CHAPTER II.
CLARA APPEALS TO HER STEPMOTHER.
Lady Hope had retreated into her own room, for the absence of her husband was beginning to prey upon her; and she was all the more sad and lonely because she knew in her heart that the two persons whom she saw together in the moonlight were thinking, perhaps talking, of the love which she must never know in its fullness again—which she had never known as good and contented wives experience it.
Indeed, love is the one passion that can neither be wrested from fate or bribed into life. It must spring up from the heart, like a wild flower from seed God plants in virgin forest soil, to bring contentment with its blossoming. The sunshine which falls upon it must be pure and bright from heaven. Plant it in an atmosphere of sin, and that which might have been a holy passion becomes a torment, bitter in proportion to its strength.
Ah! how keenly Rachael Closs felt all this as she sat there alone in her bower room, looking wistfully out upon those two lovers, both so dear to her that her very soul yearned with sympathy for the innocent love she had never known, and never could know upon earth! Yet, dear as these two persons were to her, she would have seen that fair girl and the manly form beside her shrouded in their coffins, if that could have brought back one short twelve-months of the passionate insanity which had won Lord Hope to cast aside all restraint and fiercely wrench apart the most sacred ties in order to make her his wife. She asked for impossibilities. Love born in tumult and founded in selfishness must have its reactions, and between those two the shadow of a wronged woman was forever falling; and, struggle as they would, it grew colder and darker every year. But upon these two persons time operated differently. The wild impetuosity of his character had hardened into reserve. His ambition was to stand high among men of his own class—to be known as a statesman of power in the realm.
But, in all this Rachael knew that she was a drawback and a heavy weight upon his aspirations. Was it that she was less bright or beautiful? No, no. Her mirror contradicted the one doubt, and the power which she felt in her own genius rebuked the other.
Once give her a foothold among the men and women who had so persistently considered her as an intruder, and the old vigor and pride of her life would come back with it: the idolatry which had induced that infatuated man to overlook these stumbling blocks to his pride and impediments to his ambition would surely revive.
"Let him see me at court; let him compare me with the women whose cutting disdain wounds me to death, because it disturbs him; let him place me where this intellect can have free scope, and never on this earth was there a woman who would work out a husband's greatness so thoroughly."
In the first years of her marriage, Rachael would say these things to herself, in the bitterness of her humiliation and disappointment. Others, less beautiful and lacking her talent, had been again and again introduced from lower ranks into the nobility of England, accepted by its queen, and honored by society. Why was she alone so persistently excluded? The answer was always ready, full of bitterness. The enmity of old Lady Carset had done it all. It was her influence that had closed the queen's drawing-room against Lord Hope's second wife. It was her charge regarding the Carset diamonds that had made Rachael shrink from wearing the family jewels, which justly belonged to her as Lord Hope's property. It was this which made her so reluctant to pass the boundaries of Oakhurst. It was this that embittered her whole life, and rendered it one long humiliation.
These reflections served to concentrate the hopes and affections of this woman so entirely around one object, that her love for Hope, which had been an overwhelming passion, grew into that idolatry no man, whose life was in the world, could answer to, for isolation was necessary to a feeling of such cruel intensity.
As the hope of sharing his life and his honors gave way, doubts, suspicions, and anxieties grew out of her inordinate love, and the greatest sorrow to her on earth was the absence of her husband. It was not alone that she missed his company, which was, in fact, all the world to her; but, as he went more and more into the world, a terrible dread seized upon her. What if he found, among all the highly born women who received him so graciously, some one who, in the brightness of a happy life, might make him regret the sacrifice he had made for her, the terrible scenes he had gone through in order to obtain her? What if he might yet come to wish her dead, as she sometimes almost wished herself!