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me so.

Once I should have been indignant at such fulsome compliments, and shocked at the fixed and insolent gaze with which they were accompanied; but now, deserted by my own sex, I was fain to seek companionship with the other, for I was not bold enough to face those pitiless women alone. At last Thornleigh came, and I flew to him-I felt I did-like a wounded bird. All day he was by my side, and at night, when together we left that scene where I had so sorely sufferedthat night—I, grown reckless and despairing, laid my head upon his breast, and promised to be his! The morning came, and brought with it no better or safer reasoning; for in the future I saw nothing but an unbearable existence of humiliation and wretchedness. I was guiltless of aught more blamable than girlish folly, and I was already condemned as a woman abandoned to her evil passions and lost to all sense of shame. What wonder, then, that destitute of a protector, and being but a poor and timid girl, my heart sank

within me, and that I utterly rejected the idea of sojourning among those who contemned and slighted me? What wonder, that abandoned to the leadings of my own wild will, I should have resolved to seek a happier lot elsewhere? What were home and parents to me, or, rather, what was I to them? The thought of parting from my father hardly cost me a pang, and if I suffered a tinge of regret at deserting my poor ailing mother, the feeling was but momentary, and all insufficient to turn me from my purpose.

'Trifling, indeed, had been the part they had played in the short opening portion of my Life's Dream, and now I was preparing to act out the play in other scenes and before a different audience. Even now, when I look back upon my flight, I cannot feel that I was heartless or undutiful in keeping my promise as I did, steadily and unswervingly, to Thornleigh; but here I must assure you, that it was not the force of overpowering passion for him which led me from what is

called the "path of duty," but rather the thorns strewn by women in that path, and which made it so hard to tread. I do not attempt to justify either myself or any of the many fallen creatures who err as I did; but of this I am persuaded, that many a woman sins for want of encouragement to be good; and that if you could look back into the early history of many of us, you would see that in more ways than I can reckon, women are women's worst enemies; that they have powerful auxiliaries in our own vanity and folly, and in the strength of their own passions, is a truth which I cannot venture to deny.'

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'The heart's aye the part aye

That makes it right on.'-BURns.

years had now passed away-years that had changed nothing in the lot of Helen Langton-or, rather, of Helen Vaughan, for she had adopted the surname of a distant relative. At three-and-twenty she was still happy, still unrepentant, and, if possible, handsomer than ever. This description of a woman's state, when she has defied the laws of God and man, may, we fear, be deemed detrimental to the cause of morality, but it is nevertheless true (in some degree) to nature. It has been said by one who knew that nature well, that Le remords est né de

l'abandon, et non pas de la faute; and it may be that had Helen's lover relaxed in his devoted attentions (showing her thereby that his passion was diminished, and that he had grown weary of her society), we should not now have to record the fact that her gay spirits had not flagged, and that her bright loveliness was not shorn of a single beam.

Those four years had been passed far away from England, and under the burning sun of India; and in the almost solitude of a bungalow the erring woman had nearly ceased to think of a country where the deed that she had done would (and that justly) exclude her from the society of the respected and the virtuous.

Helen's character and disposition rendered her fully equal to the emergency in which she was placed-the emergency, namely, of being a man's almost sole companion through many a month, which but for her society would have been tedious in the extreme. She was a very pleasant creature, variable

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