"But is mine the less true--the less valuable for this, dear Edward?"
"No, perhaps not! It may be even more true, more valuable; it may be only less intense. But fanaticism, you know, is exacting--nothing more so. It permits no half-pa.s.sion, no moderate zeal. It insists upon devotion like its own. Ah, Julia, could you but love as I do!"
"I love you all, Edward, all that I can, and as it belongs in my nature to love. But I am a woman, and a timid one, you know. I am not capable of that wild pa.s.sion which you feel. Were I to indulge it, it would most certainly destroy me. Even as it sometimes appears in you, it terrifies and unnerves me. You are so impetuous!"
"Ah, you would have only the meek, the amiable!"
And thus, with an implied sarcasm, our conversation ended. Julia turned on me a look of imploring, which was naturally one of reproach. It did not have its proper influence upon me. I seized my hat, and hurried from the house. I rushed, rather than walked, through the streets; and, before I knew where I was, I found myself on the banks of the river, under the shade of trees, with the soft evening breeze blowing upon me, and the placid moon sailing quietly above. I threw myself down upon the gra.s.s, and delivered myself up to gloomy thoughts. Here was I, then, scarcely twenty-five years old; young, vigorous; with a probable chance of fortune before me; a young and lovely wife, the very creature of my first and only choice, one whom I tenderly loved, whom, if to seek again, I should again, and again, and only, seek! Yet I was miserable--miserable in the very possession of my first hopes, my best joys--the very treasure that had always seemed the dearest in my sight.
Miserable blind heart! miserable indeed! For what was there to make me miserable? Absolutely nothing--nothing that the outer world could give--nothing that it could ever take away. But what fool is it that fancies there must be a reason for one"s wretchedness? The reason is in our own hearts; in the perverseness which can make of its own heaven a h.e.l.l! not often fashion a heaven out of h.e.l.l!
Brooding, I lay upon the sward, meditating unutterable things, and as far as ever from any conclusion. Of one thing alone I was satisfied--that I was unutterably miserable; that my destiny was written in sable; that I was a man foredoomed to wo! Were my speculations strange or unnatural! Unnatural indeed! There is a cla.s.s of surface-skimming persons, who p.r.o.nounce all things unnatural which, to a cool, unprovoked, and perhaps unprovokable mind, appear unreasonable: as if a vexed nature and exacting pa.s.sions were not the most unreasonable yet most natural of all moral agents. My woes may have been groundless, but it was surely not unnatural that I felt and entertained them.
Thus, with bitter mood, growing more bitter with every moment of its unrestrained indulgence, I gloomed in loneliness beside the banks of that silvery and smooth-flowing river. Certainly the natural world around me lent no color to my fancies. While all was dark within, all was bright without. A fiend was tugging at my heart; while from a little white cottage, a few hundred yards below, which grew flush with the margin of the stream, there stole forth the tender, tinkling strains of a guitar, probably touched by fair fingers of a fair maiden, with some enamored boy, blind and doting, hovering beside her. I, too, had stood thus and hearkened thus, and where am I--what am I!
I started to my feet. I found something offensive in the music. It came linked with a song which I had heard Julia sing a hundred times; and when I thought of those hours of confidence, and felt myself where I was, alone--and how lone!--bitterer than ever were the wayward pangs which were preying upon the tenderest fibres of my heart.
In the next moment I ceased to be alone. I was met and jostled by another person as I bounded forward, much too rapidly, in an effort to bury myself in the deeper shadow of some neighboring trees. The stranger was nearly overthrown in the collision, which extorted a hasty exclamation from his lips, not unmingled with a famous oath or two.
In the voice. I recognised that of my friend Kingsley--the well-known pseudo-Kentucky gentleman, who had acted a part so important in extricating my wife from her mother"s custody. I made myself known to him in apologizing for my rudeness.
