My child came. Ah! that I should have to mention her here! I do it in penance; I do it in despair; since with her my heart woke, and for her that heart is now broken, never to be healed again. Oh, if the knowledge of my misery wakens in you one thought that is not of revenge, cast a pitying eye upon this darling one, left in a hateful country without friends, without lover, without means. For friends and lover and means will all leave her with the revelations which the morning will bring, and unless Heaven is merciful to her innocence as it has been just to my guilt, she will have no other goal before her than that which has opened its refuge to me.
As for her father, let Heaven deal with him. He gave me this darling child; so I may not curse him, even if I cannot bless.
I have seen one bright thing to-day, and that was the faint and almost unearthly gleam which shot for a moment from beneath Honora's falling lids as I told her what love was and how the marquis only awaited her permission to speak to assure her of his boundless affection and his undying purpose to be true to her even to the point of assuming her griefs and taking upon himself the protection of her innocence.
If it had not been for this, I should have felt that the world was too dark to remain in, and life too horrible to be endured.
I thought that when Honora Urquhart left my house to be married to M. De Fontaine, in the church below the hill, peace would return to us once more.
But there is no peace. This morning another horrible tragedy defiled my doorstep.
I was sitting in the open porch waiting for the mail coach, for it seemed to me that it was about time I received some word from Mr. Tamworth. It was yet some minutes before the time when the rumble of the coach is usually heard, and I was brooding, as was natural, over the more than terrible occurrences of the last few weeks, when I heard the clatter of horses' hoofs, and looking up and down the road, saw a small party of men approaching from the south. As they came nearer, I noticed that one of the riders was white-haired and presumably aged, and was interesting myself in him, when he came near enough for me to distinguish his features, and I perceived it was no other than Mr. Tamworth.
Rising in perturbation, I glanced at the men behind and abreast of him, and saw that one of these rode with lowered head and oppressed mien, and was just about to give that person a name in my mind when the horse he bestrode suddenly reared, bolted, and dashed forward to where I sat, flinging his rider at the very threshold of my house, where he lay senseless as the stone upon which his head had fallen.
For an instant both his companions and myself paused aghast at a sight so terrible and bewildering; then, amid cries from the road and one wild shriek from within, I rushed forward, and turning over the head, looked upon the face of the fallen man. It was not a new one to me. Though changed and seamed and white now in death, I recognized it at once. It was that of Edwin Urquhart.
This noon I took down the sign which has swung for twenty years over my front door. "Happy-Go-Lucky" is scarcely the name for an inn accursed by so many horrors.
This week I have fulfilled the threat of years ago. I have had the oak parlor and its hideous adjunct torn from my house.
Now, perhaps, I can sleep.
News from Honora. The distant relative who succeeded to the estates and the title of the Marquis de la Roche-Guyon has fallen a victim to the guillotine. Would this have been the fate of Honora's husband had he forsaken her and returned home? There is reason to believe it. At all events, she finds herself greatly comforted by this news for the sacrifice which her husband made to his love, and no longer regrets the exile to which he has been forced to submit for her sake. Wonderful, wonderful Providence! I view its workings with renewed awe every day.
I have been from home. I have been on a visit to New York. I have tasted of change, of brightness, of free and cheerful living, and I can settle down now in this old and fast-decaying inn with something else to think about than ruin and fearful retribution.
I have been visiting Madame De Fontaine. She wished me to come, I think, that I might see how amply her married life had fulfilled the promise of her courtship days. Though she and her noble husband live in peaceful retirement, and without many of the appurtenances of wealth, they find such resources of delight in each other's companionship that it would be hard for the most exacting witness of their mutual felicity to wish them any different fate, or to desire for them any wider field of social influence.
The marquis—I shall always call him thus—has found a friend in General Washington, and though he is never seen at the President's receptions, or mingles his voice in the councils of his adopted country, there are evidences constantly appearing of the confidence reposed in him by this great man, which cannot but add to the exile's contentment and satisfaction.
Honora has developed into a grand beauty. The melancholy which her unhappy memories have necessarily infused into her countenance have given depth to her expression, which was always sweet, and frequently touching. She looks like a queen, but like a queen who has known not only grief, but love. There is nothing of despair in her glance, rather a lofty hope, and when her affections are touched, or her enthusiasm roused, she smiles with such a heavenly brightness in her countenance, that I think there is no fairer woman in the world, as I am assured there is none worthier.
Her husband agrees with me in this opinion, and is so happy that she said to me one day:
"I sometimes wonder how my heart succeeds in holding the joy which Heaven has seen fit to grant me. In it I read the forgiveness of God for the unutterable sins of my parents; and though the shadows will come, and do come, whenever I think upon the past, or see a face which, like yours, recalls memories as bitter as ever overwhelmed an innocent girl in her first youth, I find that with every year of love and peaceful living the darkness grows less, as if, somewhere in the boundless heavens, the mercy of God was making itself felt in the heart of her who once called herself my mother."
And hearing her speak thus, I felt my own breast lose something of the oppression which had hitherto weighed it down. And as the days passed, and I experienced more and more of the true peace that comes with perfect love and perfect trust, I found my tears turned to rejoicing and the story of my regrets into songs of hope.
And so I have come back comforted and at rest. If there are yet ghosts haunting the old inn, I do not see them, and though its walls are dismantled, its custom gone, and its renown a thing of the past, I can still sit on its grass-grown doorstep and roam through its fast-decaying corridors without discovering any blacker shadow following in my wake than that of my own figure, bent now with age, and only held upright by the firmness of the little cane with which I strive to give aid to my tottering and uncertain steps.
The grace of God has fallen at last upon the Happy-Go-Lucky Inn.