Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol III, No 13, 1851

"I give you credit," she resumed, "for the best intentions. It is not your fault that habit and a constitutional acquiescence in it have left you no power over your will in great emergencies. You are what the world has made you; and you should be thankful that you have found it out in time. For me, what does it matter? By coming here, I have violated obligations for which society will hold me accountable, though they pressed like prison-bars upon me, lacerating and corroding my soul. It will admit no excuse for their abandonment in the unutterable misery they entailed. I am as guilty by this one step as if I had plunged into the depths of crime. The world does not recognize the doctrine that the real crime is in the admission of the first disloyal thought; it only looks to appearances which I have outraged. I have compromised myself beyond redemption. I can not retrieve my disgrace, though I am as pure in act as if we had never met. But I have done it upon my own responsibility, and upon me alone let the penalty fall. From this hour I release you."

Her language, and the dignity of her manner, stung me. She seemed to tower above me in the strength of her will, and the firmness with which she went through a scene that shattered my nerves fearfully, and made me equally irresolute of speech and purpose. While I was harrowed by an agony that fluttered in every pulse, she was perfectly calm and collected, and, rising quietly from her seat, turned away to leave me.

This action roused me from the stupor of indecision. The situation in which she was placed – making so new a demand upon my feelings – gave me a sort of advantage which I thought might enable me to recover the ground I had lost. By the exercise of magnanimity in such circumstances, I should vindicate myself in her estimation, and prove myself once more worthy of the opinion she had originally formed of me. It was something nobler, I thought, to embrace ruin at this moment for her sake, than if I had known it all along, and had come to that conclusion by a deliberate process of reasoning. This train of subtle sophistry, which has taken up some space to detail, struck me like a flash of light on the instant I thought I was about to lose her. I could bear all things but that, and could suffer all things to avert it. And so again I became her suitor, in a kind of proud generosity, that flattered itself by stooping to gain its own ends. How mean and selfish the human heart is when our desires are set in opposition to our duties!

I sprang forward, and clasped her eagerly by the hands. I flung myself on my knees before her. Tears leaped into my eyes. I told her that I had wronged her – that we had wronged each other – that I had never wavered in my faith – that we were bound to each other – and that we could commit no crime now except that of doubting, at either side, the truth of the love which had brought us there, and for which I, like her, had relinquished the world forever.

She had a woman's heart, full of tenderness and pity; and it is the tendency of woman's nature to forgive and believe where the affections are interested, without exacting much proof or penalty. She bent over me, and raised me in her arms. The storm had passed away, and she trusted in me implicitly again.

Her history? What was it? We shall come to it presently.

X

The storm had passed away; but it left traces of disorder behind, such as a tempest leaves in a garden over which it has recently swept. The collision had set us both thinking. We felt as if a mist had suddenly melted down, and enabled us, for the first time, to see clearly before us. We felt this differently, but we were equally conscious of the change.

"I am the wife of another!"

The words still throbbed in my brain. I could not escape from the images they conjured up. I could not rid myself of the doubts and distrusts, shapeless, but oppressive, thus forced upon me. I could not recall a single incident out of which, until these words were uttered, I could have extracted the remotest suspicion of her situation. To me, and to every person around her, Astræa had always appeared a free agent. She bore no man's name. She acted with perfect independence, so far as outward action was concerned; and the only restraint that ever seemed to hang upon her was some dark memory, or heavy sorrow, that clouded her spirit. Here was the mystery solved. She was a bond-woman, and had hidden her fetters from the world. In our English society, where usages are strict, and shadows upon a woman's reputation, even where there is not a solitary stain, blot it out forever, this was strange and painful. It looked like a deception, and, in the estimate of all others, it was a deception. This was the way in which it first presented itself to me. I had not emancipated myself from the influence of opinion, or habit, or prejudice, or whatever that feeling may be called which instinctively refers such questions to the social standard. The recoil was sudden and violent. Yet, nevertheless, I felt rebuked by the superiority of Astræa in the strength of purpose and moral courage she displayed under circumstances which would have overwhelmed most other women. Her steadfastness had a kind of grandeur in it, that seemed to look down upon my misgivings as failings or weaknesses of character. And she sat silently in this pomp of a clear and unfaltering resolution, while I, fretted and chafed, exhibited too plainly my double sense alike of the injury she had inflicted on me, and of the ascendency which, even in the hour of injury, she exercised over me. It was the stronger mind, made stronger by the force of love, overawing the weaker, made weaker by the prostration of the affections.