"You here!" said he; "I did not expect to meet you. I have just been to your house, where I found your wife, and where I intended to stop a while and wait for you. But Bill Edgerton, in the meanwhile, popped in, and after that I could hear nothing but pictures and paintings, Madonnas, Ecce h.o.m.os, and the like; till I began to fancy that I smelt nothing but paint and varnish. So I popped out, with a pretty blunt excuse, leaving the two amateurs to talk in oil and water-colors, and settle the principles of art as they please. Like you, I fancy a real landscape, here, by the water, and under the green trees, in preference to a thousand of their painted pictures."
It may be supposed that my mood underwent precious little improvement after this communication. Dark conceits, darker than ever, came across my mind. I longed to get away, and return to that home from which I had banished confidence!--ah, only too happy if there still lingered hope!
But my friend, blunt, good-humored, and thoughtless creature as he was, took for granted that I had come to look at the landscape, to admire water-views by moonlight, and drink fresh draughts of sea-breeze from the southwest; and, thrusting his arm through mine, he dragged me on, down, almost to the threshold of the cottage, whence still issued the tinkle, tinkle, of the guitar which had first driven me away.
"That girl sings well. Do you know her--Miss Davison? She"s soon to be married, THEY say (d--n "they say," however--the greatest scandal-monger, if not mischief-maker and liar, in the world!)--she is soon to be married to young Trescott--a clover lad who sniffles, plays on the flute, wears whisker and imperial on the most cream-colored and effeminate face you ever saw! A good fellow, nevertheless, but a silly!
She is a good fellow, too, rather the cleverest of the twain, and perhaps the oldest. The match, if match it really is to be, none of the wisest for that very reason. The damsel, now-a-days, who marries a lad younger than herself, is laying up a large stock of pother, which is to bother her when she becomes thirty--for even young ladies, you know, after forty, may become thirty. A sort of dispensation of nature. She sings well, nevertheless."
I said something--it matters not what. Dark images of home were in my eyes. I heard no song--saw no landscape The voice of Kingsley was a sort of buzzing in my ears.
"You are dull to-night, but that song ought to soothe you. What a cheery, light-hearted wench it is! Her voice does seem so to rise in air, shaking its wings, and crying tira-la! tira-la! with an enthusiasm which is catching! I almost feel prompted to kick up my heels, throw a summerset, and, while turning on my axis, give her an echo of tira-la!
tira-la! tira-la! after her own fashion."
"You are certainly a happy, mad fellow, Kingsley!" was my faint, cheerless commentary upon a gayety of heart which I could not share, and the unreserved expression of which, at that moment, only vexed me.
"And you no glad one, Clifford. That song, which almost prompts me to dance, makes no impression on you! By-the-way, your wife used to sing so well, and now I never hear her. That d---d painting, if you don"t mind, will make her give up everything else! As for Bill Edgerton, he cares for nothing else out his varnish, trees, and umber-hills, and streaky water. You shouldn"t let him fill your wife"s mind with this oil-and-varnish spirit--giving up the piano, the guitar, and that sweeter instrument than all, her own voice. D--n the paintings!--his long talk on the subject almost makes me sick of everything like a picture. I now look upon a beautiful landscape like this as a thing that is shortly to be desecrated--taken in vain--scratched out of shape and proportion upon a deal-board, and colored after such a fashion as never before was seen in the natural world, upon, or under, or about this solid earth. D--n the pictures, I say again!--but, for G.o.d"s sake, Clifford, don"t let your wife give up the music! Make her play, even if she don"t like it. She likes the painting best, but I wouldn"t allow it!
A wife is a sort of person that we set to do those things that we wish done and can"t do for ourselves. That"s my definition of a wife. Now, if I were in your place, with my present love for music and dislike of pictures, I"d put her at the piano, and put the paint-saucers, and the oil, and the s.m.u.tted canva.s.s, out of the window; and then--unless he came to his senses like other people--I"d thrust Bill Edgerton out after them! I"d never let the best friend in the world spoil my wife."
