Oh God! how these convictions shook my frame! I had no longer strength
for thought or action. I was feebler than the child, who, lost in
the woods, struggles and sinks at last, through sheer exhaustion,
into sobbing slumber at the foot of the unfeeling tree. I did
not sob. I had no tears. But at intervals, the powers of breathing
becoming choked, and my struggles for relief were expressed in a
groan which I vainly endeavored to keep down. The sense of desolation
was upon me much more strongly than that of either crime or death.
I did not so much feel that she was guilty, as that I was alone!
That, henceforth, I must for ever be alone. This was the terrible
conviction;--and oh! how lone! To lessen its pangs, I strove to
recall the fault for which she perished--to renew the recollection
of those thousand small events, which, thrown together, had seemed
to me mountains of rank and reeking evidence against her. But even
my memory failed me in this effort. All this was a blank. The
few imperfect and shadowy facts which I could recall seemed to me
wholly unimportant in establishing the truth of what I sought to
believe; and I shuddered with the horrible doubt that she might be
innocent! If she were indeed innocent, what am I?
With the desperate earnestness of the cast-away, who strives, in
mid-ocean, for the only plank which can possibly retard his doom,
did I toil to re-establish in my mind that conviction of her guilt
which the demon in my soul had made so certain by his assurances
before. Alas! I had not only lost the wife of my bosom, but its
fiend also. Vainly now did I seek to summon him back. Vainly did I
call upon him to renew his arguments and proofs! He had fled--fled
for ever; and I could fancy that I heard him afar off, chuckling
with hellish laughter, over the triumphant results of his malice.
I know not how long I hung over that silent speaker. Her pale,
placid countenance--her bloodless lips, that still seemed to smile
upon me as they had ever done before;--and that eye of speaking
beauty--only half closed--oh! what conclusive assurances did they
seem to give of that innocence which it now seemed the worst impiety
to doubt! I would have given worlds--alas! how impotent is such a
speech! Death sets his seal upon hope, and love, and endeavor; and
the regrets of that childish precipitation which has obeyed the
laws of passion only, are only so many mocking memorials of the
blind heart, that jaundiced the face of truth, and distorted all
the aspects of the beautiful.
Once more I laughed--a vain hysterical laugh--the expression of
my conviction that I was self-doomed and desperate; and, writhing
beside the inanimate angel whom I then would have recalled though
with all her guilt--assuming all of it to have been true--to
the arms that wantonly cast her off for ever--I grasped the cold
senseless limbs in my embrace, and placed the drooping head once more
upon the bosom where it could not long remain! What a weight! The
pulsation in my own heart ceased, and, with a shudder, I released
the chilling form from my grasp, and found strength barely to
compose the limbs once more in the bed beside me.