THE COMMONER'S DAUGHTER. By the Author of "A Few out of Thousands." CHAP. XXIII. [CONCLUSION.] And thus Marcus was to make acquaintance with the mother who had ignored her maternity, who had disregarded every tie, human and divine-and for what? Regarding human things with the calm views of maturity, it seems to me now, that female frailty is the most bitterly requited sin on this earth. The men who are wronged, and the men who wrong us, are alike implacable. The one justly disdains the sinner : the other unjustly casts her forth to scorn, and often to deeper depths of infamy; and I believe if she meets, as, indeed she mostly does, with the virtuous disdain and pharisaicle cruelty of her own sex, she is even more harshly treated by the partner of her guilt, who, one might think, should shield her from its consequences. There never was a libertine in this world, I fancy, who was not also characterised by intense selfishness. Lady Laura had sacrificed all that woman should hold dear in honour and morality, to one, who, though, perhaps, he but resembled other men, in being a compound of good and evil, certainly shone pre-eminent for selfish hardness in his relations towards woman. What were hearts to one, who had in earliest youth frittered his own away? Say that the women who shared his sins and follies were as vicious as himself; still that fact can scarcely excuse his indifference to the objects of his base passion, when that passion ceased to be aught but a heap of ashes. When my unhappy step-mother was somewhat recruited from her shattered condition, we procured for her clothes better suited to her station than the rags she wore, and took her to a celebrated oculist. But his opinion was decisive: no human effort was likely to restore her to sight; and I had cause to dread the effect this decision would have on that mind, so ill-disciplined for affliction or suffering. There was, indeed, for some hours, a wild mad despair, which no soothing, no argument could alleviate. How should it have been otherwise? what experience had this unhappy creature ever had of trust in God under trial, of resignation to a will she had passed her whole life in ig noring? Oh! when we live without God in the world, how hard to recognise him in affliction, when the world is fading from us, with its hollow mockeries, its spasms, its hardness, its wholesale condemnation of sin and sinners! We took her at last to Ellisham-took her, when the violence of despair had calmed down into a black sullen submission, only melted when I placed Marcus in her arms, and bade the child kiss his mother. Then her emotion became uncontrollable, and I feared the boy might learn from her own lips her sin, and her newly awakened loathing of it. I took him, frightened and amazed, away, and with, I hope, a pardonable deception, I tried to explain to him that his papa and mamma had disagreed and lived apart, and that now his poor mother was sorry, because papa was dead, and she had been away from him. I told the child no positive falsehood: the truth I could not tell. I could not desire that the young mind should loathe the guilty parent, nor that Marcus in his maturity should condemn his mother for her frailty. Yet it must not be supposed that Lady Laura Castlebrook became all at once a penitent Magdalen. After the first burst of remorse, the severe miseries and privations produced by her downfall being over, she was disposed, I believe, to regard herself rather in the light of a martyr than a transgressor. She was perpetually reproaching her husband's memory, persisting that his neglect had caused her dereliction-an accusation I could neither refute nor bear to hear. She viewed all attempts to awaken religious contrition for her sin as a species of penitentiary punishment, against which her impatient, haughty nature (under the influences of good food and accustomed comforts) rebelled. She returned to her old system of taunts. She averred that I was revenging my own former fancied wrongs (for she would not allow I really had any) by humiliating her, preaching she called it. And, when irritated beyond her control, she would call on me violently to send her, the poor dependent beggar, to the workhouse. Had I not at this period violently struggled to subdue the demon of passion in my own breast, had I not scourged it with prayers with tears with self-loathing Lady Laure had been lost. These scenes took |