Part 2

Thus year after year passed away, and thus should I have lived and died; but I saw him, I heard his voice, I learned daily his thoughts, I revelled in his nature! Then I wrote to you again; my faith had become a living power; I began a new life.

Then came the fall, as ever before. The influence of social restraint was too terrible, and I sunk back as I did that day when we were children. This last assertion and denial of my nature brought me to the verge of death, but it brought me to reason also; and then, an altered being, weak and broken down, I rose, and with one fearful, silent struggle, that our sex’s nature alone can know, I was forever free! Oh, the revelation of that hour! Life seemed in a moment no longer hard and difficult. Its relations were simple, its passions legitimate, its love supreme.

But let me narrate to you how I awakened to the reality of my position, my after experience, and how at last I had the strength to accomplish my emancipation.

The first few months of my married life I was truly not happy; but I cannot speak of that period as one of unhappiness. Indeed, during the whole spring I did not fully realize what that covenant means that disposes finally of the life of a woman, and that, too, at a time before the meaning of her nature consciously asserts itself. The novelty of the change, the new interests arising, the necessity to be a wife—all these feelings and emotions shut out myself from myself. And so it went on, month after month, in which I cannot recall anything that awakened me fully to the reality of my position.

But, E * * *, it was ordered in my life that it should come, and it came. A simple incident defined to me the meaning of my vow.

Among our visits to Earlham was one we made on the first day of the following autumn. I remember the date and the appearance of the country well. I shall never forget either. The fields were undulating with their golden grain. Costessy Park was in its fullest verdure. Everything seemed rejoicing in the coming harvest—the happy maternity of earth. And so we reached Earlham.

The first object I saw was Anna’s child. It impressed me profoundly. I took him in my arms, and as I looked at him everything grew dark about me. I had been before the toy of a ceremony; I was now a conscious wife. Beautiful lawn and woodland, summer breezes, kindness, marriage rites even, what can they avail against the first awakening consciousness of a crime against nature?

I was wholly without sympathy; there were none around me to understand me. If I had spoken my thought the very air would have been filled with condemnation. I, a wife, had I a right to entertain for an instant such an idea? Could I dare to experience an instinct of aversion? Had I a right to say I had been violated—that I was what all women loathe?

I could not understand it; yet there it remained, a fact of my nature, asserting itself against the condition in which I was placed, and from which apparently no earthly power existed to release me.

I returned to Easton an altered being; but this feeling wore off somewhat in the routine, and in the necessities of married life—for his father’s death, occurring shortly after, you remember, involved many changes and responsibilities, which turned, in a measure, for a time, the current of my thoughts.

Afterwards succeeded, at constantly recurring intervals of a year or two, many other deaths in our families which tended to check my free indulgence of thought, till at last my feelings settled simply into a sense of a vague but awful responsibility of a violation of the social law.

You must recall the constant distress and trouble into which we were all plunged by the successive deaths of his sister Anna, his aunt Catharine, my father and the children. The family at I—— Hall, too, was a weight which never ceased to press upon my heart, and, indeed, upon my whole existence.

And so I lived, but not among the living. I had my inner life and my outward life—what, I doubt not, other women have had as well as this poor one at Catton. I drummed, in the old school-girl way, into my husband’s ears the set tunes for the piano, utterly unobservant of the music. I dressed in the same mechanical way to receive his relations, and thanked God when they were gone—and so underwent, beneath a conjugal yoke of continued kindness, a slow death. I entered into the life around me as an actress, real herself only when away from the stage of her action. I became the same that other women become, who turn from human faces to brute things for comfort. My early passion for horses and dogs proved then my consolation. I had to the full that mental nervousness which craves allayment in action. It would be impossible to admire a horse more than I had always done. It was an instinct of my nature, just as of Landseer’s, or of old Mary Breeze’s, of glorious memory; but I loved them now, for they were so much to me!

But when alone, immured, away from every one, I lived my fullest life. My imagination went away boldly, admiringly, lovingly, to other men. They were not objects of jealousy, dear E * * *, for they were dead.

I lived with the memories of the founders of our family—men who never sat upon the clerk’s stool, and could never have claimed the benefit of clergy—men with strong arms and stalwart frames, making their deeds of knightly prowess known in a hundred battles—with the memories of Hugh, and Walter, and Anselm, and Girard, and Reginald, and Matthew and John, who in the Holy Land fought at Prince Edward’s side, and rendered their red cross a terror to the Paynim. And my memory, only too tenacious, as you know, kept each noble form before me, with all the vividness of a present reality.

