“But this love—this idolatry, rather?” persisted the young man; “must it be forever hopeless? Shall I never see you again?”
“It is wrong, therefore should be hopeless,” replied Zulima. “You do not know what trouble it would bring upon you.”
“Why wrong?—why should it bring trouble upon me?”
“Should we ever meet again, you will know. Everybody will know why it is wrong for you to love me. Now I must go.”
Zulima drew away her hand, using a little gentle force; and while the young man was striving to fathom the meaning of her words, she opened the door and disappeared.
Every way was poor Zulima beset. The false position in which the concealment of her marriage had placed her, made itself cruelly felt at all times. She had taken a long journey, alone and entirely unprotected. Young and beautiful—to all appearance single—she was naturally exposed to all those attentions that a creature so lovely and unprotected was sure to receive, even against her will. In the young man whom she had just left, those attentions gradually took a degree of tender interest which, but for her state of anxious preoccupation, she must have observed long before, as others less interested had not failed to do. But she had literally given the devotion, so apparent to others, no thought. Knowing herself to be bound by the most solemn ties to the man who seemed to have forgotten her, she never reflected that others knew nothing of this, or that she might become the object of affectionate, nay, passionate regard, such as the man had just declared.
Now it only served to add another pang to the bitterness of her grief; heart-wounded, neglected as she had been, it was not in human nature to be otherwise than flattered and very grateful for devotion which soothed her pride, and which in its possessor was innocent and honorable. But even these feelings gained but a momentary hold upon her; they were followed by regret and that shrinking dread which every new source of excitement is sure to occasion where the heart has been long and deeply agitated. She went away then with a new cause of grief added to those that had so fatally oppressed her.
Zulima reached Baltimore in the night. Weary with travel and faint with anxiety, she took a coach at the stage-house and went in search of the hotel where she learned that her husband was lodged. As she drove up to the hotel a private carriage stood at the entrance; a negro in livery was in the seat, and another stood with the carriage door in his hand, watching for some one to come down the steps; the door opened, and by the light that streamed through, Zulima saw her husband richly dressed as if for some assembly. One white glove was held loose in his hand with an embroidered opera-cap, which he put upon his head as he came quickly down the steps.
Zulima was breathless; she leaned from the window of her hackney-coach, and would have called to him aloud, but her tongue clove to her mouth; she could only gaze wildly on him, as just touching the step of his carriage with one foot he sprung lightly in. The door closed with a noise that went through Zulima’s heart like an arrow. She saw the negro spring up behind the carriage; the lamps flashed by her eyes, and while every thing reeled before her, the coachman of her own humble hack had opened the door.