The effect of this random chatter of my good-natured friend upon my mind may well be imagined. It was fortunate that he was quite too much occupied in what he was saying to note my annoyance. In vain, anxious to be let off, was I restrained in utterance--cold, unpliable. The good fellow took for granted that it was an act of friendship to try to amuse; and thus, yearning with a nameless discontent and apprehension to get home I was marched to and fro along the river-bank, from one scene to another--he, meanwhile, utterly heedless of time, and as actively bent on perpetual motion as if his sinews were of steel and his flesh iron. Meanwhile, the guitar ceased, and the song in the cottage of Miss Davison; the lights went out in that and all the other dwellings in sight; the moon waned; and it was not till the clock from a distant steeple tolled out the hour of eleven with startling solemnity, that Kingsley exclaimed:--
"Well, mon ami, we have had a ramble, and I trust I have somewhat dissipated your gloomy fit. And now to bed--what say you?--with what appet.i.te we may!"
With what appet.i.te, indeed! We separated. I rushed homeward, the moment he was out of sight--once more stood before my own dwelling. There the lights remained unextinguished and William Edgerton was still a tenant of my parlor!
CHAPTER XXII.
SELF-HUMILIATION.
I had not the courage to enter my own dwelling! My heart sank within me.
It was as if the whole hope of a long life, an intense desire, a keen unremitting pursuit, had suddenly been for ever baffled. Let no one who has not been in my situation; who has not been governed by like moral and social influences from the beginning; who knows not my sensibilities, and the organization--singular and strange it may be--of my mind and body; let no such person jump to the conclusion that there was any thing unnatural, however unreasonable and unreasoning, in the wild pa.s.sion which possessed me. I look back upon it with some surprise myself. The fears which I felt, the sufferings I endured, however unreasonable, were yet true to my training. That training made me selfish; how selfish let my blindness show! In the blindness of self I could see nothing but the thing I feared, the one phantom--phantom though it were--which was sufficient to quell and crush all the better part of man within me, banish all the real blessings which were at command around me. I gave but a single second glance through the windows of my habitation, and then darted desperately away from the entrance!
I bounded, without a consciousness, through the now still and dreary streets, and found myself, without intending it, once more beside the river, whose constant melancholy chidings, seemed the echoes-though in the faintest possible degree--of the deep waters of some apprehensive sorrow then rolling through all the channels of my soul.
What was it that I feared? What was it that I sought? Was it love?
Can it be that the strange pa.s.sion which we call by this name, was the source of that sad frenzy which filled and afflicted my heart? And was I not successful in my love? Had I not found the sought?--won the withheld? What was denied to me that I desired? I asked of myself these questions. I asked them in vain. I could not answer them. I believe that I can answer now. It was sincerity, earnestness, devotion from her, all speaking through an intensity like that which I felt within my own soul.
Now, Julia lacked this earnestness, this intensity. Accustomed to submission, her manner was habitually subdued. Her strongest utterance was a tear, and that was most frequently hidden. She did not respond to me in the language in which my affections were wont to speak. Sincerity she did not lack--far from it--she was truth itself! It is the keener pang to my conscience now, that I am compelled to admit this conviction.
Her modes of utterance were not less true than mine. They were not less significant of truth; but they were after a different fashion. In a moment of calm and reason, I might have believed this truth; nay, I knew it, even at those moments when I was most unjust. It was not the truth that I required so much as the presence of an attachment which could equal mine in its degree and strength. This was not in her nature. She was one taught to subdue her nature, to repress the tendencies of her heart, to submit in silence and in meekness. She had invariably done so until the insane urgency of her mother made her desperate. But for this desperation she had still submitted, perhaps, had never been my wife.
In the fervent intensity of my own love, I fancied, from the beginning, that there was something too temperate in the tone of hers. Were I to be examined now, on this point, I should say that her deportment was one which declared the nicest union of sensibility and maidenly propriety.
But, compared with mine, her pa.s.sions were feeble, frigid. Mine were equally intense and exacting. Perhaps, had she even responded to my impetuosity with a like fervor, I should have recoiled from her with a feeling of disgust much more rapid and much more legitimate, than was that of my present frenzy.