I lived with them, too, in their pastimes, in which—side by side with the Black Prince, in the eyes of their sovereign, and their gracious mistress, his Queen Phillippa, at the tournaments, held on the very spots where I daily rode—they mimicked their glorious achievements upon the veritable fields of blood which they had won.

I admired their splendid force, their brains not emasculate with such education as I saw around me, nor hampered with narrow trade tricks. I wondered what work they would be about if they were living to-day. I tried to imagine how any of the family could have got down, step by step, generation after generation, to studying Greek verbs, or calculating per cents.

Hugo alive, I knew well, would not be a praying banker, but abroad in the free air, adventuring crusades, simply and naturally, in whatever way the time demanded, just as the man I love, simply and naturally, and yet so irresistibly, rescued the sepulchre of my buried hopes and desires, against the law and the power, the ignorance and the infidelity to human nature, of all around me. All things great are simple. In the crusades my ancestors adventured, they went a long way across the world. It was as far as the distance between groom and lady, but not further. They conquered what was their own by right of their nature and their belief, and with such a struggle as every one must undergo who undertakes the assertion of his right against social law.

They conquered theirs as he did also his own; and does not his seem an act like, or nobler, than theirs? Is the rescue of a dead body a worthier act than the rescue of a living soul?

It was not so hard a conquest. My requirements were simple and natural. I was surrounded by everything unreal and artificial. I demanded the society of a living man, free from the education and influences of a family holding all these foolish theories that deprive us of the real enjoyments of life—one who could look upon water as water, and drink it without a homily—look upon food, not as a subject of prayer, but of mastication—enjoy the sunshine and air as sunshine and air, and talk with men and women as such without shrinking from them as heterodox, or loving them as orthodox too well—one who could listen to music and find it pleasant to the ear, and not be exercised whether God intended it should be agreeable—who could contemplate a picture not as an engine of the devil, but a work of art—one who could enjoy all delights as requirements of nature, and not as subjects of a deep concern. In Mr. Taylor I found such a man. He looked upon all these things as, indeed, I also saw them; but with him it was not a matter which cost him questioning. He knew it all without thought, and without education, as they call it. He lived in the intuitive knowledge of it.

In the interchange of kindred thoughts about these things we lived day by day, until, unconsciously, I found myself craving every word he spoke. I found his presence, which took me back to the men of my ancestral pride, a necessity of my life, and, at last, I felt myself for the first time beneath an influence of love.

The night that followed this discovery, when I knelt down by my bedside, his image stood between me and the far-off height on which my subjected brain had placed God.

And when I saw him there, I struggled, as I had been led to believe was duty, to dash down the image that stood at once in the way of my human vows and in the very presence of the stern methodical God of their education.

Yet there it stood, and there it must stand forever. Yes, dear E * * *, I loved him almost before I knew it; and he I felt, moreover, loved me, though not a word was spoken between us. It was not his to speak, and I would have concealed from my very inmost self the fact of this love.

But it could not be so forever. To maintain the form of a superiority, where none existed, became at last an impossibility. We loved, and the expression of it I foresaw could no longer be controlled by either, and so it came first from my lips. He was riding beside me, and did not reply to me. He said, out into the air, into the heavens: God has given me too great a joy. Then he turned to me and said: I have loved you from the first day I saw you. I loved you because I felt it was my destiny; other than this I know not why; I only know I loved you.

Dear E * * *, he was so beautiful, so noble then, in the expression of that love so long concealed. The earth whirled around me, and his arm caught me falling unconsciously. When I came to myself I was resting on his bosom, confident of its strength as of a breastplate of iron, though I saw his eyes dim with tears.

We rode homewards in silence. There was a beauty in the very stones beneath our feet. The wayside flowers had an odor too exquisite to the sense. The air and sky were filled with an influence too beautiful for earth. I was very, very happy. Could this feeling have rested in me, I had been content—faithful to my duty, as I had been taught—to have lived ever so. But my heart was now craving constantly the repetition of that moment. It could not be satisfied but in his presence. Hitherto patient only under a sense of wrong, I now began to be agitated by a passion in which every feeling of my life had centred.

It is not necessary to recount all the conflicts which it brought to me, nor to trace the way in which my nobler nature sunk gradually before the threatened penalty of social destruction; it is enough to say that I was borne by it to the decision which involved my destiny, and I yielded to the social law for the last time, because I had not yet come to that point at which a woman, driven to the very presence of death by the pressure of a false relation, thinks at last for herself, and hesitates no longer how to shape her course, should even the remaining wreck of her life be dashed to destruction.

