Page:The Aspern Papers.djvu/190

 'She's my punishment and she's my stigma!' cried Louisa Pallant, with veritable exaltation.

'It seems to me rather that you are hers.'

'Hers? What does she know of such things?—what can she ever feel? She's cased in steel; she has a heart of marble. It's true—it's true. She appals me!'

I laid my hand upon the poor lady's; I uttered, with the intention of checking and soothing her, the first incoherent words that came into my head and I drew her toward a bench which I perceived a few yards away. She dropped upon it; I placed myself near her and besought her to consider well what she was saying. She owed me nothing and I wished no one injured, no one denounced or exposed for my sake.

'For your sake? Oh, I am not thinking of you!' she answered; and indeed the next moment I thought my words rather fatuous. 'It's a satisfaction to my own conscience—for I have one, little as you think I have a right to speak of it. I have been punished by my sin itself. I have been hideously worldly, I have thought only of that, and I have taught her to be so—to do the same. That's the only instruction I have ever given her, and she has learned the lesson so well that now that I see it printed there in all her nature I am horrified at my work. For years we have lived that way; we have thought of nothing else. She has learned it so well that she has gone far beyond me. I say I am horrified, because she is horrible.'

'My poor extravagant friend,' I pleaded, 'isn't it still more so to hear a mother say such things?'

'Why so, if they are abominably true? Besides, I don't care what I say, if I save him.'