The Wildfire Club - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

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OR THE lUUNTED lIAN. 131
terrible. One evening, just as I had completed every
arrangement for my intended journey, I returned to the
cottage where I had left my wife and a new-born babe,
scarcely a week old. I returned to find the cottage and
both its precious inmates a heap of nlins - consumed, as it
was subsequently made evident, by an incendiary; both
mother and child had perished in one burning wreck.
When night came, and the crowd of sympathizing neighbors
whom the horrible calamity had drawn around me had
left me to my unutterable woe, a lady entered my apartment,
whom, to my horror and shame, I recognized as .Mrs.
F. I. • Edward H.,' she began, • coward, traitor, and
thief! I am yet but partially avenged - watching the
favorable moment, I dpstroyed your 'Wife and child! Seek
not to arrest or convict me; the instruments who served
me are beyond your reach; their safety and their silence
are bought by a price which places them forever out of
your power. Now learn your doom! Go forth and preach
with lying lips, a seducing tongue, and felon's speech! Go
forth and teach lessons of virtue and morality; but go
where you will, do what you will, say what you will, li"ing
or dead, I 7cill never leave you more! Till the hour of
doom, when we must part forever, these lips shall never
address you by word or token, but my presence shall be
your continual shame, the sight of me your everlasting torment,
and the consciousness of that presence a fire which
nought but the death of both can quench.' 0, sir, you
never can imagine how fearfully that awful denunciation
has been visiteu upon me. These eyes have never beheld
her face, that tone of doom has never again sounded in my
ears until to-day; but the horrible consciousness that she
was there, the certainty that I could not escape her, the
hideous prescience by which she seemed able to divine my