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 thougnts 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 rearrainged 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.