And she, too, had something to reflect upon in this moment of mutual revolt.

She loved me passionately. She loved me with a devotion capable of confronting all risks and perils. The profound unselfishness and truthfulness of her love made her serene at heart, and inspired her with a calmness which enabled her to endure the worst without flinching. There was not a single doubt of herself in her own mind. Her faith gave her the fortitude needful for the martyr. When a woman trusts every thing to this faith, and feels her reliance on it sufficient for the last sacrifice, she is prepared for an issue which no man contemplates, and which no man is able to encounter with an equal degree of courage or confidence in his own constancy. With her it is otherwise. By one step, the ground is closed up behind her forever; no remorse can help her, no suffering can make atonement, or propitiate reconciliation; she can not retract, she can not retreat, she can not return! No man is ever placed in this extremity, though his sin be of a ten-fold deeper dye. Such is the moral justice of society. He has always a space to fall back upon – he has always room to retrieve, to recover, to reinstate himself. But she is lost! The foreknowledge of her doom, which shuts out hope, makes her strong in endurance; the magnitude of her sacrifice enhances and deepens the idolatry from which it proceeded; she clings to it, and lives in it evermore, as the air which she must breathe, or die. But he? He has ever the backward hope, the consciousness of the power of retracing his steps. The world is there behind him, as he left it, its eager tumult still floating into his ears from afar off, its reckless gayeties, its panting ambition, its occupations, and its pleasures; and he knows he can re-enter it when he lists. He, then, if he consent to commit the great treason against a confiding devotion, can afford to be bold; that boldness which has always an escape and safeguard in reserve! But it is this consideration which makes him irresolute and infirm – it is this which dashes his resolves with hesitation, and makes him temporize and play fast and loose in his thoughts, while his lips overflow with the fervid declamation of passion. He may believe himself to be sincere; but no man understands himself who believes that he has renounced the world. The world has arranged it otherwise for him.

The whole conditions of her position were clear to Astræa. She had not now considered them for the first time; but the mistrust, not of my love for her, but of my character, was now first awakened; and if she trembled for the consequences, it was not for her own sake, but for mine. Men can not comprehend this abnegation of self in women, and, not being able to comprehend it, they do not believe in it. It requires an elevation and generosity rare in the crisis of temptation, and, perhaps, also, an entire change of surrounding circumstances and responsibilities, to enable them to estimate it justly; the power of bestowing happiness through a life-long sacrifice, instead of the privilege of receiving it at a trifling risk.

When we had become a little more at our ease, and I had endeavored by a variety of commonplaces to revive her faith in me, Astræa, with the most perfect frankness, entered upon her history. I will not break up the narrative by the occasional interruptions to which it was subjected by my curiosity and impatience, but preserve it as nearly entire as I can.

"There is a period," said Astræa, "in all our lives when we pass through delusions which an enlarged experience dispels. We too often begin by making deities, and end by total skepticism. I suppose, like every body else, I had my season of self-deception, although it has not made me an absolute infidel."

And as she said this, she looked at me with a smile so full of sweetness, that I yielded myself up implicitly to the enchantment.

"I was devotedly attached to my father," she continued; "he educated me, and was so proud of the faculties which his own careful tending drew into activity, that it was the greatest happiness of my life to deserve the kindness which anticipated their development. There was no task my father set to me I did not feel myself able to conquer by the mere energy of the love I bore him. The education he bestowed upon me was not the cultivation of the intellect alone – I owe him a deeper debt, fatally as I have discharged it – for it was his higher aim to educate my affections. He succeeded so well, that I would at any moment have cheerfully surrendered my own fondest desires, or have sacrificed life itself, to comply with any wish of his. You shall judge whether I have a right to say that I loved him better than I loved myself.

