Again the warrior seemed agitated with the most violent emotion; he buried his face in his hands; and the silence that ensued was longer than any he had previously indulged in.  At length he made an effort to arouse himself; and again exhibiting his swarthy features, disclosed a brow, not clouded, as before, by grief, but animated with the fiercest and most appalling passions, while he thus impetuously resumed.

CHAPTER XI.

“If, hitherto, Clara de Haldimar, I have been minute in the detail of all that attended my connection with your mother, it has been with a view to prove to you how deeply I have been injured; but I have now arrived at a part of my history, when to linger on the past would goad me into madness, and render me unfit for the purpose to which I have devoted myself.  Brief must be the probing of wounds, that nearly five lustres have been insufficient to heal; brief the tale that reveals the infamy of those who have given you birth, and the utter blighting of the fairest hopes of one whose only fault was that of loving, “not too wisely, but too well.”

“Will you credit the monstrous truth,” he added, in a fierce but composed whisper, while he bent eagerly over the form of the trembling yet attentive girl, “when I tell you that, on my return from that fatal expedition, during my continuance on which her image had never once been absent from my mind, I found Clara Beverley the wife of De Haldimar?  Yes,” continued Wacousta, his wounded feeling and mortified pride chafing, by the bitter recollection, into increasing fury, while his countenance paled in its swarthiness, “the wife, the wedded wife of yon false and traitorous governor!  Well may you look surprised, Clara de Haldimar:  such damnable treachery as this may startle his own blood in the veins of another, nor find its justification even in the devotedness of woman’s filial piety.  To what satanic arts so calculating a villain could have had recourse to effect his object I know not; but it is not the less true, that she, from whom my previous history must have taught you to expect the purity of intention and conduct of an angel, became his wife,—­and I a being accursed among men.  Even as our common mother is said to have fallen in the garden of Eden, tempted by the wily beauty of the devil, so did your mother fall, seduced by that of the cold, false, traitorous De Haldimar.  “Here the agitation of Wacousta became terrific.  The labouring of his chest was like that of one convulsed with some racking agony and the swollen veins and arteries of his head seemed to threaten the extinction of life in some fearful paroxysm.  At length he burst into a violent fit of tears, more appalling, in one of his iron nature, than the fury which had preceded it,—­and it was many minutes before he could so far compose himself as to resume.