After casting her thoughts around, anxious to find some bud of comfort on which to fix her longing eye; she beheld, in the total loss of William, nothing but a wide waste, an extensive plain of anguish. “How am I to be sustained through this dreary journey of life?” she exclaimed. Upon this question she felt, more poignantly than ever, her loss of innocence: innocence would have been her support, but, in place of this best prop to the afflicted, guilt flashed on her memory every time she flew for aid to reflection.
At length, from horrible rumination, a momentary alleviation came: “but one more step in wickedness,” she triumphantly said, “and all my shame, all my sufferings are over.” She congratulated herself upon the lucky thought; when, but an instant after, the tears trickled down her face for the sorrow her death, her sinful death, would bring to her poor and beloved parents. She then thought upon the probability of a sigh it might draw from William; and, the pride, the pleasure of that little tribute, counterpoised every struggle on the side of life.
As she saw the sun decline, “When you rise again,” she thought, “when you peep bright to-morrow morning into this little room to call me up, I shall not be here to open my eyes upon a hateful day—I shall no more regret that you have waked me!—I shall be sound asleep, never to wake again in this wretched world—not even the voice of William would then awake me.”
While she found herself resolved, and evening just come on, she hurried out of the house, and hastened to the fatal wood; the scene of her dishonour—the scene of intended murder—and now the meditated scene of suicide.
As she walked along between the close-set tree, she saw, at a little distance, the spot where William first made love to her; and where at every appointment he used to wait her coming. She darted her eye away from this place with horror; but, after a few moments of emotion, she walked slowly up to it—shed tears, and pressed with her trembling lips that tree, against which she was accustomed to lean while he talked with her. She felt an inclination to make this the spot to die in; but her preconcerted, and the less frightful death, of leaping into a pool on the other side of the wood, induced her to go onwards.
Presently, she came near the place where her child, and William’s, was exposed to perish. Here she started with a sense of the most atrocious guilt; and her whole frame shook with the dread of an approaching, an omnipotent Judge, to sentence her for murder.
She halted, appalled, aghast, undetermined whether to exist longer beneath the pressure of a criminal conscience, or die that very hour, and meet her final condemnation.
She proceeded a few steps farther, and beheld the very ivy-bush close to which her infant lay when she left him exposed; and now, from this minute recollection, all the mother rising in her soul, she saw, as it were, her babe again in its deserted state; and bursting into tears of bitterest contrition and compassion, she cried—“As I was merciless to thee, my child, thy father has been pitiless to me! As I abandoned thee to die with cold and hunger, he has forsaken, and has driven me to die by self-slaughter.”
She now fixed her eager eyes on the distant pond, and walked more nimbly than before, to rid herself of her agonising sensations.
Just as she had nearly reached the wished-for brink, she heard a footstep, and saw, by the glimmering of a clouded moon, a man approaching. She turned out of her path, for fear her intentions should be guessed at, and opposed; but still, as she walked another way, her eye was wishfully bent towards the water that was to obliterate her love and her remorse—obliterate, forever, William and his child.