Frenzy it was! and it led me to the performance of those things of which I shame to speak. But the truth, and its honest utterance now, must be one of those forms of atonement with which I may hope, perhaps vainly, to lessen, in the sight of Heaven, some of my human offences. I had scarcely reached the water-side before a new impulse drove me back. You will scarcely believe me when I tell you that I descended to the base character of the spy upon my household. The blush is red on my cheek while I record the shameful error. I entered the garden, stole like a felon to the lattice of the apartment in which my wife sat with her guest, and looked in with a greedy fear, upon the features of the two!
What were my own features then? What the expression of my eyes? It was well that I could not see them; I felt that they must be frightful. But what did I expect to see in this espionage? As I live, honestly now, and with what degree of honesty I then possessed, I may truly declare that when I THOUGHT upon the subject at all, I had no more suspicion that my wife would be guilty of any gross crime, than I had of the guilt of the Deity himself. Far from it. Such a fancy never troubled me. But, what was it to me, loving as I did, exclusive, and selfish, and exacting as I was--what was it to me if, forbearing all crime of conduct, she yet regarded another with eyes of idolatry--if her mind was yielded up to him in deference and regard; and thoughts, disparaging to me, filled her brain with his superior worth, manners, merits? He had tastes, perhaps talents, which I had not. In the forum, in all the more energetic, more imposing performances of life, William Edgerton, I knew, could take no rank in compet.i.tion with myself. But I was no ladies" man. I had no arts of society. My manners were even rude. My address was direct almost to bluntness. I had no discriminating graces, and could make no sacrifice, in that school of polish, where the delicacy is too apt to become false, and the performances trifling. It is idle to dwell on this; still more idle to speculate upon probable causes. It may be that there are persons in the world of both s.e.xes, and governed by like influences, who have been guilty of like follies; to them my revelations may be of service.
My discoveries, if I have made any, were quite too late to be of much help to me.
To resume, I prowled like a guilty phantom around my own habitation. I scanned closely, with the keenest eyes of jealousy, every feature, every movement of the two within. In the eyes of Edgerton, I beheld--I did not deceive myself in this--I beheld the speaking soul, devoted, rapt, full of love for the object of his survey. That he loved her was to me sufficiently clear. His words were few, faintly spoken, timid. His eyes did not encounter hers; but when hers were averted, they riveted their fixed glances upon her face with the adherence of the yearning steel for the magnet! Bitterly did I gnash my teeth--bitterly did my spirit rise in rebellion, as I noted these characteristics. But, vainly, with all my perversity of feeling and judgment, did I examine the air, the look, the action, the expression, the tones, the words of my wife, to make a like discovery. All was pa.s.sionless, all seeming pure, in her whole conduct.
She was gentle in her manner, kind in her words, considerate in her attentions; but so entirely at ease, so evidently unconscious, as well of improper thoughts in herself as of an improper tendency in him, that, though still resolute to be wilful and unhappy, I yet could see nothing of which I could reasonably complain. Nay, I fancied that there was a touch of listlessness, amounting to indifference, in her air, as if she really wished him to be gone; and, for a moment, my heart beat with a returning flood of tenderness, that almost prompted me to rush suddenly into the apartment and clasp her to my arms.
At length, Edgerton departed. When he rose to do so, I felt the awkwardness of my situation--the meanness of which I had been guilty--the disgrace which would follow detection. The shame I already felt; but, though sickening beneath it, the pa.s.sion which drove me into the commission of so slavish an act, was still superior to all others, and could not then be overcome. I hurried from the window and from the premises while he was taking his leave. My mind was still in a frenzy.
I rambled off, unconsciously, to the most secluded places along the suburbs, endeavoring to lose the thoughts that troubled me. I had now a new cause for vexation. I was haunted by a conviction of my own shame.
How could I look Julia in the face--how meet and speak to her, and hear the accents of her voice and my own after the unworthy espionage which I had inst.i.tuted upon her? Would not my eyes betray me--my faltering accents, my abashed looks, my flushed and burning cheeks? I felt that it was impossible for me to escape detection. I was sure that every look, every tone, would sufficiently betray my secret. Perhaps I should not have felt this fear, had I possessed the courage to resolve against the repet.i.tion of my error. Could I have declared this resolution to myself, to forego the miserable proceeding which I had that night begun, I feel that I should then have taken one large step toward my own deliverance from that formidable fiend which was then raging unmastered in my soul.
