CHAPTER XII.

Shall then, in earnest truth, My careful eyes observe her? Shall I consume my youth, And short my time to serve her?

Shall I beyond my strength, Let passion’s torments prove me, To hear her say at length “Away,—I cannot love thee!”

GEORGE WITHER.—A.D. 1588.

Ellen was one morning quietly seated in the back drawing-room which had been given up to her and her children; the elder ones were employed, George in reading to his mother, and Caroline in working, seated on a stool at her feet, while the little Agnes was playing on the floor. Ellen heard a knock at the door. Every sound made her start. She heard a loud voice in the passage! A voice! His voice! Yes it was his voice whom she had so long believed in the grave, uttering in loud and stern accents, “Show me to Mrs. Cresford,—I must instantly see her,” and he darted by the servant up the stairs.

“Not into the front room, sir,” the servant called out; “there is company in the front room! the back room, sir, if you please.”

Cresford burst open the door, and stood before her, pale and haggard. She did not faint, she did not scream: she had risen from her seat, and she stood transfixed!

She was as beautiful as ever. Sorrow could but dim her brilliancy,—the finely chiselled features, the marble brow, the angelic expression, the feminine dignity, were all there. Cresford gazed in agonized admiration.

“How I have longed for this moment!—this moment, which proves one of torture! Ellen, Ellen, you never loved me, or you could not have done what you have done. But I was resolved to see you again.—Yes, if heaven and hell had conspired against me, I would have gazed upon that face again.” She hid her face with her hands. “No,” he said, and forcibly removed them, “I will look upon those features. It was the recollection of those eyes, of that brow, those lips, which made me cling to life, while they induced me to hazard it a thousand times to gain another sight of them; it was to gaze on them that I practised the imposture by which I escaped from my prison; it was to gaze on them that I preserved my life, though treated as a spy, a prisoner, and a maniac!”

Ellen shook from head to foot. Fear, simple, deadly fear, absorbed every other feeling. She spoke not, she struggled not.

“Ellen, do you love me still? Have you thought of me in absence? Have you wept for me? Is your heart faithful?”

A horrible surmise crossed her. Surely he could not contemplate the idea of taking her back.—“Do you love me, Ellen?” he repeated, and he still held her hands.

“I pity you from the bottom of my heart.”

“Do you love me?” and he dashed her hands from him.

“No!” she exclaimed, clasping them earnestly, “No! my whole heart, soul, and affections are Algernon’s,” and she sank on the floor.

“And do I live to hear you avow your guilt? Shameless, abandoned creature! You, whom I so worshipped! now, now,—in truth my brain will madden!” He struck his forehead with his clenched hands. Then looking round, “These are my children, are they not?—I believed them mine. Yes, yes, they are mine, and mine they shall be! Come with me, children; you shall not remain to be contaminated by the example of a creature who glories in her shame. And this,” he added, and lifted the little Agnes from the floor, “this, this is _his_ child! Take it,—take it, before I commit any crime I may repent of!” Ellen rushed to it, tore it from him, and hugged it to her bosom. “But these are mine!” he continued, and “these are mine, by every law of nature and of man!” He seized one in each hand. She flew to him,—she clung round his feet. He looked down on her in triumph.

“Oh, spare my children! Oh, Charles, have mercy upon me,” and she desperately held the children who clung round her.

At this moment Captain Wareham, who had heard the tumult, entered,

“Captain Wareham, you see a man who claims his children—his children—by the law of the land, his! I conclude you will not interfere with the exercise of my rights as a free-born Englishman.”

Ellen had sunk exhausted and sobbing on the floor, feeling that her father would protect her, and preserve her children.

“Surely, Mr. Cresford, this is not the manner in which an Englishman, and a gentleman, would enforce his rights.”

“I have been taunted by that woman with her love for another man, and I cannot leave my children in her keeping. They must be delivered up to me.”

“They shall—they shall, Mr. Cresford. I pledge myself that before evening they shall be sent to you, at any place you may appoint.”

“I am at the hotel opposite, sir, and there I await them within the next two hours.”

He darted down the stairs, and out of the house.

The terrified children hung round their mother; Captain Wareham supported her; Caroline—Matilda rushed in. Concealment was no longer practicable—despair and consternation prevailed through the whole house. The two Miss Parkses, who had been “the company in the front drawing-room,” discreetly took their departure, but not before they had seen and heard enough to be perfectly _au fait_ as to the cause of the confusion, and, in a quarter-of-an-hour, the fact of Mrs. Hamilton’s first husband’s return was known in every house in the Close, and in half-an-hour more throughout the whole town. But one feeling, however, prevailed—sincere sorrow for the unfortunate Ellen!

Her manners were so gentle, she had not an enemy—her conduct so irreproachable, that even the slander of a country-town coterie had never approached her name. Every one felt disposed to be angry with Mr. Cresford for being alive, and many a parent made use of the event to impress upon the minds of their children the dreadful consequences of a deviation from truth, under any circumstances whatsoever.

