 | Randolph |  |
EDWARD MOLTON TO MARY HOWARD.
I shall obey you, imperious girl. You know your power,
and you abuse it. It is as I foretold you, when I detected
the first yearning of your heart. But beware!—
no woman shall hold me in thraldom longer than I can
revere her. “Love!”—O Mary! you know not what love
is. Do I?—look at me;—look in that glass—there is the
face of the haughty Edward. That death-like aspect—
these sunken temples—that is thy work. I do not know
myself. The fire of my eyes, it may be, is not yet utterly
quenched; but God knows that it soon will be. And,
even now, there is something in their lustre, unlike the
colour or brightness of health; and were I to see it in the
eyes of another, in thine, Mary, I should weep;—but, as
it is, there is a melancholy gladness about my heart, that
comforts it, like the touch of a beloved hand, gently put
upon a wounded part.
My character is gone. What of that? It was sacrificed
to thee. My health is blasted—death is within me
—my vitals are decaying;—I can feel them weakening
and detaching themselves, while I write, like the filaments
of life from a dead heart;—but what of that?—
Thou art the happier for it.
Even now, I was on the point of slaying another man
to thee! O woman! woman! what art thou made of? So
beautiful, yet so deadly! I hear the echo of his departing
step, now. The noise of the door, that he hath shut
after him, is sounding in my ears now, like something
miraculous; as if a dead man had arisen, from before my
feet, and walked leisurely away from me. What saved
him, Mary? I know not, unless it be his resemblance
to—to—by heaven, I will write it, though it kill thee!—
to Juliet!...... there!.......
He knows not that I suspected his errand; no!—for, if
he had, he should never have left my presence, alive!—
What! bearded, baited, cursed and threatened, by children,
even in the solitude of my own chamber! No.—
George, George!—it was well for thy brother, and for
thine too. William, poor William, that I was not obliged
to trample on another of your headlong, impetuous blood.
But let me proceed more gently. Here is the precious
note that he brought. O, would that the writer were a
man! Read it—read it, Mary, and tell me that you wonder
at me. You ought—you will—I have surpassed myself.
The boy came to murder me, and he went away
my vassal. What a retinue I shall have!—the gallant,
the athletick, the noble in heart, the wise, all subject to
me—me! a weak and miserable creature, on whom the
weakest might set his foot—if he dared. Read it!—and
wonder, as I do, that my heart was not shivered into
ten thousand pieces, when I read it.
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