“Let me speak, I tell you! Don't I know? You're young, and you'll get over it. You will get all your beauty and good looks back, now that the baby's out of the way, and there's no more nursing to be done. And what with your beauty and your talents, Margaret—”
“Peace! mother! Peace—peace! You will drive me to madness if you continue to speak thus.”
“Well, I'm sure there's no knowing what to say to please you. I'm sure, I only want to cheer you up, and to convince you that things are not so bad as you think them now. The cloud will blow over soon, and everything will be forgotten, and then, you see—”
The girl waved her hand impatiently.
“Death—death!” she exclaimed. “Oh! child of shame, and bitterness, and wrath!” she murmured, kneeling down beside the infant, “thou art the witness that I have no future but storm, and cloud, and wrath, and—Vengeance!”
The last word was inaudible to her mother's ears.
“It is an oath!” she cried; “an oath!” And her hands were uplifted in solemn adjuration.
“Come—come, Margaret! none of this swearing. You frighten me with your swearing. There's nothing that you need to swear about! What's done can't be helped now, by taking it so seriously. You must only be patient, and give yourself time. Time's the word for us now; after a little while you'll see the sky become brighter. It's a bad business, it's true; but it needn't break a body's heart. How many young girls I've known in my time, that's been in the same fix. There was Janet Bonner, and Emma Loring, and Mary Peters—I knew 'em all, very well. Well, they all made a slip once in their lives, and they never broke their hearts about it, and didn't look very pale and sad in the face either; but they just kept quiet and behaved decent for awhile, and every one of 'em got good husbands. Janet Bonner, she married Dick Pyatt, who came from Massachusetts, and kept the school down by Clayton's Meadow; Emma Loring married a baptist-preacher from Virginia, named Stokes. I never saw him to know him; and as for Mary Peters, there never was a girl that had a slip that was ever so fortunate, for she's been married no less than three times since, and as she's a widow again, there's no telling what may happen to her yet. So don't you be so downcast. You're chance is pretty nigh as good as ever, if you will only hold up your head, and put the best face on it.”
“Oh! torture—torture! Mother, will you not be silent? Let the dead speak to me only. I would hear but the voice of this one witness—”
And she communed only with the dead infant, sitting or kneeling beside it. But the communion was not one of contrition or tears—not of humility and repentance—not of self-reproach and a broken spirit. Pride and other passions had summoned up deities and angels of terror and of crime, before the eyes and thoughts of the wretched mourner, and the demon who had watched with her and waited on her, and had haunted her with taunt and bitter mockeries, night and day, was again busy with terrible suggestions, which gradually grew to be divine laws to her diseased imagination.