Under the despotic influence of these enchanted feelings, Venetia
was fast growing into womanhood, without a single cloud having ever
disturbed or sullied the pure and splendid heaven of her domestic
life. Suddenly the horizon had become clouded, a storm had gathered
and burst, and an eclipse could scarcely have occasioned more terror
to the untutored roamer of the wilderness, than this unexpected
catastrophe to one so inexperienced in the power of the passions as
our heroine. Her heaven was again serene; but such was the effect
of this ebullition on her character, so keen was her dread of again
encountering the agony of another misunderstanding with her mother,
that she recoiled with trembling from that subject which had so often
and so deeply engaged her secret thoughts; and the idea of her father,
associated as it now was with pain, mortification, and misery, never
rose to her imagination but instantly to be shunned as some unhallowed
image, of which the bitter contemplation was fraught with not less
disastrous consequences than the denounced idolatry of the holy
people.
Whatever, therefore, might be the secret reasons which impelled Lady
Annabel to shroud the memory of the lost parent of her child in such
inviolate gloom, it is certain that the hitherto restless though
concealed curiosity of Venetia upon the subject, the rash
demonstration to which it led, and the consequence of her boldness,
instead of threatening to destroy in an instant the deep and matured
system of her mother, had, on the whole, greatly contributed to the
fulfilment of the very purpose for which Lady Annabel had so long
laboured.
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