"My dear friend, I assure you, you have not yet found the true God, if you believe this."
"I have found I verily believe the God of the Bible, and he has said the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment; and I am the most wicked of all God's creatures."
Here Mrs. Wayland left him again standing upon the colonnade, and hurried rapidly from him down the path which led to the sea. Her conversation had revived in her heart all the strong passions which slumbered there, and which she usually held in close repression. As she paced wildly up and down the beach, feeling in her nearness to the sea a sort of comfort as though the great ocean were her friend, she thought over her whole lonely life. She thought of her happy and brilliant youth, of its gayeties, its triumphs, and its great hopes; she beheld herself the petted darling of a joyous circle of companions and friends. She thought of her journeys in distant lands, whither a loving father had taken her, and of all the delights of those years when they had wandered through all the sunny climes of southern Europe, and so away on to the Orient, where she had trodden with pilgrim feet all the sacred places of that Holy Land. It was there she had first met her husband; and she dwelt with fondness upon every little incident which memory recalled of her intercourse with him there, and of how they had sailed together upon their return to their native land. It was then she had learned to love the ocean. In those long days, when they were out upon the trackless deep, they had learned together the sweet mystery of loving. Night after night they had paced the deck together, gazing out upon the moonlighted expanse, and watching the breakers rise and fall. The long voyage had been a season of enchantment. It had passed into her being, and become a part of her inmost life forever. She had one of those natures to whom such things come but once in a lifetime. When they had reached home, they had been married, and, after a year or two of pleasant married life, they had built the old gray house of which I have told you, designing to pass their summers down there within hearing of the grand, eternal anthem of the sea. How well she remembered the hurry they were in to get down here,—so great a hurry that they could not stop to have the house entirely finished, and so in early May they had furnished two or three rooms, and lived here in a wild trance of what seems to her now, as she looks back upon it, perfect bliss. Here they wandered up and down the beach together hand in hand for hours and beheld the waters glowing in the early tints of sunrise, and reflecting the gorgeous splendors of sunset, and rippling and shimmering in the bewildering moonlight. Then she thinks of how gayeties began up at the village yonder, and how they began to see much company and to mingle in all the excitements of watering-place life. Here they had met the beautiful syren who had stolen her husband from her. With what angry hate she dwells upon the soft, bewildering beauty of that woman,—her rounded, dimpled form, her golden hair, and the languishing blueness of the dreamy eyes! She seemed in all her bewitching beauty, to the eye of Agnes Wayland, more hateful and hideous than a fiend. She had fascinated Mortimer Wayland almost from their first meeting. Of a dreamy, sensuous temperament, and a weak will, and with no great power of principle at his back, the artful and wicked woman had ensnared him with her wiles, and in the meshes of her charms he had forgotten the grand and queenly wife, who to every eye was so infinitely the superior of one for whom he was deserting her, and the little year-old baby, who was just learning to lisp "father" to him as he fondled him.
Of the wild tempest which tossed her soul at this time she dreaded to think even now. It had been so near to madness that it was a terror to her yet. But pride had always been one of her ruling passions, and, instead of pleading with him with a woman's tenderness, as some might have done, she had treated him with coldness and disdain, and with reproachful scorn had goaded him on to take the last step in the dreadful drama.
He had deserted her, and with the blue-eyed woman had sailed for a distant land. Never since that time, now nearly twenty years, had she left, except for her lonely walks, the old gray house. She shut herself up like a hermit, and with wild and bitter grief cursed herself and her God. Down into the deepest gloom of despair she went, where never a single ray of heavenly light and comfort reached her. Her child, indeed, she had left; but although she loved him with all the concentrated passion of her nature, he seemed little comfort to her. She brooded continually upon the darkness of her fate, and upon the fathomless depths of despair into which she was sinking.
Then the child died, and her last human interest went; and she made its little grave in the tangled garden, and every year covered it thick with flowers. But in her heart no white blossom of hope had ever sprung up, no purple pansy of royal magnanimity and forgiveness had yet blossomed there. And this night, after so many years, she was living it all over again with tragic interest, and no softened feelings of relenting or forgiveness entered her stern heart.
"He is very happy," she thought to herself as she wended her way back and stood by her little grave; "he is very happy, for he can stand by his child's bed and weep; and so could I, if I had his hope. O my darling, my darling, darling boy!" and she stooped down, and threw her arms caressingly over the little mound.
"Oh, if God would only, only let me meet you once more! O my God, why cannot I forgive and be forgiven?"
"My sister," said the kind old man, coming up and hearing her last words; and feeling how vain it would be to reason or expostulate with this woman,—"let us pray;" and, almost before she knew it, they were kneeling by the little one's grave; and before the old minister had concluded his simple but touching prayer, the woman, whose heart had been stone for so many years, was weeping, weeping with passionate sobs like a little child; and when he had concluded, she arose, and without a word made her way into the house, and soon the red light shone in the little window.