Page:Edgar Huntly, or The Sleep Walker.djvu/54

 himself. Love and friendship he considered as groundless and chimerical; and believed that those delusions would, in people of sense, be rectified by experience: but he knew the obstinacy of his sister's attachment to these phantoms; and that to bereave her of the good they promised, was the most effectual means of rendering her miserable. For this end he set himself to thwart her wishes. In the imbecility and false indulgence of his parents he found his most powerful auxiliaries: he prevailed upon them to forbid that union, which wanted nothing but their concurrence, and their consent to endow her with a small portion of their patrimony, to render completely eligible. The cause was that of her happiness, and the happiness of him on whom she had bestowed her heart: it behoved her, therefore, to call forth all her energies in defence of it, to weaken her brother's influence on the minds of her parents, or to win him to be her advocate. When I reflect upon her mental powers, and the advantages which should seem to flow from the circumstance of pleading in the character of daughter and sister, I can scarcely believe that her attempts miscarried: I should have imagined that all obstacles would yield before her; and particularly in a case like this, in which she must have summoned all her forces, and never have believed that she had struggled sufficiently.

"Certain it is that her lot was fixed: she was not only denied the husband of her choice, but another was imposed upon her, whose recommendations were irresistible in every one's apprehension but her own. The discarded lover was treated with every sort of contumely: deceit and violence were employed by her brother to bring his honour, his liberty, and even his life, into hazard.

"All these iniquities produced no considerable effect on the mind of the lady: the machinations to which her love was exposed would have exasperated him into madness, had not her most strenuous exertions been directed to appease him.

"She prevailed on him at length to abandon his country, though she thereby merely turned her brother's depravity into a new channel. Her parents died without consciousness of the evils they inflicted; but they experienced a