But I lacked the courage for this. Fatal deficiency! I felt impressed with the necessity of keeping a strict watch upon Edgerton. I had seen, with eyes that could not be deceived, the feeling which had been expressed in his. I saw that he loved her, perhaps, without a consciousness himself of the unhappy truth. I hurried to the conclusion, accordingly, that he must be looked after. I did not so immediately perceive that in looking after him, I was, in truth, looking after Julia; for what was my watch upon Edgerton but a watch upon her? I had not the confidence in her to leave her to herself. That was my error.
The true reasoning by which a man in my situation should be governed, is comprised in a nutsh.e.l.l. Either the wife is virtuous or she is not. If she is virtuous, she is safe without my espionage. If she is not, all the watching in the world will not suffice to make her so. As for the discovery of her falsehood, he will make that fast enough. The security of the husband lies in his wife"s purity, not in his own eyes. It must be added to this argument that the most virtuous among us, man or woman, is still very weak; and neither wife, nor daughter, nor son, should be exposed to unnecessary temptation. Do we not daily implore in our own prayers, to be saved from temptation?
I need not strive to declare what were my thoughts and feelings as I wandered off from my dwelling and place of espionage that night. No language of which I am possessed could embody to the idea of the reader the thousandth part of what I suffered. An insane and morbid resentment filled my heart. A close, heavy, hot stupor, pressed upon my brain. My limbs seemed feeble as those of a child. I tottered in the streets. The stars, bright mysterious watchers, seemed peering down into my face with looks of smiling inquiry. The sudden bark of a watch-dog startled and unnerved me. I felt with the consciousness of a mean action, all the humiliating weakness which belongs to it.
It took me a goodly hour before I could muster up courage to return home, and it was then midnight. Julia had retired to her chamber, but not yet to her couch. She flew to me on my entrance--to my arms. I shrunk from her embraces; but she grasped me with greater firmness. I had never witnessed so much warmth in her before. It surprised me, but the solution of it was easy. My long stay had made her apprehensive. It was so unusual. My coldness, when she embraced me, was as startling to her, as her sudden warmth was surprising to me. She pushed me from her--still, however, holding me in her grasp, while she surveyed me.
Then she started, and with newer apprehensions.
Well she might. My looks alarmed her. My hair was dishevelled and moist with the night-dews. My cheeks were very pale. There was a quick, agitated, and dilating fullness of my eyes, which rolled hastily about the apartment, never even resting upon her. They dared not. I caught a hasty glance of myself in the mirror, and scarcely knew my own features.
It was natural enough that she should be alarmed. She clung to me with increased fervency. She spoke hurriedly, but clearly, with an increased and novel power of utterance, the due result of her excitement. Could that excitement be occasioned by love for me--by a suspicion of the truth, namely, that I had been watching her? I shuddered as this last conjecture pa.s.sed into my mind. That, indeed, would be a humiliation--worse, more degrading, by far, than all.
"Oh, why have you left me--so long, so very long? where have you been?
what has happened?"
"Nothing--nothing."
"Ah, but there is something, Edward. Speak! what is it, dear husband?
I see it in your eyes, your looks! Why do you turn from me? Look on me!
tell me! You are very pale, and your eyes are so wild, so strange! You are sick, dear Edward; you are surely sick: tell me, what has happened?"
Wild and hurried as they were, never did tones of more touching sweetness fall from any lips. They unmanned--nay, I use the wrong word--they MANNED me for the time. They brought me back to my senses, to a conviction of her truth, to a momentary conviction of my own folly.
My words fell from me without effort--few, hurried, husky--but it was a sudden heartgush, which was unrestrainable.
"Ask me not, Julia-ask me nothing; but love me, only love me, and all will be well--all is well."