Why should we return to the scene where Ellen is helplessly kissing her two elder children, while they are as helplessly hanging around her? The idea of resistance never for a moment crossed her. The strong arm of the law she knew could wrest them from her—there was no hope of touching Cresford’s heart. Ellen thought this was the bitterest drop of all, in her cup of woe. To be parted from the beings over whose welfare, bodily and mental, she had so carefully watched; in whom she had with tender, and patient care, sown the seeds of good, which she now saw every day bearing fruit according to her most sanguine wishes! The instinctive bond between mother and child may be equally strong at all ages; but when, in addition to the natural pang at such a tie being severed, there is the sorrowful and disappointing prospect of seeing your labour of love all wasted, and the grief of seeing your sorrow shared by the innocent sufferers, there can be no anguish more poignant, more hopeless.

In man there may exist a preference towards the children of the woman he loves, over those of the woman he has not loved—not so in the gentler sex. It frequently happens that maternal affection is the more powerful principle in those who have been disappointed in their hopes of conjugal happiness. The heart whose tenderness has been repelled in one quarter, expands and fixes itself in the one other lawful direction, and Ellen’s love for her elder children fully equalled that she felt for the child of Algernon.

She has taken her last kiss of them; she has for the last time wrapped the handkerchiefs close round their throats to defend them from the chill of the evening; she has for the thousandth time bade them be good children, and implored them to remember all she has told them concerning their duty to God, and to their fellow-creatures. Above all, she made them both promise never to forget to say their prayers, and added, “never forget to pray for me, my children.”

“No, no, mamma; but we shall see you again soon.”

“We will hope so, my loves—we shall, I trust, meet again, here, or elsewhere,” and her eyes sought that Heaven to which her spirit longed to flee, and be at rest.

“We are not always to remain with that pale dark stranger?”

“He is your father, my children. You owe to him the same duty you owe to me.” But she could not bid them love him, obey him, watch his every look, and attend to his every word, as they did to hers, for alas! she remembered but too well what was his violent uncertain temper in happier days, and she trembled to think to what guardianship their helpless innocence was committed.

“If strangers,” she added, “should speak slightingly of me, darlings,—my own dear good children will not believe them. I know they will not.”

Once more they were locked in a long and close embrace—gradually she relaxed her hold. Matilda, Caroline, Captain Wareham gently unwound them from her. The awe-struck children let themselves be quietly withdrawn, and when Ellen recovered from her swoon, they were with their father some miles on the road to London.

What were Cresford’s emotions?—Such was the tumult of his soul they could scarcely be defined. The circumstances under which the children had been introduced to their father were not such as to inspire them with filial affection; and, notwithstanding their mother’s parting injunction, they looked upon him with fear and horror, as the stranger who had made mamma so unhappy, and had taken them away from her in such a hurry. They could not the least comprehend what was meant by this man’s being their father, for they remembered wearing black frocks for a long time, because their father was dead.

Cresford saw the instinctive terror with which, when he kissed them, and bade them love him, they shrank from his caresses. With increased bitterness he exclaimed, “She has taught them to hate me! My own children hate me,—my wife disowns me! I am an outcast on the face of the earth! It had been better, a thousand times better for me to have consumed away the remnant of my existence in my dungeon! There I had hope!—I could think of my Ellen,—of my children! and fancy the time might come when I should once more know happiness with them. Oh! for those visionary days of fancied bliss!—how much better than this horrible waking certainty of endless misery! But I will be revenged! If I am miserable, those who have made me so shall not be happy!” And at that moment he took the resolution of availing himself of every power which the law placed in his hands, of bringing her, who had caused him to be the wretch he was, to open and public shame.

The rest of the journey was performed in silence. His heart had been too long seared by suffering, to open to parental affection. His children showed none for him; he was not in a state of mind to attempt to win it by patient kindness, and he felt injured as a father, as well as a husband. In truth, a calmer, gentler disposition than his might have had all the milk of human kindness turned to gall, in his situation. He had most truly loved his wife, and his case was as pitiable, and as hopeless a one, as can well be imagined. The mental aberration to which he had slightly alluded, and which had prevented him for some years from even attempting to make his imprisonment in Austria known, either to his friends or to the Government, had been brought on by the vehement and ungoverned nature of his passions; which, as might be expected, did not meet with the soothing treatment calculated to allay them, but, on the contrary, with every thing tending most to inflame and irritate them. The reason which might have controlled them remained, in some degree, weakened, while the passions themselves were in full force.

Upon his arrival in London he deposited his children at an hotel, and sallied forth in search of a lawyer. He walked to Lincoln’s Inn, and knocked at the first door that presented itself. He was admitted, and was shown up to a middle-aged, quiet little man, with spectacles upon his nose.