"My mother was a beauty. A woman of whom one can say nothing more than that she was a beauty, is misplaced in the home of a man of intellect. One can never cease wondering how it is that such men marry such women; but I believe there are no men so easily ensnared by their own imaginations, or who trouble themselves so little about calculating consequences. They make an ideal, and worship it; and, as your true believers contrive to refresh their motionless saints by new draperies and tinsel, so they go on perpetually investing their idols with fictitious attributes, to encourage and sustain their devotions. But that sort of self-imposition can not last very long; and the best possible recipe for stripping the idol of its false glitter is to marry it! My father made this discovery in due time. He found that beauty without enthusiasm or intellect is even less satisfying than a picture, which is, at least, suggestive, and leaves something to the imagination. There was no sympathy between them. She existed only in company, which, from the languor of her nature, she hardly seemed to enjoy. Change, and variety, and the flutter of new faces were as necessary to her as they were wearisome to him; and so gradually and imperceptibly the distance widened between them, and his whole affections were concentrated on me. This may in some measure account for the formation of my character. I was neither weakened nor benefited by maternal tenderness; and my studies and habits, shaped and regulated by my father, imparted to me a strength and earnestness which – now that they avail me nothing – may speak of as existing in the past.

"It is nearly ten years since my mother died; she went out as a flower dies, drooping slowly, and retaining something of its sweetness to the end. My father outlived her several years. That was the happiest period of my life. There was not a break in the love that bound us together. But there came a struggle at last between us – a struggle in which that love was bitterly tried and tested on both sides.

"I made a deity to myself, as most young people do, especially when they are flattered into the belief that they are more spirituelle and capable of judging for themselves, than the rest of the world. It was a girlish fancy; all girls have such fancies, and look back upon them afterward as they look back upon their dreams, trying to collect and put together forms and colors that fade rapidly in the daylight of experience.

"One of our visitors made an impression upon me; perhaps that is the best way to describe it. He had a sombre and poetical air – that was the first thing that touched me – an oval face, very pale and thoughtful, and chiseled to an excess of refinement; a sensitive mouth; dark, melancholy eyes; and black, lustrous hair. I remember he had quite a Spanish or Italian cast of features; and that was dangerous to a young girl steeped in the lore of history and chivalry. You think it strange, perhaps, I should make this sort of confession to you; you expect that I should rather suffer you to believe that, until we met, I had never been disturbed by the sentiment of love; yet you may entirely believe it. This was a mere phantasy – the prescience of what was to come – the awakening of the consciousness of a capacity of loving which, until now, was never stirred in its depths. It merely showed me what was in my nature, but did not draw it out.

"The fascination was on the surface; but, while it lasted, I thought it intense; and such is the contradiction in the constitution of youth, that a little opposition from my father only helped to strengthen it. In the presence of that sad face, into which was condensed an irresistible influence, I was silent and timid, frightened at the touch of his white hands, and so confused that I could neither speak to him, nor look at him: but in my father's presence, when we talked of him, and my father hinted distrusts and antipathies, I was bold in his defense, and soared into an enthusiasm that often surprised us both. It was evident that I was in love – to speak by the card – and that the admonitions of experience were thrown away upon me.

"My father was grieved at this discovery, when it really came to take a serious shape of resistance to his advice. As yet, we had only flirted round the confines of the subject, and neither of us had openly recognized it as a reality. The action of the drama was in my own brain. The hero of my fantastic reveries regarded me only as a precocious child: was amused, or, at the utmost, interested by my admiration of him, which he could not fail to detect; and it was not until he imagined he had traced a deeper sentiment in my shy and embarrassed looks, that he began to feel any emotion himself. But the emotions which spring out of vanity or compassion, which come only as a sort of generous or pitying acknowledgment of an unsought devotion, have no stability in them. It is more natural, and more likely to insure duration of love that they should originate at the other side. Woman was formed to be sued and won; it is the law of our organization. Men value our affection in proportion to the efforts it has cost to gain them. The rights of a difficult conquest are worn with pride and exultation, while the fruits of an easy victory are held in indifference. These things, however, were mysteries to me then.

