“But we may write,” I timidly suggested. “You will not deny me that consolation?”
“We can hear of each other through my brother.”
“Your brother!” A pang of remorse and shame shot through me. She had not heard of the injury he had sustained at my hands; and I had not the courage to tell her. “Your brother will not help us,” I said: “he would have all communion between us to be entirely at an end.”
“And he would be right, I suppose. As a friend of both, he would wish us both well; and every friend would tell us it was our interest, as well as our duty, to forget each other, though we might not see it ourselves. But don’t be afraid, Gilbert,” she added, smiling sadly at my manifest discomposure; “there is little chance of my forgetting you. But I did not mean that Frederick should be the means of transmitting messages between us—only that each might know, through him, of the other’s welfare;—and more than this ought not to be: for you are young, Gilbert, and you ought to marry—and will some time, though you may think it impossible now: and though I hardly can say I wish you to forget me, I know it is right that you should, both for your own happiness, and that of your future wife;—and therefore I must and will wish it,” she added resolutely.
“And you are young too, Helen,” I boldly replied; “and when that profligate scoundrel has run through his career, you will give your hand to me—I’ll wait till then.”
But she would not leave me this support. Independently of the moral evil of basing our hopes upon the death of another, who, if unfit for this world, was at least no less so for the next, and whose amelioration would thus become our bane and his greatest transgression our greatest benefit,—she maintained it to be madness: many men of Mr. Huntingdon’s habits had lived to a ripe though miserable old age. “And if I,” said she, “am young in years, I am old in sorrow; but even if trouble should fail to kill me before vice destroys him, think, if he reached but fifty years or so, would you wait twenty or fifteen—in vague uncertainty and suspense—through all the prime of youth and manhood—and marry at last a woman faded and worn as I shall be—without ever having seen me from this day to that?—You would not,” she continued, interrupting my earnest protestations of unfailing constancy,—“or if you would, you should not. Trust me, Gilbert; in this matter I know better than you. You think me cold and stony-hearted, and you may, but—”
“I don’t, Helen.”
“Well, never mind: you might if you would: but I have not spent my solitude in utter idleness, and I am not speaking now from the impulse of the moment, as you do. I have thought of all these matters again and again; I have argued these questions with myself, and pondered well our past, and present, and future career; and, believe me, I have come to the right conclusion at last. Trust my words rather than your own feelings now, and in a few years you will see that I was right—though at present I hardly can see it myself,” she murmured with a sigh as she rested her head on her hand. “And don’t argue against me any more: all you can say has been already said by my own heart and refuted by my reason. It was hard enough to combat those suggestions as they were whispered within me; in your mouth they are ten times worse, and if you knew how much they pain me you would cease at once, I know. If you knew my present feelings, you would even try to relieve them at the expense of your own.”
“I will go—in a minute, if that can relieve you—and NEVER return!” said I, with bitter emphasis. “But, if we may never meet, and never hope to meet again, is it a crime to exchange our thoughts by letter? May not kindred spirits meet, and mingle in communion, whatever be the fate and circumstances of their earthly tenements?”
“They may, they may!” cried she, with a momentary burst of glad enthusiasm. “I thought of that too, Gilbert, but I feared to mention it, because I feared you would not understand my views upon the subject. I fear it even now—I fear any kind friend would tell us we are both deluding ourselves with the idea of keeping up a spiritual intercourse without hope or prospect of anything further—without fostering vain regrets and hurtful aspirations, and feeding thoughts that should be sternly and pitilessly left to perish of inanition.”