He was going on: but Adeline, who had till now struggled successfully with her feelings, wound up almost to phrensy at the possibility that anxiety had shortened Glenmurray's life, gave way to a violent paroxysm of sorrow, which, for a while, deprived her of consciousness; and when she recovered she found Berrendale bending over her, while her head lay on Glenmurray's pillow.
The sight of Berrendale in a moment roused her to exertion:—his look was so full of anxious tenderness, and she was at that moment so ill disposed to regard it with complacency, that she eagerly declared she was quite recovered, and begged Mr Berrendale would return to bed; and Glenmurray seconding her request, with a deep sigh he departed.
'Poor fellow!' said Glenmurray, 'I wish you had seen his anxiety during your illness!'
'I am glad I did not,' replied Adeline: 'but how can you persist in talking to me of any other person's anxiety, when I am tortured with yours? Your conversation of to-night has made me even more miserable than I was before. By what strange fatality do you blame yourself for the conduct worthy of admiration?—for giving to the world, as soon as produced, opinions which were calculated to enlighten it?'
'But,' replied Glenmurray, 'as those opinions militated against the experience and custom of ages, ought I not to have paused before I published, and kept them back till they had received the sanction of my maturer judgment?'
'And does your maturer judgment condemn them?'
'Four years cannot have added much to the maturity of my judgment,' replied Glenmurray: 'but I will own that some of my opinions are changed; and that, though I believe those which are unchanged are right in theory, I think, as the mass of society could never at once adopt them, they had better remain unacted upon, than that a few lonely individuals should expose themselves to certain distress, by making them the rules of their conduct. You, for instance, you, my Adeline, what misery—!' Here his voice again faltered, and emotion impeded his utterance.
'Live—do but live,' exclaimed Adeline passionately, 'and I can know of misery but the name.'
'But I cannot live, I cannot live,' replied Glenmurray, 'and the sooner I die the better;—for thus to waste your youth and health in the dreadful solitude of a sick-room is insupportable to me.'
'O Glenmurray!' replied Adeline, fondly throwing herself on his neck, 'could you but live free from any violent pain, and were neither you nor I ever to leave this room again, believe me, I should not have a wish beyond it. To see you, to hear you, to prove to you how much I love you, would, indeed it would, be happiness sufficient for me!' After this burst of true and heartfelt tenderness, there was a pause of some moments: Glenmurray felt too much to speak, and Adeline was sobbing on his pillow. At length she pathetically again exclaimed, 'Live! only live! and I am blest!'