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 passion 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 passion 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 passions 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.