I rage and chafe like a chained beast, and every moment I feel my chains are getting less galling—presently, oh, father, father! they will be pleasant, like your chains were—then I shall love them—then they will crush me, and I shall not be your Lilia any more, but a little piece of another identity.
It must have been your plan from the beginning. How you used to talk about him after that dreadful time in the hospital! You made him out a second “Hamlet,” only larger-minded, cleverer; but never said he was young and handsome. You must have purposely let me imagine him like your friends, that I might be surprised, that first time he came here. How well I remember one evening, when you and I were walking in the wood, and you were talking about him, and said he was coming!
“At last I shall see this ancient ‘Hamlet’ of yours,” I said, and asked you if there had been an “Ophelia” in his story.
“Scarcely time for that, yet,” you said, in a peculiar way of yours, that means I am all at sea—all in the dark about something. But I was not interested enough to think more about it.
Then came the day, when a graceful, dark, young, prince-like creature walked across the lawn, and when I saw him I felt all paralysed. I felt nothing, thought nothing. He stupefied me. I only seemed to wake up when he went away; no, some hours after he went back to London, and then my whole being seemed to give one great cry of despair, like it did when Mr. Mervyn told me of your accident and that you were in the hospital.
I did not know what that feeling of despair meant then. It only frightened me. I know what it meant, only too well, now. I despaired, because it is impossible that he can ever love me. And no one could see him and know him without feeling that life without his love is dry, purposeless—a living death.
Oh! why did you bring him here, and ask him to take me? Poor, dear father! I thought you could not be mistaken in any one, and you are certainly not mistaken in your estimate of him. But when you thought he could love me, how you exaggerated me, how your kind eyes saw your poor child in a false light!
I—his companion—his—wife! Impossible! The whole world would laugh, would stare! and I should be sick with shame, as I was to-day.
I told him, two days before, that he must go away. I begged him to go away. He did not. He thinks he ought to sacrifice himself. So he stayed for the “funeral,” as they call it. (Why not good Saxon burial?) Father, you never treated me wrongly till now. Now you have wronged your child. When you were dying, you did what you thought best for me. But—to-day—the shame of it!
Your brothers, Mr. Pym and Mr. Edmund Pym, came for the burial. Roderick did not come, it was said he was ill; but his brother Herbert, the clergyman, you used to laugh at to Roderick, and call the “family prig,” came. They followed your coffin through the pouring rain in carriages. I sat in my room alone—I could not even bear Mammy Mervyn with me—feeling cold and half-dead. While they were seeing your coffin put into the ground I was listening to the clatter of plates and dishes, and the footsteps of the servants laying the luncheon which those people were to eat when they came back. I heard the carriages coming back like carriages in a dream. Then Mammy Mervyn would come in with a cup of beef-tea. She took me in her arms and dropped tears on to me, which made me drink the beef-tea, as the less disagreeable of the two. She told me the will was to be read, and Mr. Moffatt said I must come down; and she made me put on that dreadful black gown, which you would dislike, I know, as much as I do. I went downstairs with her. She asked me if I thought I should “break down.” I said the truth: “Mammy, I feel there is nothing of me to break down.”