To my surprise and increased vexation, I found my worthy uncle
striving in every possible way, without actually declaring his
purpose, in opposing my efforts and prospects. It is true he did
not utter my name; but he had formed a complete ticket, in which
my name was not; and he was toiling with all the industry of a
thoroughgoing partisan in promoting its success. The cup which he
had commended to my lips was overrunning with the gall of bitterness.
Hostility to me seemed really to have been a sort of monomania
with him from the first. How else was this canton procedure to be
accounted for? how, even with this belief, could it be excused? His
conduct was certainly one of those mysteries of idiosyncracy upon
which the moral philosopher may speculate to doomsday without being
a jot the wiser.
If his desire was to baffle me, he was successful. I was defeated,
after a close struggle, by a meagre majority of seven votes in some
seventeen hundred; and the night after the election was declared,
he gave a ball in honor of the successful candidates, in which
his house was filled to overflowing. I passed the dwelling about
midnight. Music rang from the illuminated parlor. The merry dance
proceeded. All was life, gayety, and rich profusion. And Julia!
even then she might have been whirling in the capricious movements
of the dance with my happy rival--she as happy--unconscious of him
who glided like some angry spectre beneath her windows, and almost
within hearing of her thoughtless voice.
Such were my gloomy thoughts--such the dark and dismal subjects of
my lonely meditations. I did the poor girl wrong. That night she
neither sung nor danced; and when I saw her again, I was shocked at
the visible alteration for the worse which her appearance exhibited
She was now grown thin, almost to meagreness; her cheeks were very
wan, her lips whitened, and her beauty greatly faded in consequence
of her suffering health.
Yet, will it be believed that, in that interview, though such
was her obvious condition, my perverse spirit found the language
of complaint and suspicion more easy than that of devotion and
tenderness. I know that it would be easy, and feel that it would
be natural, to account for and to excuse this brutality, by a
reference to those provocations which I had received from her father. A
warm temper, ardent and glowing, it is very safe to imagine, must
reasonably become soured and perverse by bad treatment and continual
injury. But this for me was no excuse. Julia was a victim also of
the same treatment, and in far greater degree than myself, as she
was far less able to endure it. Mine, however, was the perverseness
of impetuous blood--unrestrained, unchecked--having a fearful
will, an impetuous energy, and, gradually, with success and power,
swelling to the assertion of its own unqualified dominion--the
despotism of the blind heart.