Marmion Herbert, AET.  XX.

Yet there needed not these letters to guide the agitated spirit of Venetia, for, before her eye had reached them, the word was spoken; and falling on her knees before the portrait, the daughter of Lady Annabel had exclaimed, ‘My father!’

CHAPTER V.

The daughter still kneels before the form of the father, of whom she had heard for the first time in her life.  He is at length discovered.  It was, then, an irresistible destiny that, after the wild musings and baffled aspirations of so many years, had guided her to this chamber.  She is the child of Marmion Herbert; she beholds her lost parent.  That being of supernatural beauty, on whom she gazes with a look of blended reverence and love, is her father.  What a revelation!  Its reality exceeded the wildest dreams of her romance; her brightest visions of grace and loveliness and genius seemed personified in this form; the form of one to whom she was bound by the strongest of all earthly ties, of one on whose heart she had a claim second only to that of the being by whose lips his name was never mentioned.  Was he, then, no more?  Ah! could she doubt that bitterest calamity?  Ah! was it, was it any longer a marvel, that one who had lived in the light of those seraphic eyes, and had watched them until their terrestrial splendour had been for ever extinguished, should shrink from the converse that could remind her of the catastrophe of all her earthly hopes!  This chamber, then, was the temple of her mother’s woe, the tomb of her baffled affections and bleeding heart.  No wonder that Lady Annabel, the desolate Lady Annabel, that almost the same spring must have witnessed the most favoured and the most disconsolate of women, should have fled from the world that had awarded her at the same time a lot so dazzling and so full of despair.  Venetia felt that the existence of her mother’s child, her own fragile being, could have been that mother’s sole link to life.  The heart of the young widow of Marmion Herbert must have broken but for Venetia; and the consciousness of that remaining tie, and the duties that it involved, could alone have sustained the victim under a lot of such unparalleled bitterness.  The tears streamed down her cheek as she thought of her mother’s misery, and her mother’s gentle love; the misery that she had been so cautious her child should never share; the vigilant affection that, with all her own hopes blighted, had still laboured to compensate to her child for a deprivation the fulness of which Venetia could only now comprehend.

When, where, why did he die?  Oh that she might talk of him to her mother for ever!  It seemed that life might pass away in listening to his praises.  Marmion Herbert! and who was Marmion Herbert?  Young as he was, command and genius, the pride of noble passions, all the glory of a creative mind, seemed stamped upon his brow.  With all his marvellous beauty, he seemed a being born for greatness.  Dead! in the very burst of his spring, a spring so sweet and splendid; could he be dead?  Why, then, was he ever born?  It seemed to her that he could not be dead; there was an animated look about the form, that seemed as if it could not die without leaving mankind a prodigal legacy of fame.