Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/579

Rh "One thing you must promise me!" sobbed Clementina; for the inner citadel of her will had not yielded, though the outer bulwarks had been swept away; "you must break off this marriage with Sir James Walshe;" here she wept afresh. "You must promise me this, mamma! I could not bring such shame upon him!"

"Which means, my dear, that I must purchase the safety of one child by the ruin of another. Think calmly, my dear Clementina—what will become of you if you break off this match? I do not wish you to be mercenary, nor would I, to marry you to a duke, give you to one you did not love; but you do love Sir James; and if you discard him you discard your only chance of settlement. Men are shy of marrying girls whose wedding-day has been fixed. Yet if you do not marry what will become of you? You know that my income dies with me; you have no relatives to whom I can consign you; what will you do when left friendless and penniless?"

"Teach," said Clementina.

"The eternal resource of the incapable! Teach? My dear child! you are as little fitted to teach children as I am to command an army! You have neither the patience nor the warmth of nature for such a task. You would chill your pupils, and then you would punish them for not loving you." Which were about the most sensible words Mrs. Kinniside had ever uttered.

Clementina was silent. She felt the force of her mother's last speech, and for the moment her hands were held.

"If you do not marry," continued her mother—"if you draw back and break faith with Sir James, you have ruined both yourself and me, and, when I die, your brother." This she added below her breath.

The word gave a new turn to Clementina's thoughts. "Where is he?" she said, eagerly; "and I have forgotten him for all this time I have been thinking and talking of my miserable self! Oh, mamma! Let me see him! He lives, and I have believed him dead so long! Let me see him! let me go to him! dear mamma. My only brother, poor Tom, that I loved so much!"

"You cannot see him, Clementina," said Mrs. Kinniside, greatly troubled.

"Why? why cannot I, mamma?" She arose from her knees as she said this, with a wild look and a hurried gesture. How her face had changed during the last few hours! That still, calm, saintly face, with its mild eyes and its silken breadth of fair brown hair; its pale, creamy cheeks and plaintive mouth, had taken on itself all the flush and fever, and burning power and tumbled wreck of passion, such as none but the most tropical natures are assumed to know. And now, as she stood there, with her head thrown back, her eyes dilated and lighted by strange fires not their own, her nostrils and her lips quivering, she looked another creature to the saintly Adeline of Sir James' fancy—the Protestant nun, as he sometimes called her, who seemed as if she could never know an emotion of a stronger kind than gentle pity. Even her mother, powerfully moved as she was, and full of unspoken dread, could yet spare perception enough to see the change in her, and to note the wonderful beauty of her look and attitude.

"I wish you always looked like that, Clementina!" she said, in a critical voice, and not inadvertently. And the phrase so jarred upon the girl's excited nerves that she left the room abruptly, and so the scene ended.

"Can I control her?" thought the mother, anxiously. "Can I save her?" came next And as she thought this she clasped her hands convulsively feeling that her cup of sorrow was not yet filled to the brim. Ah! that cup is