her lover one day restored, on this memorable occasion lost every glimpse of hope, and was weighed to the earth with an accumulation of despair.
Where is the degree in which the sinner stops? Unhappy Agnes! the first time you permitted indecorous familiarity from a man who made you no promise, who gave you no hope of becoming his wife, who professed nothing beyond those fervent, though slender, affections which attach the rake to the wanton; the first time you interpreted his kind looks and ardent prayers into tenderness and constancy; the first time you descended from the character of purity, you rushed imperceptibly on the blackest crimes. The more sincerely you loved, the more you plunged in danger: from one ungoverned passion proceeded a second and a third. In the fervency of affection you yielded up your virtue! In the excess of fear, you stained your conscience by the intended murder of your child! And now, in the violence of grief, you meditate—what?—to put an end to your existence by your own hand!