Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters — John Shaqi
Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and DaughtersAguilar, Grace
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Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters
Aguilar, Grace
Domestic fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction
go out with her, and not sit moping at home, and that if he would, she
would behave just as he liked, and if he did not care to see her
surrounded, as she knew she was, by red coats, she would dismiss them
all, and devote herself to him--but indeed she could not stay at
home--he would feel that it would be cruel indeed to chain such a being
to his side, and sometimes make the exertion (for which he was little
fitted) to accompany her; at others, with kind words and indulgent love,
permit her to follow her own wishes, and remain alone. But little did he
think the real reason that Eleanor could not rest in quiet at home. The
recollection of Lord Fitzclair was at such times so fearfully vivid,
that the very agony she had endured when first told of his fearful end
would return in all its intensity; the thought: Had her father really
cursed her for her disobedience, and was it that forever hovering round
her, preventing any thing like lasting happiness. And yet, by a strange
contradiction, while the idea of her father's curse shook her whole
frame at times with convulsive sobs, pride, that most fatal ingredient
of her character, utterly prevented all attempt on her part to
communicate with her relations. She said, as they had made no effort to
conciliate, she would not; and yet the longing for Emmeline sometimes
became actually painful.
Eleanor was never intended for the heartless, reckless being she had
tried to become. It was a constant and most terrible struggle between
the good and evil parts of her nature, and though the evil triumphed--in
the determination that nothing should change her course of action,
nothing compel her to acknowledge she had ever been in the wrong, and
was really not the perfect creature which flattery was ever ready to
pour into her ear--the good had yet so much power as to make her
miserable, by the conviction, that she was not what she might have
been--that she never could be happy--that every pleasure was hollow,
every amusement vain. Again and again the memories of Emmeline's gentle,
sustaining, ever active piety would come before her, as if beseeching
her to seek the only fount of peace; but so terrible was the
self-reproach, the anguish which the thought called up, that she always
turned from it with a shudder, resolved that religion was never meant
for such as herself, and that its restrictions should never enter her
mind, or its dictates pass her lips.
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