THE MONK. 101 



were unavailing. I was doomed to expiate my fault. You now be- 

 hold a miserable heart-broken creature, subdued by misfortune, op- 

 pressed by anguish and remorse, borne down by wretchedness and 

 despair, but it has been of my own seeking. My own pride and 

 folly have embittered every drop in the cup of life Yet pity me. 

 But how can I ask you to pity me — you whom I have so much in- 

 jured — you whom I have so deeply loved ? Oh ! I know not what 

 I say, yet I must speak. Yes, Rudolf, I deeply loved you I You 

 alone had my first, my only affection ; but I thought to humble you. 

 I wished to gratify my vanity by seeing you at my feet, pleading a 

 cause already sufficiently advocated. To show my own power, I 

 trifled with a heart I would have died for ; but I was justly punished 

 for my duplicity. Since that day I have not known peace, and the hor- 

 ror of my present fate is aggravated by the remembrance that I might 

 have been blessed and happy. And now, can you forgive, can you 

 pity me ? Speak, I implore you I 1 am now sinking fast into the 

 grave, where alone I can find rest; and were I but assured of your 

 forgiveness, I could then calmly, nay gladly, meet death.' 



" Rudolf had hitherto been silent. The mingled feelings of joy, 

 surprise, grief, admiration, and regret, had alternately agitated his 

 mind, and he was bewildered with conflicting sensations. Every 

 word of Paulina had reached to the inmost recesses of his soul. 

 Every syllable had awakened the dormant, but not extinct, energies 

 of his nature. He was in a mingled delirium of bliss and torture. 

 But the last appeal roused him to the terrible reality. He took her 

 hand. The touch ran through his veins. His brain burned. No 

 longer master of himself, he caught Paulina in his arms. He clasped 

 her to his breast, and poured forth his long-suppressed feelings in a 

 torrent of wild and impassioned language. He recalled the time 

 when he had first seen her in his native valley. He remembered the 

 hours of exquisite happiness he had there spent. He forgot his pre- 

 sent sacred ofiice. He forgot that she was the wife of another. He 

 forgot everything, but that his beloved lay upon his bosom, that his 

 arms encircled her, that her warm tears fell upon his cheek, that her 

 heart throbbed responsive to his own ; and, as he strained her again 

 and again to that heart, and impressed a fervent kiss upon her lips, 

 there was no external world for him. He thought not of time or 

 eternity. Heaven could not long permit such a pi*ofanation to con- 

 tinue unpunished. A faint shriek from Paulina recalled him from 

 his madness. He turned and beheld the Count de Vegnet, who had 

 entered unobserved, and thus witnessed his wife in the monk's em- 



