CHAPTER XII.

A REVELATION.

"I am a beggar, child, and you are a beggar's daughter. It is to Mr. Wareham that we are indebted for all that we enjoy. For years he has paid the expenses of your education; and now that you have grown to young womanhood he shelters you in a palace, surrounds you with splendor that a queen might envy, and not satisfied with this,--"

She paused and fixed her eyes upon my face, I know that I was frightfully pale.

"Offers you his hand in marriage."

For a moment the light, the mirrors, the roof itself swam round me, and I sank half-fainting in my mother's arms.

"O! this is but a jest, a cruel jest to frighten me. Say, mother, it is a jest!"

"It is not a jest; it is sober, serious earnest;" and she raised me sternly from her arms. "He has offered his hand, and you _will_ marry him."

I flung myself on my knees at the bedside, clasped her hands, and as my night-dress fell back from my shoulders and bosom, I told her, with sobs and tears, of my love for Ernest, and my engagement with him.

"Pshaw! A poor clergyman's son," she said bitterly.

"O, let us leave this place, mother!" I cried, still pressing her hands to my bosom. "You say that we are poor. Be it so. We will find a home together in the home of my childhood. Or if that fails us, I will work for you. I will toil from sun to sun and all night long,--beg,--do anything rather than marry this man. For, mother, I cannot help it,--but I do hate him with all my soul."

"Pretty talk, very pretty!" and she loosened her hands from my grasp; "but did you ever try poverty, my child? Did you ever know what the word meant,--POVERTY? Did you ever work sixteen hours a day, at your needle, for as many pennies, walk the streets at dead of winter in half-naked feet, and go for two long days and nights without a morsel of food? Did you ever try it, my child? That's the life which _poor_ widows and their pretty daughters live in New York, my dear."

"But Ernest loves me,--he will make his way in life,--we will be married,--you will share our home, dear mother."

These words rendered her perfectly furious. She started up and uttered a frightful oath--it was the first time I had ever heard an oath from a woman's lips. Her countenance for a moment was fiendish. She assailed me with a torrent of reproaches, concluding thus:

"And this is your gratitude for the care, the anxiety, the very agony of a mother's anxiety, which I have endured on your account for years! In return for all you condemn me to--poverty! But it shall not be. One of us must bend, and that one will not be me. I swear, girl,"--her brows were knit, she was lividly pale, and she raised her right hand to heaven,--"that you _shall_ marry this man."

"And I swear,"--I bounded to my feet, my bosom bare, and the blood boiling in my veins--perchance it was the same blood which gave my mother her fiery temper,--"I swear that I will _not_ marry him as long as there is life in me. Do you hear me, mother? Before I marry that miserable wretch, whose very presence fills me with loathing, I will fall a corpse at your feet."

My words, my attitude took her by surprise. She surveyed me silently but was too much enraged to speak.

"O, that my father was living!" I cried, the fit of passion succeeded by a burst of tears; "he would save me from this hideous marriage."

My mother quietly drew a letter from her bosom and placed it open in my hand.

"Your father is living. That letter is the last one I have received from him. Read it, my angel."

I took it,--it was very brief,--I read it at a glance. It was addressed to my mother, and bore a recent date. These were its contents:

"DEAR FRANK:

"My sentence expires in two weeks from to-day. Send me some decent clothes, and let me know where I will meet you. Glad to hear that your plans as regards _our daughter_ approach a 'glorious' completion.

"Yours as ever,

"CHARLES."

It was a letter from a convict in Auburn prison,--and that convict was my father!

"It is false; my father died years ago," I cried in very agony. "This is not from my father."

"It is from your father," answered my mother; "and unless I send him the clothes which he asks for, you will see him, in less than three weeks, in his convict rags."

"O, mother! are you human? A mother to taunt her own daughter with her father's shame,--"

My temples throbbed madly and my sight failed. All that mortal can endure and be conscious, I had endured. I sank on the floor, and had not my mother caught me in her arms, I would have wounded my forehead against the marble table.

All night long, half waking, half delirious, I tossed on my silken couch mingling the name of my convict father and of Ernest in my broken exclamations. Once I was conscious for a moment and looked around with clear eyes. My mother was watching over me. Her face was bathed in tears. She was _human_ after all. That moment past, the delirium returned and I struggled with horrible dreams until morning.