After dinner, Lady Annabel drew her chair towards the fire, for, although May, the weather was chill, and said, ‘A quiet evening at home, Venetia, will be a relief after all this gaiety.’ Venetia assented to her mother’s observation, and nearly a quarter of an hour elapsed without another word being spoken. Venetia had taken up a book, and Lady Annabel was apparently lost in her reflections. At length she said, somewhat abruptly, ‘It is more than three years, I think, since Lord Cadurcis left Cherbury?’
‘Yes; it is more than three years,’ replied Venetia.
‘He quitted us suddenly.’
‘Very suddenly,’ agreed Venetia.
‘I never asked you whether you knew the cause, Venetia,’ continued her mother, ‘but I always concluded that you did. I suppose I was not in error?’
This was not a very agreeable inquiry. Venetia did not reply to it with her previous readiness and indifference. That indeed was impossible; but, with her accustomed frankness, after a moment’s hesitation, she answered, ‘Lord Cadurcis never specifically stated the cause to me, mamma; indeed I was myself surprised at his departure, but some conversation had occurred between us on the very morning he quitted Cadurcis, which, on reflection, I could not doubt occasioned that departure.’
‘Lord Cadurcis preferred his suit to you, Venetia, and you rejected him?’ said Lady Annabel.
‘It is as you believe,’ replied Venetia, not a little agitated.
‘You did wisely, my child, and I was weak ever to have regretted your conduct.’
‘Why should you think so, dearest mamma?’
‘Whatever may have been the cause that impelled your conduct then,’ said Lady Annabel, ‘I shall ever esteem your decision as a signal interposition of Providence in your favour. Except his extreme youth, there was apparently no reason which should not have induced you to adopt a different decision. I tremble when I think what might have been the consequences.’
‘Tremble, dearest mother?’
‘Tremble, Venetia. My only thought in this life is the happiness of my child. It was in peril.
‘Nay, I trust not that, mamma: you are prejudiced against Plantagenet. It makes me very unhappy, and him also.’
‘He is again your suitor?’ said Lady Annabel, with a scrutinising glance.
‘Indeed he is not.’
‘He will be,’ said Lady Annabel. ‘Prepare yourself. Tell me, then, are your feelings the same towards him as when he last quitted us?’
‘Feelings, mamma!’ said Venetia, echoing her mother’s words; for indeed the question was one very difficult to answer; ‘I ever loved Plantagenet; I love him still.’
‘But do you love him now as then? Then you looked upon him as a brother. He has no soul now for sisterly affections. I beseech you tell me, my child, me, your mother, your friend, your best, your only friend, tell me, have you for a moment repented that you ever refused to extend to him any other affection?’
‘I have not thought of the subject, mamma; I have not wished to think of the subject; I have had no occasion to think of it. Lord Cadurcis is not my suitor now.’
‘Venetia!’ said Lady Annabel, ‘I cannot doubt you love me.’
‘Dearest mother!’ exclaimed Venetia, in a tone of mingled fondness and reproach, and she rose from her seat and embraced Lady Annabel.
‘My happiness is an object to you, Venetia?’ continued Lady Annabel.
‘Mother, mother,’ said Venetia, in a deprecatory tone. ‘Do not ask such cruel questions? Whom should I love but you, the best, the dearest mother that ever existed? And what object can I have in life that for a moment can be placed in competition with your happiness?’
‘Then, Venetia, I tell you,’ said Lady Annabel, in a solemn yet excited voice, ‘that that happiness is gone for ever, nay, my very life will be the forfeit, if I ever live to see you the bride of Lord Cadurcis.’
‘I have no thought of being the bride of any one,’ said Venetia. ‘I am happy with you. I wish never to leave you.’
‘My child, the fulfilment of such a wish is not in the nature of things,’ replied Lady Annabel. ‘The day will come when we must part; I am prepared for the event; nay, I look forward to it not only with resignation, but delight, when I think it may increase your happiness; but were that step to destroy it, oh! then, then I could live no more. I can endure my own sorrows, I can struggle with my own bitter lot, I have some sources of consolation which enable me to endure my own misery without repining; but yours, yours, Venetia, I could not bear. No! if once I were to behold you lingering in life as your mother, with blighted hopes and with a heart broken, if hearts can break, I should not survive the spectacle; I know myself, Venetia, I could not survive it.’