Last autumn I began to feel myself breaking down. I could live thus no longer. When the time came we usually went to London, a while before the opening of Parliament, I felt that the crisis had come. If I went down with my husband in any hope of escaping the feelings that were mastering me, I knew well that on my return this life of passion would only recommence at sight of its object. If I remained alone, I believed I had strength to put it from me—I believed I could part with him, if for the days or weeks that would follow, after I had left him, I might meet no other gaze than God’s—if I might exhaust the despair that I well knew would follow in silence.

I remained, therefore, at home.

I was not deceived in myself. The artificial being they had created of me was strong enough to assert itself and to sacrifice the love that lay in my heart’s depths—but not till the last moment. It was only upon the very brink of my husband’s return, that, arousing myself from the brief dream of happiness into which, secure in his absence, I had weakly fallen, I could summon the energy to take the draught of agony which, I believed, the hand of duty had prepared for me.

But further delay was now impossible.

I had him come to me. My heart was like a cup overrunning; my grief knew no expression. He was before me, at my feet. I cannot describe—no one dares acknowledge what passes between lovers, sundered by a social law; it is not possible to express that life within life, the innermost, the last.

I have brought you to me, I said, because I can see you no longer—I am dying.

My God, it seemed to me then as if my heart would break—as if I should go mad!

A moan of agony came to his lips.

He looked up at me; the intelligence of his face was gone; his eyes were dim; the despair that was in me changed his face to stone.

I looked on him immovably; I could say to him: We must part forever. I could repeat again the phrases of social life: There can be no honorable recognition of our love—its open avowal will bring disgrace to my husband and odium upon my children.

And how did he reply to me? Shall I confess, even there, in that hour of my strength, my utter weakness! I longed for a pleading word. One look of tenderness, and I should have fallen at his feet a ruined being, but ruined in the acknowledgment and utter abandon of my love.

Well he knew all this; but in that crisis he was true to himself, and to me; and when he ceased speaking, I was again strong. My head, my heart, every instinct of my being, approved his words, his looks, his actions.

He had saved me. He, as I knew him in that hour, was my strength; through him I conquered myself. I was strong in that final trial, as a woman only can be strong—through the soul and heart of the man who stands steadfast to himself and to her to the bitter end.

He said: Even in this hour, when every hope and joy of life have sunk away into eternal despair beneath your words, I can be true to my sense of right; I believe life requires no sacrifice; I believe self-sacrifice wrongs not only her who, blindly, in its belief as right, accepts it, but those the more for whom it is accepted. If, with your sense of duty, you were to sever the relation which binds you to them, it could bring you no happiness; its severance, as you feel, would bring at last misery to both, for your happiness is mine. There is no rule, no duty in life, but the pursuit of happiness. Mine can alone be purchased now at the cost of your own, and that is mine. We must part, then, forever!

The utter despair of these words can never leave my heart.

* * * * *

There were many things he said in this last interview which I recall, but it matters not now should be repeated. Our lives express them more clearly than words. He spoke of the false relation which he had gradually been led to assume, and into the continuance of which our passion had held him day by day.

I knew well, he said, it should long ago have been terminated; but I knew not then, as now, the controlling power that has kept me by you until this hour. I believed, first, that I might love you, and that you might remain forever unconscious of my love. And so I lived till this was impossible. And then my life became one eternal delay of hope, enduring all to this last measure of despair. It could not be otherwise. I believed from day to day that you would see clearly, as I saw, the right, and so it might at last end. It is over now! My life is over. My lot is hopeless, endless misery. I accept it for your sake—for the memory of our love.

Then my life, my very soul, met his in one long kiss of agony, and we parted, as I believed, forever.

* * * * *

I had conquered my life; this social law had achieved its triumph.

* * * * *

When my husband reached home I was strong to do the last duty which my position imposed upon me. I knew well that, cost what it would, this must also be done. I must live the life, to which I was bound, openly. I went to him and told him of my love, of my resolution, and of our separation. Much passed between us at this horrible time; but all that was in my heart to say was just these words: I love William. Of the rest, and of what followed, I have no clear remembrance.

I only knew now that he must be gone—that life, hope, all were gone, though I remained there still that honorable thing, a wife! For me, it was determined that I should leave England for a time. I was to travel. A change of scene they prescribed for the invalid of the heart. It was always the same, the same ignorance of a woman’s nature and its necessities. They would have me enjoy Paris, Rome. They would substitute the splendor of the Vatican for some little flower that might perchance come from his hand should I remain at home. It seemed so much more to them.

Absorbed in the contemplation of the ruins of my life, I took no heed of these arrangements for my departure, but abandoned myself a willing prey to despair.

When the full measure of my grief had exhausted itself, I arose a new being.