"There was a kind of love-scene between us. I can hardly recall any thing of it, except that I thought him more grand and noble than ever, and full of a magnificent patronage of my nerves and my ignorance. He was several years older than I was, which made a great distance between us, and made me look up to him with a superstitious homage. I remember nothing more about it, only that when I left him, I felt as if I had suddenly grown up into a woman.

"And now came the beginning of the struggle.

"We had other visitors who were better liked by my father. I could not then understand his objections to my Orlando. I have understood them since, and know that he was right in that, if he erred in the rest.

"Among our visitors was one whom I can not speak of without a shudder. There was in him a combination of qualities calculated to inspire me with aversion, which grew from day to day into loathing. I do not believe my father really liked that man. Circumstances, however, had given him an influence in our house, against which it was vain for me to contend. His family was closely connected with my mother; and my father had acquired an estate through his marriage, with which these people were mixed up as trustees; they had, in fact, a lien upon us, which it was impossible to shake off; and by this means maintained a position with us which was at once so familiar and harassing to me, that nothing but my devotion to my father restrained me from an open mutiny against them.

"This man, who was not much my senior in years, but who seemed to have been born old, and to have lived centuries for every year of my life, entertained the most violent passion for me. I had no suspicion of it at first; and as the closeness of our relations threw us constantly together, I was feeding it unknowingly for a long time before I discovered it. I will spare you what I felt when I made that discovery – the horror! the despair!

"When I compared this man, loathsome and hideous to me, with him who was the Orlando, the Bayard, the Crichton of my foolish dreams, it made me sick at heart. So deep was the detestation he inspired, that, young as I was, I would have gladly renounced my own choice to have escaped from him. But there was one consideration paramount even to that; it was my father's desire that I should marry him.

"By some such sorcery as wicked demons in the wise allegories of fable obtain a control over good spirits, the demon who had thus risen up in my path obtained an ascendency over my father. It was impossible that he could have persuaded my father, who was clear-sighted and sagacious, into the belief that he possessed a single attribute of goodness; it must have been by the force of a fascination, such as serpents are said to exercise over children, that he wrought his ends. And the comparison was never applied with greater justice, for my father was as guileless as a child in mere worldly affairs, while the other was a subtle compound of cunning and venom, glazed over with a most hypocritical exterior.

"He worked at his purpose for months and months in the dark, by artifices which assisted his progress without betraying his aim. He adroitly avoided an abrupt disclosure of his design, for he knew, or feared, that if it came too suddenly, it would have shocked even my father. He saw that my fancy was taken up elsewhere, and the first part of his plot was, to prejudice and poison my father's mind against his rival. In this he effectually succeeded. But it was a more difficult matter to bring round his own object, and he never could have achieved it, with all his skill, had he not been so mixed up with our affairs as to have it in his power to involve my father in a net-work of embarrassments. The meshes were woven round him with consummate ingenuity, and every effort at extrication only drew them tighter and tighter.

"Had I known as much of the world then as I do now I might have acted differently. But I was a girl; my sensibility was easily moved; my terrors were easily alarmed; and I loved my father too passionately to be able to exercise a calm judgment where his safety was concerned. It was this devotion – impetuous and unreflecting – that gave an advantage to the fiend, of which he availed himself unrelentingly, and which threw me, bound and fettered, at his feet.

"I will not dwell on these memories. My heart was harrowed by a terrible conflict. I know not how it might have been, had I not gathered a little strength from wounded pride. A circumstance came to my relief which crushed my enthusiasm, and from that instant determined my fate.

