Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/173

 misery. I did not love her less; but the birth of that boy had infused fresh bitterness into the cup of servitude. Whenever I looked upon him, my mind was filled with horrid images. The whole future seemed to come visibly before me. I saw him naked, chained, and bleeding under the lash; I saw him a wretched, trembling creature, cringing to escape it; I saw him utterly debased, and the spirit of manhood extinguished within him; already he appeared that worthless thing, — a slave contented with his fate!

I could not bear it. I started up in a phrensy of passion; I snatched the child from the arms of his mother, and while I loaded him with caresses, I looked about for the means of extinguishing a life, which, as it was an emanation from my existence, seemed destined to be only a prolongation of my misery.

My eyes rolled wildly, I doubt not; and the stern spirit of my determination must have been visibly marked upon my face; for gentle and unsuspicious as she was, and wholly incapable of that wild passion which tore my heart, my wife, with a mother's instinctive watchfulness, seemed to catch some glimpse of my intention. She rose up hastily, and without speaking a word, she caught the baby from my feeble and trembling grasp; and as she pressed it to her bosom, she gave a look that told me all that she feared; and told me too, that the mother's life was bound up in that of the child.

That look subdued me. My arms dropped powerless, and I sunk down in a sort of sullen stupor. I had been prevented from accomplishing my purpose, but I was not satisfied that in foregoing it, I did a father's duty to the child. The more I thought upon it — and it so engrossed me that I could scarcely, draw my thoughts away, — the more was I convinced that it were better for the boy to die. And if the deed did peril my own soul, I loved the child so well I did not shrink, even at that!

But then his mother?

I would have reasoned with her; but I knew how vain would be the labor to array a woman's judgment against a mother's feelings; and I felt, that one tear stealing down her cheek, one look of hers, like that she gave me when