It was, then, an irresistible destiny that, after the wild musings and
baffled aspirations of so many years, had guided her to this chamber.
She is the child of Marmion Herbert; she beholds her lost parent. That
being of supernatural beauty, on whom she gazes with a look of blended
reverence and love, is her father. What a revelation! Its reality
exceeded the wildest dreams of her romance; her brightest visions of
grace and loveliness and genius seemed personified in this form; the
form of one to whom she was bound by the strongest of all earthly
ties, of one on whose heart she had a claim second only to that of the
being by whose lips his name was never mentioned. Was he, then, no
more? Ah! could she doubt that bitterest calamity? Ah! was it, was
it any longer a marvel, that one who had lived in the light of those
seraphic eyes, and had watched them until their terrestrial splendour
had been for ever extinguished, should shrink from the converse that
could remind her of the catastrophe of all her earthly hopes! This
chamber, then, was the temple of her mother's woe, the tomb of her
baffled affections and bleeding heart. No wonder that Lady Annabel,
the desolate Lady Annabel, that almost the same spring must have
witnessed the most favoured and the most disconsolate of women, should
have fled from the world that had awarded her at the same time a lot
so dazzling and so full of despair.
Pages:
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193