THE TWO PICTURES.
We come now to another stage of this history. Six months have glided
into the past since the events recorded in the foregoing chapter. The
political world of Charleston is resolved to remain in the Union a few
months longer. It is a pleasant evening in early May. The western sky is
golden with the setting sun, and the heavens are filled with battlements
of refulgent clouds, now softening away into night. Yonder to the East,
reposes a dark grove. A gentle breeze fans through its foliage, the
leaves laugh and whisper, the perfumes of flowers are diffusing through
the air birds make melodious with their songs, the trilling stream
mingles its murmurs, and nature would seem gathering her beauties into
one enchanting harmony. In the foreground of the grove, and looking as
if it borrowed solitude of the deep foliage, in which it is half buried,
rises a pretty villa, wherein may be seen, surrounded by luxuries the
common herd might well envy, the fair, the beautiful siren, Anna Bonard.
In the dingy little back parlor of the old antiquary, grim poverty
looking in through every crevasse, sits the artless and pure-minded
Maria McArthur. How different are the thoughts, the hopes, the emotions
of these two women. Comfort would seem smiling on the one, while
destitution threatens the other. To the eye that looks only upon the
surface, how deceptive is the picture. The one with every wish
gratified, an expression of sorrow shadowing her countenance, and that
freshness and sweetness for which she was distinguished passing away,
contemplates herself a submissive captive, at the mercy of one for whom
she has no love, whose gold she cannot inherit, and whose roof she must
some day leave for the street. The other feels poverty grasping at her,
but is proud in the possession of her virtue; and though trouble would
seem tracing its lines upon her features, her heart remains untouched by
remorse;--she is strong in the consciousness that when all else is gone,
her virtue will remain her beacon light to happiness. Anna, in the loss
of that virtue, sees herself shut out from that very world that points
her to the yawning chasm of her future; she feels how like a slave in
the hands of one whose heart is as cold as his smiles are false, she is.
Maria owes the world no hate, nor are her thoughts disturbed by such
contemplations. Anna, with embittered and remorseful feelings--with dark
and terrible passions agitating her bosom, looks back over her eventful
life, to a period when even her own history is shut to her, only to find
the tortures of her soul heightened. Maria looks back upon a life of
fond attachment to her father, to her humble efforts to serve others,
and to know that she has borne with Christian fortitude those ills which
are incident to humble life. With her, an emotion of joy repays the
contemplation. To Anna, the future is hung in dark forebodings. She
recalls to mind the interview with Madame Montford, but that only tends
to deepen the storm of anguish the contemplation of her parentage
naturally gives rise to. With Maria, the present hangs dark and the
future brightens. She thinks of the absent one she loves--of how she can
best serve her aged father, and how she can make their little home
cheerful until the return of Tom Swiggs, who is gone abroad. It must be
here disclosed that the old man had joined their hands, and invoked a
blessing on their heads, ere Tom took his departure. Maria looks forward
to the day of his return with joyous emotions. That return is the day
dream of her heart; in it she sees her future brightening. Such are the
cherished thoughts of a pure mind. Poverty may gnaw away at the
hearthstone, cares and sorrow may fall thick in your path, the rich may
frown upon you, and the vicious sport with your misfortunes, but virtue
gives you power to overcome them all. In Maria's ear something whispers:
Woman! hold fast to thy virtue, for if once it go neither gold nor false
tongues can buy it back.
Anna sees the companion of her early life, and the sharer of her
sufferings, shut up in a prison, a robber, doomed to the lash. "He was
sincere to me, and my only true friend--am I the cause of this?" she
muses. Her heart answers, and her bosom fills with dark and stormy
emotions. One small boon is now all she asks. She could bow down and
worship before the throne of virgin innocence, for now its worth towers,
majestic, before her. It discovers to her the falsity of her day-dream;
it tells her what an empty vessel is this life of ours without it. She
knows George Mullholland loves her passionately; she knows how deep will
be his grief, how revengeful his feelings. It is poverty that fastens
the poison in the heart of the rejected lover. The thought of this
flashes through her mind. His hopeless condition, crushed out as it were
to gratify him in whose company her pleasures are but transitory, and
may any day end, darkens as she contemplates it. How can she acquit her
conscience of having deliberately and faithlessly renounced one who was
so true to her? She repines, her womanly nature revolts at the
thought--the destiny her superstition pictured so dark and terrible,
stares her in the face. She resolves a plan for his release, and,
relieved with a hope that she can accomplish it while propitiating the
friendship of the Judge, the next day seeks him in his prison cell, and
with all that vehemence woman, in the outpouring of her generous
impulses, can call to her aid, implores his forgiveness. But the rust of
disappointment has dried up his better nature; his heart is wrung with
the shafts of ingratitude--all the fierce passions of his nature, hate,
scorn and revenge, rise up in the one stormy outburst of his soul. He
casts upon her a look of withering scorn, the past of that life so
chequered flashes vividly through his thoughts, his hate deepens, he
hurls her from him, invokes a curse upon her head, and shuts her from
his sight. "Mine will be the retribution!" he says, knitting his dark
brow.
How is it with the Judge--that high functionary who provides thus
sumptuously for his mistress? His morals, like his judgments, are
excused, in the cheap quality of our social morality.
Such is gilded vice; such is humble virtue.
A few days more and the term of the Sessions commences. George is
arraigned, and the honorable Mr. Snivel, who laid the plot, and
furthered the crime, now appears as a principal witness. He procures the
man's conviction, and listens with guilty heart to the sentence, for he
is rearraigned on sentence day, and Mr. Snivel is present. And while
the culprit is sentenced to two years imprisonment, and to receive
eighty lashes, laid on his bare back, while at the public whipping-post,
at four stated times, the man who stimulated the hand of the criminal,
is honored and flattered by society. Such is the majesty of the law.