There was more, however, far more bitter kept mingling in the draught. Round the idea of one's mother the mind of man clings with fond affection. It is the first sweet, deep thought stamped upon our infant hearts, when yet soft and capable of receiving the most profound impressions, and all the after-feelings of the world are more or less light in comparison. I do not know that even in our old age we do not look back to that feeling as the sweetest we have known through life. Our passions and our wilfulness may lead us far from the object of our filial love; we learn even to pain her heart, to oppose her wishes, to violate her commands; we may become wild, headstrong, and angry at her counsels or her opposition; but when death has stilled her monitory voice, and nothing but calm memory remains to recapitulate her virtues and good deeds, affection, like a flower beaten to the ground by a past storm, raises up her head and smiles among the tears. Round that idea, as we have said, the mind clings with fond affection; and even when the early period of our loss forces memory to be silent, fancy takes the place of remembrance, and twines the image of our dead parent with a garland of graces, and beauties, and virtues, which we doubt not that she possessed. Thus had it been with De Vaux: he could just call to mind a face that had appeared to him very beautiful, and a few kind and tender words from the lips of her he had called mother; but he had fancied her all that was good, and gentle, and virtuous; and now that he was forced to look upon her as a fallen being, as one who had not only forgotten virtue herself, but, in sin, had brought him into the world, to degradation and shame, what could be his feelings towards her?
Horrid! horrid is it to say, that the world should take unto itself that awful power claimed by Almighty Omniscience, of visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, and of making the guiltless offspring more than share the punishment inflicted on the offending parent! But so De Vaux felt that the world does, and that, in his instance, it was not alone the usual contemptible sneer, or still more contemptible neglect, that he was destined to meet; but that he must expect all the venomous pity and malignant compassion which his fall, more than his situation, would excite, and which the hard and unfeeling beings of the earth affect to experience for those they wish most powerfully to depress.