Sink or Swim? , Volume III

Alas, alas for the young creature that was taken, and for the old man that was left behind! Kate's words were only too true; and Sophy, the loved of many hearts -- the wealthy heiress, on whose bright blooming face the winds of heaven had never been allowed to play too roughly -- was numbered with the dead. She never spoke again, after they laid her upon her bed by the side of her sleeping infant; and that she died unconscious of the truth -- that the frantic denials poured forth in his agony by Arthur of the guilt and treachery of which he had been accused, fell upon ears that heard them not -- was, perhaps, the bitterest portion of his punishment. That he had been accused unjustly, and that he had in reality never what is called _wronged_ the tender wife who had paid for her jealous curiosity with her life, was Arthur's only consolation in his hour of trial and bereavement. He forgot that his freedom from actual guilt was owing to no virtue on his own part; forgot that in his heart he had committed the sin the bare accusation of which, overheard by his poor Sophy, had consigned her to an early grave; forgot that while _she_ was tender, loving, and true, his heart, ever since he had led her to the altar, had been bound up in, and wholly occupied by, another.

But if, in his yearning for self-comfort, and in the natural longing of cowardly mortals to escape from the sharp stings of conscience, Arthur Vavasour could find consolation in the reflection that he had escaped _actual_ guilt, there was one who, from the hour when he was first prostrated to the earth by the intelligence of poor Sophy's death to the day when his own sorrows were buried in the grave, could never bring himself to see any mitigation of Arthur Vavasour's offence, or any plea for mercy on the ground that he had not been, in _fact_, faithless to his marriage-vows. To describe the grief, the frantic despair it might rather be called, of the father whose only child was thus, in the bloom of her innocent and happy youth, torn from his arms and from his love, would be impossible. The blow had, indeed, fallen with terrible suddenness on the aged head that never, never again rose erect, as it had done before, with the proud, glad look that prosperity and domestic content are wont to lend to their possessors. "Old Dub" (there was such a touching solemnity, a sacredness as it were, thrown around his undying grief, that the name seemed no longer to suit him, and died away speedily, as do the nicknames of children when age and wisdom renders their foolish _petits noms_ inappropriate and absurd), "old Dub" was never the same man again after he had seen the delicate limbs of his dead daughter laid out for her burial. It was a touching sight to witness, that of the gray hairs falling over the white closed eyelids of the corpse, while the scant tears of age wrung from a father's agony fell slowly one by one upon poor Sophy's marble forehead.