University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.

Shakspeare.

Shakspeare.

Hitherto, I had been near Warburton, stood
beside him, studied him—unknown—as an unseen
spirit.

“Elsie!” he said.

“Nathan!”

There was a long silence. His face grew white,
and his thin lips moved, but he did not speak, and
his eyes rested on me with such melancholy and
reproachful tenderness, that remorse went burning
down into my heart, as though mine had been all
the guilt. I involuntarily and silently prayed,
Have mercy on him, oh God! whatever darkness
be reserved for me! I would have gone, but his
arms reached toward me, and I had no strength to

execute my will. And if I had known that I was
thus giving up my soul, in that moment I would
not, I could not have prevented his embrace. That
long and passionate kiss—but with lips so cold!—
it quickened the flame smouldering for so many
wretched years, and hereafter it will never go
out.

“This—this is no phantom of a troubled brain—
no such phantom as I have seen so often,” he whispered,
as beneath his arms he felt the throbbing of
my bosom: “look up, Elsie, dear Elsie, and tell
me we shall never, never, never part any more;”
and his low voice thrilled with a most touching
tenderness and sweetness.

“I am Elsie—yes, I am Elsie—poor, degraded,
so changed that you have not known me, all this
while! but not yours—the hands of Innocence
draw me away from you—not yours! it is too late,
—your wife!”

“You are my wife—I have no other—can have
no other. You are mine in all the fondest love—
by the sacredest obligations—before God, in spite
of men's prohibitions. No—no—I see how it shall
be—you are mine, and I married her, not knowing
you were alive—that is it! I thought you were
dead, and so I married her! And you will not—
swear that you will not leave me,—this pent agony
breaks out at last—and this curse of secrecy is

ended—ah, Elsie!—peace comes at length—but
how late—how strange!”

My kisses brought no color to his cheek, but his
eyes, seeming to shine with an unearthly lustre,
looked steadily in mine with a beseeching tenderness,
and his lips, slightly apart, ashen and cold,
quivered with thoughts he could not shape in
words, and in his hands he clutched mine with a
fearful earnestness. Forgive me, All Merciful! if
I failed to crush at once that love which thus revived;
guilty, and ruined as it was, its broken and
faded light was dearer and brighter than all that
ever came down into the night from heaven. Regardless
of the sinful horrors of the past, of the
judgment to come, I look back on that hour of our
rëunion as on a rift of light between two seas of
darkness. Oh, love! the crimson, widening from
thy kiss, gives all their beauty to the roses and to
the clouds; without thee all is blank—desolate.

Ages of torture and of bliss were lived by us in
those few moments; we only felt that to be parted
was to die; that our souls were interblended; that
our thoughts could never be divided, nor stayed
from wandering down that pathway which is bordered
with fire. I felt, I knew, that with more
fervor than ever before he loved me then, disrobed
of the beauty and purity of my maiden years, discrowned
of the golden glory which he saw about

my temples long ago, when he had praised my
genius, and felt that his own nature in my presence
was abased. He had himself sat on the barren
cliffs of fame, drank till he had no more thirst, of
praise, and now he could stoop and lift me from
the dust, and feel that my simple love was more
than all to him.

I had become reconciled to my own nothingness
and oblivion, though I had not seen the star of that
ambition which arose in the light of his praises,
fade and go down, without regrets; it had burned
long and sweetly before me, and it was hard to see
it set, in quick and endless night. But with woman
ambition is never a disconnected and single aim;
she finds sometimes along the steeps to which it
leads a bitter compensation for dear hopes, and
sometimes with its flames she points the arrows of
revenge; it is only when her heart is closed against
all sympathies that her ambition dies; she cannot
sift clear purposes and distinct aims from the impulses
of feeling; she cannot think patiently down
to the bottom of things, and separate and analyze
and collect and build that which shall be only immortal;
in the storehouse of her imagery there is
no beauty unless associated with love; in the
council chamber of her thoughts there is no absolute
power; her ideas link themselves in one train,
beginning in love and ending in death. She may

press her way through walls of thorns or of fire;
and the shadow of the laurel may sweep through
her hair, but the triumph is for love's sake, in one
way or another. In man's nature affection is as
the ivy to the oak—in woman's it is the oak to the
ivy. Therefore was my ambition dead.

It was the strangest and the saddest of the hours
of my life. I only know that I gathered me about,
as some consolation, the repeated assurances of his
love—that my heart was broken anew with the
consciousness of his suffering—that we met, and
parted.