"My father had often thrown out doubts of the sincerity of him to whom I looked up with so much admiration; and at last he spoke more explicitly and urgently. He told me that the hero of my dreams was merely trifling with my feelings, and amusing himself at the expense of my credulity – in short, that he was no better than a libertine. I revolted against these cruel accusations, and repelled them by asserting that he was the noblest and truest of human beings. But my father knew more of him than I did. Even while these painful discussions were going on between us, news arrived that he had been detected in a heartless conspiracy to entrap and carry off a ward in chancery – a discovery which compelled him to fly the country.

"I was stunned and humiliated. The dream was over. The idol was broken, and the shrine degraded forever. What resource should women have in such cases if pride did not come to their help – that pride which smiles while the heart is bleeding, and makes the world think that we do not suffer! They know not what we suffer – what we hide! Our education trains us up in a mask, which is often worn to the end, when the secret that has fed upon our hearts, and consumed our lives, day by day, descends into the dark grave with us! My sufferings at the time were very great – I thought they would kill me. What mattered it to me then how they disposed of me. Poor fool! I looked in on my desolated fancy, and gave myself up for lost.

"It was in this mood the machinations of that man whom I abhorred triumphed over me. My father's affairs had become hopelessly entangled in his, and a proposal to avert chancery suits and settle disputed titles by a union between the families of the litigants presented the only means of adjustment. My father listened to this insidious proposal at first reluctantly; then, day by day, as difficulties thickened, he became more reconciled to it; and, at length, he broke it to me, with a deprecating gentleness that never sued in vain to the heart that idolized him. I had nothing left in the world but my father to love. Under any circumstances my love for him would have made me waver. As it was, wounded and hopeless, galled, deceived, and cast off – for I felt as all girls do, and was thoroughly in earnest in my sentimental misery – my love for him lightened the sacrifice he prayed, rather than demanded at my hands.

"Girl as I was. I could see the change that had passed over my father. The strong man was subdued and broken down. His clear understanding had given way; even his heart was no longer as generous and impulsive as it used to be. I could not bear to witness these alterations; and when I was told that it was in my power to relieve him from the weight that pressed upon him, what could I do?

"There were many violent struggles – many fits of tears and solitary remorse; but they all yielded to that imperative necessity, to that claim upon my feelings, which was paramount to every thing else. The first step was a contract of marriage, which I was simply required to sign. I was too young then to marry! This consideration was thrown in as a sort of tender forbearance to me, which, it was hoped, would propitiate my reluctant spirit. And from that hour, the demon, claiming me for his own, was incessant in his attendance upon me. I had hoped by that act to shake him off my father; but he was the Old Man of the Waters to his drowning victim, and at every moment only clutched and clung to him more closely.

"At last my father fell ill. First, he moped about the house, with a low, wearing cough. None of his old resources availed him. He couldn't read; the pleasant things he used to talk of – books, character, philosophy – no longer interested him. The placid mind was growing carped and restless. He was absorbed in his ailments. Trifles vexed him, and instead of the large and genial subjects which formerly engrossed him, he was taken up with petty annoyances. Oh, with what agony I watched that change from day to day! Then from the drawing-room to the bed, from whence he never rose again.

"It was in his last sickness – toward the close – when the wings of the Angel of Death were darkening his lids, and his utterance was thickening, and his vision becoming dimmer and dimmer, that he called me to his side. He knew the horror that was in my thoughts; but I was already pledged, and it was not a time for me to shrink, when he, in whom my affections were garnered up, besought me to make his death-bed happy by completing the sacrifice. There were those around us who said that it was merely to ease his mind, that he might feel he did not leave me behind him alone and without a protector; that the marriage would be performed in his presence; that we should then separate, and that my husband – oh, how I have hated that word! what images of wrong and cruelty are condensed into it! – would regard that ghastly ceremony only as a guarantee that when my grief had abated, and the signs of mourning were put off, I should consent to become his wife before the world. I believed in that and trusted to it. It was all written down and witnessed, that he would not enforce this marriage till time had soothed and reconciled me to it; and as the realization of it was to depend upon myself, I thought I was secure against the worst. Upon these conditions I was married beside the death-bed of my father.