‘But why anticipate such misery? Why indulge in such gloomy forebodings? Am I not happy now? Do you not love me?’
Venetia had drawn her chair close to that of her mother; she sat by her side and held her hand.
‘Venetia,’ said Lady Annabel, after a pause of some minutes, and in a low voice, ‘I must speak to you on a subject on which we have never conversed. I must speak to you;’ and here Lady Annabel’s voice dropped lower and lower, but still its tones were distinct, although she expressed herself with evident effort: ‘I must speak to you about — your father.’
Venetia uttered a faint cry, she clenched her mother’s hand with a convulsive grasp, and sank upon her bosom. She struggled to maintain herself, but the first sound of that name from her mother’s lips, and all the long-suppressed emotions that it conjured up, overpowered her. The blood seemed to desert her heart; still she did not faint; she clung to Lady Annabel, pallid and shivering.
Her mother tenderly embraced her, she whispered to her words of great affection, she attempted to comfort and console her. Venetia murmured, ‘This is very foolish of me, mother; but speak, oh! speak of what I have so long desired to hear.’
‘Not now, Venetia.’
‘Now, mother! yes, now! I am quite composed. I could not bear the postponement of what you were about to say. I could not sleep, dear mother, if you did not speak to me. It was only for a moment I was overcome. See! I am quite composed.’ And indeed she spoke in a calm and steady voice, but her pale and suffering countenance expressed the painful struggle which it cost her to command herself.
‘Venetia,’ said Lady Annabel, ‘it has been one of the objects of my life, that you should not share my sorrows.’
Venetia pressed her mother’s hand, but made no other reply.
‘I concealed from you for years,’ continued Lady Annabel, ‘a circumstance in which, indeed, you were deeply interested, but the knowledge of which could only bring you unhappiness. Yet it was destined that my solicitude should eventually be baffled. I know that it is not from my lips that you learn for the first time that you have a father, a father living.’
‘Mother, let me tell you all!’ said Venetia, eagerly.
‘I know all,’ said Lady Annabel.
‘But, mother, there is something that you do not know; and now I would confess it.’
‘There is nothing that you can confess with which I am not acquainted, Venetia; and I feel assured, I have ever felt assured, that your only reason for concealment was a desire to save me pain.’
‘That, indeed, has ever been my only motive,’ replied Venetia, ‘for having a secret from my mother.’
‘In my absence from Cherbury you entered the chamber,’ said Lady Annabel, calmly. ‘In the delirium of your fever I became acquainted with a circumstance which so nearly proved fatal to you.’
Venetia’s cheek turned scarlet.
‘In that chamber you beheld the portrait of your father,’ continued Lady Annabel. ‘From our friend you learnt that father was still living. That is all?’ said Lady Annabel, inquiringly.
‘No, not all, dear mother; not all. Lord Cadurcis reproached me at Cherbury with, with, with having such a father,’ she added, in a hesitating voice. ‘It was then I learnt his misfortunes, mother; his misery.’
‘I thought that misfortunes, that misery, were the lot of your other parent,’ replied Lady Annabel, somewhat coldly.
‘Not with my love,’ said Venetia, eagerly; ‘not with my love, mother. You have forgotten your misery in my love. Say so, say so, dearest mother.’ And Venetia threw herself on her knees before Lady Annabel, and looked up with earnestness in her face.
The expression of that countenance had been for a moment stern, but it relaxed into fondness, as Lady Annabel gently bowed her head, and pressed her lips to her daughter’s forehead. ‘Ah, Venetia!’ she said, ‘all depends upon you. I can endure, nay, I can forget the past, if my child be faithful to me. There are no misfortunes, there is no misery, if the being to whom I have consecrated the devotion of my life will only be dutiful, will only be guided by my advice, will only profit by my sad experience.’
‘Mother, I repeat I have no thought but for you,’ said Venetia. ‘My own dearest mother, if my duty, if my devotion can content you, you shall be happy. But wherein have I failed?’
‘In nothing, love. Your life has hitherto been one unbroken course of affectionate obedience.’
