[CHAPTER XLII.]
FROM FRANCES TO HER HUSBAND, BRYAN CAREY.
I address you from the grave, and I pray that what I write may never reach your hands. If, unhappily, you are fated to read these words, they will bring their own punishment with them.
Do I hope, then, that you may be dead on the day that this letter shall be opened or destroyed, unread? No. But rather than you should receive it, it would be better that the earth covered you, as it has covered me these many years. You will understand my meaning before you have finished reading. I write in no vindictive spirit. All bitter feeling has left me; although even yourself may acknowledge that I have good cause for feeling bitterly towards you. But I am resolved that you shall not blight another life as you blighted mine. Another life so dear to me! that should be so dear to you! Another life that has been some comfort to me in the midst of my sorrow and affliction; and that I hope may be long spared for happiness.
It is not a giddy girl who is writing to you. It is a woman who has learned to look upon things with fair judgment, notwithstanding that she has suffered deeply from a cruel wrong inflicted upon her.
When you first came to me I was a child almost in years. I had had no opportunity of knowing the world, or of gaining that experience which is necessary to those who move in its busy quarters. I had never known trouble or sorrow, and, until my father fell into misfortune, I had lived very happily with him. He had his faults, I do not doubt, as we all have; but he was a good father to the last, and I loved him to the last. You judged him harshly, I know, and made no excuses for him--but it is in your nature to judge harshly. Weak as he was to some extent, I do not believe that he would have wronged his wife--doubly wronged her--and then have deserted her: as you wronged and deserted me. I have some remembrance of my mother, who died when I was very young, and I know that he was indulgent and good to her.
I fancy I can see a hard look on your face at the word indulgent. But some natures require indulgence, and are the better and the happier for it. You were for a time indulgent to me, and it was for this, as well as for other qualities in you upon which I placed higher value than you deserved, that I loved you.
Yes, I loved you. I scarcely know whether you ever believed I did; for, thinking over matters since our separation, I have arrived--whether rightly or wrongly--at what I believe to be a correct estimate of your character, at what assuredly is a correct estimate if you are destined to read it. I see you, hard and intolerant; doubtful of goodness in others; prone to place the most uncharitable construction on the actions of others. Lightness of heart is in your eyes a sign of levity. Surely the moods which were familiar to me in the first days of our acquaintanceship, and in the first few months of our wedded life, must have been foreign to your nature.
I see something more in you. I see you false to your wife and to your marriage vows. I see you, who prided yourself upon your sense of justice, most unjust and ungenerous to me. Let your heart answer if I am wrong.
Recall the evening on which we met for the first time, and certain words which passed between us. You were at my father's house, advising him upon his business affairs, which had become complicated. You said that my voice reminded you of a friend--a lady friend, very dear to you--and that she was dead. The words did not make much impression upon me at the time; but I had occasion afterwards to remember them. I liked you that evening. Your grave face, your sensible ways, were agreeable to me, frivolous girl as you supposed me to be. We kept but little society; the only regular visitor at my father's house was my cousin Ralph. I loved him; but not in the way you suspected. We had been intimate from early childhood, and I had a sincere affection for him. When I became better acquainted with you, I saw faults in him which I had not hitherto discerned; there was a want of stability in his character; he was indolent and deficient in manliness. Even if you had not entered into my life, and marred it, I think I should never have had any but a cousinly love for him. So far as I was concerned, there were no grounds for jealousy on your part, and no grounds for your base suspicions of me. I do not speak for him; I speak for myself. And when you wrote to me on the day you deserted me, and accused me of loving him as a woman should love the man she wishes to marry, you lied. But you had another purpose to serve, and it suited you to write the lie.