Mr. Aylett was not wantonly or openly unkind to his ward, and
ungenerous persecution was utterly incompatible with the temper and
habits of his lady wife, but between them they had contrived to make
the girl's life very miserable. It was Winston's cue--adopted, let
us hope, from the strict sense of duty he avowed had ever actuated
him in his treatment of the charge bequeathed him by his father--to
deport himself with calm, seldom-relaxed severity to one who had
showed herself to be entirely unworthy of confidence; to exercise
unremitting surveillance upon her personal association with young
people out of the family and her correspondence, and to curb by look
and oral reproof the most distant approach to what he condemned as
indiscreet levity. In a thousand ways--many of them ingenious, and
all severe, she was made to feel the curtailment of her liberty, and
given to understand that it was the just retribution of her unlucky
love-affair with an unprincipled adventurer. Mrs. Aylett professed
to discountenance this policy--to be Mabel's secret friend and ally,
while she deemed it unwise to combat her husband's will by overt
measures for his sister's protection.
Thus, for a year, the object of his real displeasure and her
affected commiseration lived under a cloud, too proud to complain of
her thraldom, but feeling it every second; mourning, in the
seclusion of the trebly barred chambers of her heart, over her
shattered idol and squandered affections, and fancying, in the
morbid distrust engendered by the discovery of her lover's baseness,
and the weight of her brother's unsparing reprobation of her insane
imprudence, that she descried in every face, save Aunt Rachel's,
contempt or rebuke for the faux pas that had so nearly cast a stigma
upon her name and lineage.
In Herbert Dorrance's honest admiration and assiduous courtship the
most suspicious scrutiny could detect no tincture of either of these
feelings, and it was not long before she took refuge in his society
from the risk of being wounded and angered by the supposed
exhibition of them in others. Here was one man who could not but
know of her folly, in all its length, breadth, and depth, who was a
witness of her daily chastisement for it at her guardian's hands,
yet who esteemed her unsullied by the unworthy attachment,
undegraded by punishment. Gratitude had a powerful auxiliary in her
feverish longing to escape from scenes that kept alive to the quick,
memories she would have annihilated, had her ability been
commensurate with her will. All other associations with the house in
which she, and her father before her, had been born, and in which
she had passed her childhood and girlish days, were overrun by the
thickly thronging and pertinacious recollections of the two short
weeks Frederic Chilton had spent there with her. He haunted her
walks and drives; trod, by her side, the resounding floor of the
vine-covered portico, sat with her in parlor and halls; sang to her
accompaniment when she would have exorcised the phantom by
music--was always, whenever and wherever he appeared--the tender,
ingenuous, manly youth she had loved and reverenced as the
impersonation of her ideal lord; the demi-god whom she had
worshipped, heart and soul--set, in her exulting imagination no
lower than the angels, and beheld in the end,--with besmirched brow
and debased mien, a disgraced sensualist, not merely a deceiver of
another woman's innocent confidence, and her tempter to dishonor and
wretchedness, but a poltroon--a whipped coward who had not dared to
lift voice or pen in denial or extenuation of his crime.