‘And ever shall be,’ said Venetia. ‘But you were speaking, mother, you were speaking of, of my, my father!’
‘Of him!’ said Lady Annabel, thoughtfully. ‘You have seen his picture?’
Venetia kissed her mother’s hand.
‘Was he less beautiful than Cadurcis? Was he less gifted?’ exclaimed Lady Annabel, with animation. ‘He could whisper in tones as sweet, and pour out his vows as fervently. Yet what am I? O my child!’ continued Lady Annabel, ‘beware of such beings! They bear within them a spirit on which all the devotion of our sex is lavished in vain. A year, no! not a year, not one short year! and all my hopes were blighted! O Venetia! if your future should be like my bitter past! and it might have been, and I might have contributed to the fulfilment! can you wonder that I should look upon Cadurcis with aversion?’
‘But, mother, dearest mother, we have known Plantagenet from his childhood. You ever loved him; you ever gave him credit for a heart, most tender and affectionate.’
‘He has no heart.’
‘Mother!’
‘He cannot have a heart. Spirits like him are heartless. It is another impulse that sways their existence. It is imagination; it is vanity; it is self, disguised with glittering qualities that dazzle our weak senses, but selfishness, the most entire, the most concentrated. We knew him as a child: ah! what can women know? We are born to love, and to be deceived. We saw him young, helpless, abandoned; he moved our pity. We knew not his nature; then he was ignorant of it himself. But the young tiger, though cradled at our hearths and fed on milk, will in good time retire to its jungle and prey on blood. You cannot change its nature; and the very hand that fostered it will be its first victim.’
‘How often have we parted!’ said Venetia, in a deprecating tone; ‘how long have we been separated! and yet we find him ever the same; he ever loves us. Yes! dear mother, he loves you now, the same as in old days. If you had seen him, as I have seen him, weep when he recalled your promise to be a parent to him, and then contrasted with such sweet hopes your present reserve, oh! you would believe he had a heart, you would, indeed!’
‘Weep!’ exclaimed Lady Annabel, bitterly, ‘ay! they can weep. Sensibility is a luxury which they love to indulge. Their very susceptibility is our bane. They can weep; they can play upon our feelings; and our emotion, so easily excited, is an homage to their own power, in which they glory.
‘Look at Cadurcis,’ she suddenly resumed; ‘bred with so much care; the soundest principles instilled into him with such sedulousness; imbibing them apparently with so much intelligence, ardour, and sincerity, with all that fervour, indeed, with which men of his temperament for the moment pursue every object; but a few years back, pious, dutiful, and moral, viewing perhaps with intolerance too youthful all that differed from the opinions and the conduct he had been educated to admire and follow. And what is he now? The most lawless of the wild; casting to the winds every salutary principle of restraint and social discipline, and glorying only in the abandoned energy of self. Three years ago, you yourself confessed to me, he reproached you with your father’s conduct; now he emulates it. There is a career which such men must run, and from which no influence can divert them; it is in their blood. To-day Cadurcis may vow to you eternal devotion; but, if the world speak truth, Venetia, a month ago he was equally enamoured of another, and one, too, who cannot be his. But grant that his sentiments towards you are for the moment sincere; his imagination broods upon your idea, it transfigures it with a halo which exists only to his vision. Yield to him; become his bride; and you will have the mortification of finding that, before six mouths have elapsed, his restless spirit is already occupied with objects which may excite your mortification, your disgust, even your horror!’
‘Ah, mother! it is not with Plantagenet as with my father; Plantagenet could not forget Cherbury, he could not forget our childhood,’ said Venetia.
‘On the contrary, while you lived together these recollections would be wearisome, common-place to him; when you had separated, indeed, mellowed by distance, and the comparative vagueness with which your absence would invest them, they would become the objects of his muse, and he would insult you by making the public the confidant of all your most delicate domestic feelings.’
Lady Annabel rose from her seat, and walked up and down the room, speaking with an excitement very unusual with her. ‘To have all the soft secrets of your life revealed to the coarse wonder of the gloating multitude; to find yourself the object of the world’s curiosity, still worse, their pity, their sympathy; to have the sacred conduct of your hearth canvassed in every circle, and be the grand subject of the pros and cons of every paltry journal, ah, Venetia! you know not, you cannot understand, it is impossible you can comprehend, the bitterness of such a lot.’