“I have tried,” he said, “to assemble in my
thoughts the crimes of all the world; to slip from
doom by losing myself among the thousands of
guilty souls crowding, through life, and down to
death, and up to judgment; but over all there was
one crime which made me eminent, so that every
one could point to me and hail me as the Man!
Ah, dear Elsie, forsaken, but always loved! cool for
another moment with the dew of your kisses the
fires that will at last consume me.” And after a
moment's silence, “The world is wide: let us fly
together, and in each other's embrace defy what we
cannot evade; I feel even now the madness of my
heart coming up to my brain; if you go, you leave
me to insanity and death, Elsie;” and the melancholy
and reproachful and tenderly-appealing pathos

of his eyes burned through my bosom to my
soul, as he continued, “Leave me not, dear one,
beauty of my dreams, mother of my child!”

“Murderer!” I cried with a sudden horror, “let
me go!” and escaping from his now unclasped and
powerless arms, I took up the bones of my dead,
and flew—alone—under the light of the midnight
stars—along the hushed streets of the city.

Let me not lift the curtain from the remainder
of that terrible night. I would that it were hidden
forever from my memory. Walking, I heard the
birds sing across the meadows, and presently the
sounds of moving life, but from everything in nature
I seemed struck apart. I tried to watch the
shadows as they chased each other over the hills;
to fix my thoughts on the oxen as they ploughed
along the fields; but continually disordered recollections
would sweep like crushing storms through
all my consciousness; whatever I attempted, my
mind in cloud and tumult would come still to the
awful scene I had left; and men and women seemed
to know a curse was on me, and to avoid me; and
when the night came down again, wearied, and
utterly desolate, bearing still that coffin pressed to
my bosom, I saw in the darkness his glittering
eyes looking into mine the agonies which he had
suffered through so many years. Heaven, at length,

I felt, had withdrawn its high support, and I was
drifting insensibly, hopelessly, toward the pit.

Agony of agonies, to live thus, to front the
gloom and the torture, and not rush blindly to the
grave, where no reproachful or distrustful eyes
might see me any more, and no voice call me in
the morning to take up the burden of life.

They are not the brave who die under the heavy
pressure of pains and sorrows; there is courage
enough in almost every one to give himself the
sharp thrusts that should win freedom. At the
sound of a trumpet hills are darkened with armies
marching to death as to a triumph with flowers;
uplifted by the sublimity of his sacrifice, one may
become a martyr and sing of victory in a robe of
flame: behind, the reverence of ages—before, the
eternal shadowing of the wings of love; but the
enthusiasm born of the loftiest passion is transient
as the occasions of its necessity.

To live a martyr, with no supporting phrenzy;
to see days rise and set, summers bloom and fade,
the vigorous year break his fetters of ice, and sleep
again under a shroud of snow; and through all
changes fold the hands upon an empty, aching
breast, knowing there is no peace this side the
grave, and fearing to look beyond; no voice in all
the world to say, I love you, love you more and
more for the hate or scorn of others!—to live thus,

with an unfaltering will—ah! it is very hard. I
almost wished as I crouched out of sight for rest
by the wayside, that some sudden blow would
crush me out of being. I looked at the waters,
and thought how softly they would close above me
and be still. But Gabriel, I knew, could find me
in the sea!

The evening of the second day I sat down by
the roadside, under a tree, exhausted, wasted with
sleeplessness and hunger. The deepest crimson of
sunset was over the western woods; the gnats
hummed faintly, and the ants worked busily in a
little hill by my side, while a flock of sheep came
nibbling the short grass almost up to my feet.
Something of the tranquil influence of the time
began to steal over me, when I observed, a short
distance away, not far removed from the roadside,
a dark and naked building surrounded by a wall,
and looking closer, I perceived that the windows
were grated, and I was thinking of the blessed life
the prisoner might lead, thus shut from the cruel
gazing of the world, if there were no haunting conscience
still to trouble him, when a cloud of dust
rose from the track of an approaching carriage,
shaped like the dens for wild beasts that are drawn
through the country on wheels; and looking intently
at it as it passed, I saw a white face pressed
against the bars, and eyes glaring like fire ——

it was Mr. Warburton, on his way to the madhouse!

You understand now why I turn from the fountain,
and the white tent of innocence, to wander
thirsty and alone in the desert. God bless you.
Farewell.

Thus ended the MS. which Arnold held in his
hand as he entered the church, that winter morning,
to receive their greetings who had assembled for
his bridal. The strange woman was never seen in
the village again, but her neighbors still speak
sometimes, on occasions of suffering and sorrow, of
the good deeds of Hagar, the Penitent.