Confession; Or, The Blind Heart Part 15

"I have no doubt he is amiable--he is amiable--but that is not enough for a man. He must be something more than amiable, if he would escape the imputation of being feeble--something more if he would be anything!"

Julia looked at me with eyes of profound and dilating astonishment.

Having got thus far, it was easy to advance. The first step is half the journey in all such cases.

"William Edgerton is a little too amiable, perhaps, for his own good.

It makes him listless and worthless. He will do nothing at pictures, wasting his time only when he should be at his business."

"But did I not understand you, Edward, that he was a man of fortune, and independent of his profession?" she answered timidly.

"Even that will not justify a man in becoming a trifler. No man should waste his time in painting, unless he makes a trade of it."

"But his leisure, Edward," suggested Julia, with a look of increasing timidity.

"His leisure, indeed, Julia;--but he has been here all day--day after day. If painting is such a pa.s.sion with him, let him abandon law and take to it. But he should not pursue one art while processing another.

It is as if a man hankered after that which he yet lacked the courage to challenge and pursue openly.'

"I don't think you love pictures as you used to, Edward," she remarked to me, after a little interval pa.s.sed in unusual silence.

"Perhaps it is because I have matters of more consequence to attend to.

YOU seem sufficiently devoted to them now to excuse my indifference."

"Surely, dear Edward, something I have done vexes you. Tell me, husband.

Do not spare me. Say, in what have I offended?"

I had not the courage to be ingenuous. Ah! if I had!

"Nay, you have not offended," I answered hastily--"I am only worried with some unmanageable thoughts. The law, you know, is full of provoking, exciting, irritating necessities."

She looked at ne with a kind but searching glance. My soul seemed to shrink from that scrutiny. My eyes sunk beneath her gaze.

"I wish I knew how to console you, Edward: to make you entirely happy.

I pray for it, Edward. I thought we were always to be so happy. Did you not promise me that you would always leave your cares at your office--that our cottage should be sacred to love and peace only?"

She put her arms about my neck, and looked into my face with such a sweet, strange, persuasive smile--half mirth, half sadness--that the evil spirit was subdued within me. I clasped her fervently in my embrace, with all my old feelings of confidence and joy renewed. At this moment the servant announced Mr. Edgerton, and with a start--a movement--scarcely as gentle as it should have been, I put the fond and still beloved woman from my embrace!

CHAPTER XXI.

CHANGES OF HOME.

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 un.o.bservant, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 circ.u.mspection. 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.

"It is the language of regret. She laments our marriage. She could have found another, surely, who could have made her happier. Perhaps, had Edgerton and herself known each other intimately before!--"

Dark, perverse imagining! It crushed me. I felt, I can not tell, what bitterness. Let no one suppose that I endured less misery than I inflicted. The miseries of the d.a.m.ned could not have exceeded mine in some of the moments when these cruel conjectures filled my mind. Then followed some such proofs as these of the presence of the Evil One:--

"You sigh, Julia. You are unhappy."

"Unhappy? no, dear Edward, not unhappy! What makes you think so?"

"What makes you sigh, then?"

"I do not know. I am certainly not unhappy. Did I sigh, Edward?"

"Yes, and seemingly from the very bottom of your heart. I fear, Julia, that you are not happy; nay, I am sure you are not! I feel that I am not the man to make you happy. I am a perverse--"

"'Nay, Edward, now you speak so strangely, and your brow is stern, and your tones tremble! What can it be afflicts you? You are angry at something, dear Edward. Surely, it can not be with me."

"And if it were, Julia, I am afraid it would give you little concern."

"Now, Edward, you are cruel. You do me wrong. You do yourself wrong.

Why should you suppose that it would give me little concern to see you angry? So far from this, I should regard it as the greatest misery which I had to suffer. Do not speak so, dearest Edward--do not fancy such things. Believe me, my husband, when I tell you that I know nothing half so dear to me as your love--nothing that I would not sacrifice with a pleasure, to secure, to preserve THAT!"

"Ah! would you give up painting?"

"Painting! that were a small sacrifice! I worked at it only because you used to like it."

"What, you think I do not like it now?"

"I KNOW you do not."

"But you paint still?"

"No! I have not handled brush or pencil for a week. Mr. Edgerton was reproaching me only yesterday for my neglect."

"Ah, indeed! Well, you promised him to resume, did you not? He is a rare persuader! He is so amiable, so mild--you could not well resist."

It was from her face that I formed a rational conjecture of the expression that must have appeared in mine. Her eyes dilated with a look of timid wonder, not unmixed with apprehension. She actually shrunk back a s.p.a.ce; then, approaching, laid her hand upon my wrist, as she exclaimed:--

"G.o.d of heaven, Edward, what strange thought is in your bosom? what is the meaning of that look? Look not so again, if you would not kill me!"

I averted my face from hers, but without speaking. She threw her arms around my neck.

"Do not turn away from me, Edward. Do not, do not, I entreat you! You must not--no! not till you tell me what is troubling you--not till I soothe you, and make you love me again as much as you did at first."

When I turned to her again, the tears--hot, scalding tears--were already streaming down my cheeks.

"Julia, G.o.d knows I love you! Never woman yet was more devotedly loved by man! I love you too much--too deeply--too entirely! Alas, I love nothing else!"

"Say not that you love me too much--that can not be! Do I not love you--you only, you altogether? Should I not have your whole love in return?"

"Ah, Julia! but my love is a convulsive eagerness of soul--a pa.s.sion that knows no limit! It is not that my heart is entirely yours: it is that it is yours with a frenzied desperation. There is a fanaticism in love as in religion. My love is that fanaticism. It burns--it commands--where yours would but soothe and solicit."