love, affectionate confidence towards her parents;
now all had been cast aside. If her mother’s
words were true, and bitterly she felt they were, that
her conduct to St. Eval had been one continued falsehood,
what would her parents feel when her intercourse with
Lord Alphingham was discovered. Lord Alphingham—she
shuddered as his name rose to her lips. Her heart
yearned with passionate intensity towards her mother,
to hear her voice in blessing, to see her beaming
smile, and feel her kiss of approbation, such as at
Oakwood she had so often received: she longed
in utter wretchedness for them. That night she
was wilfully to cast them off for ever, flee as a
criminal from all she loved; and if she could return
home, confess all, would that confiding love ever be
hers again? She shrunk in trembling terror from
her father’s sternness, her mother’s look
of woe, struggling with severity, the coldness, the
displeasure she would excite—on all sides
she beheld but misery; but to fly with Lord Alphingham,
to bind herself for ever with one, whom every passing
hour told her she did not, could not love—oh,
all, all, even death itself, were preferable to that!
The words of her brother sounded incessantly in her
ears: “If you value my sister’s future
peace, let her be withdrawn from his society.”
How did she know that those words were wholly without
foundation? the countenance of the Viscount as he had
alluded to them confirmed them to her now awakened
eye. Was she about to wed herself to crime?
She remembered the perfect justness, the unwavering
charity of her father, and in those softened moments
she felt assured he would not have condemned him without
good cause. Why, oh, why had she thus committed
herself? where was she to turn for succour? where look
for aid to guard her from the fate she had woven for
herself? Where, in her childish faults, had her
mother taught her to seek for assistance and forgiveness?
Dare she address her Maker, the God whom, in those
months of infatuated blindness, she had deserted;
Him, whom her deception towards her parents had offended,
for she had trampled on His holy laws, she had honoured
them not?
The hour of seven chimed; three hours more, and her
fate was irrevocably sealed—the God of
her youth profaned; for could she ever address Him
again when the wife of Alphingham? from whose lips
no word of religion ever came, whose most simple action
had lately evinced contempt for its forms and restrictions.
The beloved guardians of her infant years, the tender
friends of her youth insulted, lowered by her conduct
in the estimation of the world, liable to reproach;
their very devotion for so many years to their children
condemned, ridiculed. An inseparable bar placed
between her and the hand-in-hand companions of her
youth; never again should she kneel with them around
their parents, and with them share the fond impressive
blessing. Oakwood and its attendant innocence
and joys, had they passed away for ever? She thought
on the anguish that had been her mother’s, when
in her childhood she had sinned, and what was she
now about to inflict? She saw her bowed down in
the depth of misery; she heard her agonized prayer
for mercy on her child.