CHAPTER XI.
"If, hitherto, Clara de Haldimar, I have been minute in
the detail of all that attended my connection with your
mother, it has been with a view to prove to you how deeply
I have been injured; but I have now arrived at a part of
my history, when to linger on the past would goad me into
madness, and render me unfit for the purpose to which I
have devoted myself. Brief must be the probing of wounds,
that nearly five lustres have been insufficient to heal;
brief the tale that reveals the infamy of those who have
given you birth, and the utter blighting of the fairest
hopes of one whose only fault was that of loving, "not
too wisely, but too well."
"Will you credit the monstrous truth," he added, in a
fierce but composed whisper, while he bent eagerly over
the form of the trembling yet attentive girl, "when I
tell you that, on my return from that fatal expedition,
during my continuance on which her image had never once
been absent from my mind, I found Clara Beverley the wife
of De Haldimar? Yes," continued Wacousta, his wounded
feeling and mortified pride chafing, by the bitter
recollection, into increasing fury, while his countenance
paled in its swarthiness, "the wife, the wedded wife of
yon false and traitorous governor! Well may you look
surprised, Clara de Haldimar: such damnable treachery as
this may startle his own blood in the veins of another,
nor find its justification even in the devotedness of
woman's filial piety.
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