‘My beloved mother!’ said Venetia, with streaming eyes, ‘you cannot have a feeling that I do not share.’
‘Venetia, you know not what I had to endure!’ exclaimed Lady Annabel, in a tone of extreme bitterness. ‘There is no degree of wretchedness that you can conceive equal to what has been the life of your mother. And what has sustained me; what, throughout all my tumultuous troubles, has been the star on which I have ever gazed? My child! And am I to lose her now, after all my sufferings, all my hopes that she at least might be spared my miserable doom? Am I to witness her also a victim?’ Lady Annabel clasped her hands in passionate grief.
‘Mother! mother!’ exclaimed Venetia, in agony, ‘spare yourself, spare me!’
‘Venetia, you know how I have doted upon you; you know how I have watched and tended you from your infancy. Have I had a thought, a wish, a hope, a plan? has there been the slightest action of my life, of which you have not been the object? All mothers feel, but none ever felt like me; you were my solitary joy.’
Venetia leant her face upon the table at which she was sitting and sobbed aloud.
‘My love was baffled,’ Lady Annabel continued. ‘I fled, for both our sakes, from the world in which my family were honoured; I sacrificed without a sigh, in the very prime of my youth, every pursuit which interests woman; but I had my child, I had my child!’
‘And you have her still!’ exclaimed the miserable Venetia. ‘Mother, you have her still!’
‘I have schooled my mind,’ continued Lady Annabel, still pacing the room with agitated steps; ‘I have disciplined my emotions; I have felt at my heart the constant the undying pang, and yet I have smiled, that you might be happy. But I can struggle against my fate no longer. No longer can I suffer my unparalleled, yes, my unjust doom. What have I done to merit these afflictions? Now, then, let me struggle no more; let me die!’
Venetia tried to rise; her limbs refused their office; she tottered; she fell again into her seat with an hysteric cry.
‘Alas! alas!’ exclaimed Lady Annabel, ‘to a mother, a child is everything; but to a child, a parent is only a link in the chain of her existence. It was weakness, it was folly, it was madness to stake everything on a resource which must fail me. I feel it now, but I feel it too late.’
Venetia held forth her arms; she could not speak; she was stifled with her emotion.
‘But was it wonderful that I was so weak?’ continued her mother, as it were communing only with herself. ‘What child was like mine? Oh! the joy, the bliss, the hours of rapture that I have passed, in gazing upon my treasure, and dreaming of all her beauty and her rare qualities! I was so happy! I was so proud! Ah, Venetia! you know not how I have loved you!’
Venetia sprang from her seat; she rushed forward with convulsive energy; she clung to her mother, threw her arms round her neck, and buried her passionate woe in Lady Annabel’s bosom.
Lady Annabel stood for some minutes supporting her speechless and agitated child; then, as her sobs became fainter, and the tumult of her grief gradually died away, she bore her to the sofa, and seated herself by her side, holding Venetia’s hand in her own, and ever and anon soothing her with soft embraces, and still softer words.
At length, in a faint voice, Venetia said, ‘Mother, what can I do to restore the past? How can we be to each other as we were, for this I cannot bear?’
‘Love me, my Venetia, as I love you; be faithful to your mother; do not disregard her counsel; profit by her errors.’
‘I will in all things obey you,’ said Venetia, in a low voice; ‘there is no sacrifice I am not prepared to make for your happiness.’
‘Let us not talk of sacrifices, my darling child; it is not a sacrifice that I require. I wish only to prevent your everlasting misery.’
‘What, then, shall I do?’
‘Make me only one promise; whatever pledge you give, I feel assured that no influence, Venetia, will ever induce you to forfeit it.’
‘Name it, mother.’
‘Promise me never to marry Lord Cadurcis,’ said Lady Annabel, in a whisper, but a whisper of which not a word was lost by the person to whom it was addressed.
‘I promise never to marry, but with your approbation,’ said Venetia, in a solemn voice, and uttering the words with great distinctness.
The countenance of Lady Annabel instantly brightened; she embraced her child with extreme fondness, and breathed the softest and the sweetest expressions of gratitude and love.
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