From this time my intercourse with William Edgerton was, on my part,
one of the most painful and difficult constraint. I had nothing to
reproach him with; no grounds whatever for quarrel; and could not,
in his case--regarding the long intimacy which I had maintained with
himself and father, and the obligations which were due from me to
both--adopt such a manner of reserve and distance as to produce
the result of indifference and estrangement which I now anxiously
desired. I was still compelled to meet him--meet him, too, with
an affectation of good feeling and good humor, which I soon found
it, of all things in the world, the most difficult even to pretend.
How much would I have given could he only have provoked me to anger
on any ground--could he have given me an occasion for difference
of any sort or to any degree--anything which could have justified
a mutual falling off from the old intimacy! But William Edgerton
was meekness and kindness itself. His confidence in me was of
the most unobservant, suspicionless character; either that, or
I succeeded better than I thought in the effort to maintain the
external aspects of old friendship. He saw nothing of change in my
deportment. He seemed not to see it, at least; and came as usual,
or more frequently than usual, to my house, until, at length, the
studio of my wife was quite as much his as hers--nay, more; for,
after a brief space, whether it was that Julia saw what troubled me,
or felt herself the imprudence of Edgerton's conduct, she almost
entirely surrendered it to him. She was not now so often to be seen
in it.
This proceeding alarmed me. I dreaded lest my secret should be
discovered. I was shocked lest my wife should suppose me jealous.
The feeling is one which carries with it a sufficiently severe
commentary, in the fact that most men are heartily ashamed to be
thought to suffer from it. But, if it vexed me to think that she
should know or suspect the truth, how much more was I troubled
lest it should be seen or suspected by others! This fear led to
new circumspection. I now affected levities of demeanor and remark;
studiously absented myself from home of an evening, leaving my wife
with Edgerton, or any other friend who happened to be present; and,
though I began no practices of profligacy, such as are common to
young scapegraces in all times, I yet, to some moderate extent,
affected them.
A tone of sadness now marked the features of my wife. There was
an expression of anxiety in her countenance, which, amid all her
previous sufferings, I had never seen there before. She did not
complain; but sometimes, when we sat alone together, I reading,
perhaps, and she sewing, she would drop her work in her lap, and
sigh suddenly and deeply, as if the first shadows of the upgathering
gloom were beginning to cloud her young and innocent spirit, and
force her apprehensions into utterance. This did not escape me, but
I read its signification, as witches are said to read the Bible,
backward. A gloomier fancy filled my brain as I heard her unconscious
sigh.