To trace the gradual and downward course she trod, and how artfully Berkeley gained an ascendancy over her by the interest he affected to feel in her little ailing brother, and how lavishly he supplied the means of such comforts as the poor child had never possessed even in his father's homely parsonage, can neither be for me to describe, nor my reader to know.
Suffice that the gentle Agnes fell into the snare, as our common ancestress did before, and became what I now found her to be.
From that hour she had never known real peace, and the memory of her parents, blended with the agonies of remorse, haunted her day and night. As a drowning wretch will cling to straws, so clung she to the desperate hope that Berkeley would love her while life lasted, and that he would redeem his promise by marrying her, for she loved him blindly and devotedly, with all the strength of her young heart, and of a first and only passion.
The change now, from work all day and music all night, with trudging to and fro, through rain or sleet, was doubtless great; but the change brought with it no joy, no peace of mind.
Had she a thousand caprices, in the first flush of her amour, her roué lover would have gratified them all; but, luckily, her tastes were simple, and she shrank from proffered boxes at the play or opera, from rural parties, and everything that made her public.
But retribution was coming now; her tears and sorrow fretted him, and he began to absent himself. The luxuries with which he surrounded her brought to her no happiness, and to her little brother no health, for the child died, passing peacefully away one night in his sleep, and was buried--not in the pleasant green village burying-ground where his kindred lay--but in a horrid fetid London churchyard, amid the human loam of ages; and when the little silver-mounted coffin was carried away, Agnes Auriol, as she cast a bouquet of lily-of-the-valley on it, felt that now she had no real tie on earth, unless it was her lover, and from him even she shrank at such a time as this.
She stood alone by the little grave, the only mourner there. She had thought of asking Berkeley to accompany her; but, somehow, his presence would seem a species of pollution by the grave of the pure and sinless little boy, and the face of her father seemed ever before her.