From that moment I was myself. I had driven every hope, every feeling from my heart. I had received from his lips the last sacrifice a man can offer to the woman he loves—the abnegation of himself for her happiness; and I declare before Heaven that it was my resolve to do what I thought right, though it cost me my life; for I had nothing now to live for.

I had long followed blindly a passion that brought me to the verge of social destruction. I had renounced it.

I had blindly followed for years a path of duty which had degraded every instinct of my nature to its last measure of degradation.

I could feel no more—I reasoned.

The meaning of the life I was about to enter upon was now distinctly before me. What it appeared to me, I well knew it was, in very reality, for I was now freed from my love. I had sacrificed all for duty. I could see now to what the blind obedience of that duty had led me. What I was I now knew.

My soul was clear from hypocrisy—there was not any lie upon it now. I had confessed all. My very life was laid open to my heart’s core. My love was gone, as well by his will as my own, forever.

What had I accomplished? I had preserved the chaste name of wife. I had preserved the honor of my husband and the reputation of his children. And to do it, I was beneath his roof, and was about to submit myself to his embraces without love.

For these considerations of honor and reputation, I was about to lead voluntarily a life of prostitution, distinguished from it only by the social fiction of a name, and I felt myself more degraded for all this honorable hire than she who accepts her paltry dole in the streets.

I was, moreover, about to fulfil functions from which every fibre of my body shrunk with abhorrence. I was there to give life to offspring created in my own degradation, in violation of my will and nature, the effete offspring of blood kin, children to die feebly before their time, or perhaps to come into the world, they, or their children, deformed, or dumb, or blind, or imbecile. I, who was perfect myself, and formed to receive and transmit the sacred treasure of a new life, was to become voluntarily the matricide of the more perfect conceptions which should be mine.

Better, in the agony of that thought, I said, better death than this—better self-immolation of body and soul; it were far less a crime.

And then, shuddering with horror upon the brink to which duty had led me, I supplicated my soul imploringly for light, as I asked myself the great question: Does any law of God sanction, shall any law of man have the power to continue, the bond of marriage where no love exists?

And I answered it, as my children, if they inherit aught of my nature, shall at last approve, as the world shall at last come to understand.

Thus was I at once and forever severed from all former relations and left alone in the world.

I write these last words quietly, here at my writing desk; but that inquisition of my brain, it was terrible—more terrible even than the death I had accepted in parting from him.

But my decision was made, and I was calm then.

I knew in that moment the rest of a fearful struggle of the brain—the poor weak brain of a woman—that swept the world, though, beneath her feet.

There was grief in that family, when I became in that decision myself, and stood a stranger among them; when the social fabric, his children, their father, false pride, conventional position—all had overthrow; when my mother’s wrongs had revenge, and my father’s love had justification, in the child of his life-wronged wife!

But their grief was joy to the agony of calm in which I made that decision.

Not a tear came to my eye when I told it them; not a pulse stirred in my breast. How inconceivable to them all this agony.

My husband was even still solicitous to preserve the form of a union, now no longer possible in reality. One of those formality doctors of the soul was sent for—his uncle Francis. O! after all the agony I had passed through, I might have been spared the sight of one of those whose words had sanctioned and stamped upon me, as if by the authority of God, all this misery.

But how weak and idle to me were his words about theological sin and social infamy. They fell on my ear, in constant repetition, meaningless as the dropping of the beads of a rosary.

He told me I was imperiling my soul, and he left me with some formal expression of pious horror, when I told him I would willingly incur that risk.

* * * * *

And now I was alone in the world—my life still before me—severed from every living relation—to be lived or ended. What new connections must I assume? Unsupported, helpless, alone, where should I go? What must I do?

In those past ages the convent doors would have been open to me; but my intelligence, the intelligence of the very age in which I lived, forbade me the immolation of my living body and my free soul.

And then came to me again the idea of suicide.

I did not shrink from this thought superstitiously, as fearing to rush unbidden into the presence of the offended deities. I had no such thought. It meant to me only rest from this great burden and weariness of life—to lie down and sleep while it was yet day—to sleep forever.

But I was too calm for the rashness of this act—too strong. If they, who retired to the cloister from a sense of a superstitious duty, willingly endured its burden, I, with larger intelligence, could not sink beneath their lower thought, and weakly die. No, I had committed no crime that I should die; nor were my past misfortunes a reason why I should voluntarily impose new ones upon my life to come. I knew I was in the world to live. Vigor of body, of mind, passions, desires, reason, all that goes to make up a human soul, were in the full tide of existence; and I was here surely not to contemplate death, but to fulfil the functions of life—of a new life.