"Now," said he, "that little space was given to delirium and
delusion. I rested my temples on the breast of temptation, and put
my neck voluntarily under her yoke of flowers. I tasted her cup.
The pillow was burning: there is an asp in the garland: the wine
has a bitter taste: her promises are hollow--her offers false: I
see and know all this."
I gazed at him in wonder.
"It is strange," pursued he, "that while I love Rosamond Oliver so
wildly--with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the
object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating--I
experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that she
would not make me a good wife; that she is not the partner suited to
me; that I should discover this within a year after marriage; and
that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of regret.
This I know."
"Strange indeed!" I could not help ejaculating.
"While something in me," he went on, "is acutely sensible to her
charms, something else is as deeply impressed with her defects:
they are such that she could sympathise in nothing I aspired to--co-
operate in nothing I undertook. Rosamond a sufferer, a labourer, a
female apostle? Rosamond a missionary's wife? No!"
"But you need not be a missionary. You might relinquish that
scheme."
"Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid
on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the
band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering
their race--of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance--of
substituting peace for war--freedom for bondage--religion for
superstition--the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I
relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is
what I have to look forward to, and to live for."
After a considerable pause, I said--"And Miss Oliver? Are her
disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?"
"Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers: in less
than a month, my image will be effaced from her heart. She will
forget me; and will marry, probably, some one who will make her far
happier than I should do."
"You speak coolly enough; but you suffer in the conflict. You are
wasting away."
"No. If I get a little thin, it is with anxiety about my prospects,
yet unsettled--my departure, continually procrastinated. Only this
morning, I received intelligence that the successor, whose arrival I
have been so long expecting, cannot be ready to replace me for three
months to come yet; and perhaps the three months may extend to six."