I wrote to Ernest for the first time, for we had never been parted before. Again and again I commenced, and threw down the pen in despair. My heart seemed locked, closed as with Bastile bars. What words of mine could pierce through the cloud of infamy in which his remembrance wrapped me? He would not believe my strange, improbable tale. He would cast it from him as a device of the evil spirit, and brand me with a deeper curse. No! if he was so willing to cast me off, to leave me so coldly and cruelly, without one farewell line, one wish to know whether I were living or dead, let him be. Why should I intrude my vindication on him, when he cared not to hear it? He had no right to believe me guilty. Had a winged spirit from another sphere come and told me that he was false, I would have spurned the accusation, and clung to him more closely and more confidingly.
"But you knew his infirmity," whispered accusing conscience, "even before you loved him; and have you not seen him writhing at your feet in agonies of remorse, for the indulgence of passions more torturing to himself than to you! It is you who have driven him from country and home, innocently, it is true, but he is not less a wanderer and an exile. Write and tell him the simple, holy truth, then folding your hands meekly over your heart, leave the result to the disposal of the God of futurity."
Then words came like water rushing through breaking ice. They came without effort or volition, and I knew not what they were till I saw them looking at me from the paper, like my own image reflected in a glass. Had I been writing a page for the book of God's remembrance, it could not have been more nakedly true. I do believe there is inspiration now given to the spirit in the extremity of its need, and that we often speak and write as if moved by the Holy Ghost, and language comes to us in a Pentecostal shower, burning with heaven's fire, and tongues of flame are put in our mouth, and our spirits move as with the wings of a mighty wind.
I recollect the closing sentence of the letter. I knew it contained my fate; and yet I felt that I had not the power to change it.
"Come back to your country, your mother, and Edith. I do not bid you come back to me, for it seems that the distance that separates us is too immeasurable to be overcome. I remember telling you, when the midnight moon was shining upon us in the solitude of our chamber, that I saw as in a vision a frightful abyss opening between us, and I stood on one icy brink and you on the other, and I saw you receding further and further from me, and my arms vainly sought to reach over the cold chasm, and my own voice came back to me in mournful echoes. That vision is realized. Our hearts can never again meet till that gulf is closed, and confidence firm as a rock makes a bridge for our souls.
"I have loved you as man never should be loved, and that love can never pass away. But from the deathlike trance in which you left me, my spirit has risen with holier views of life and its duties. An union, so desolated by storms of passion as ours has been, must be sinful and unhallowed in the sight of God. It has been severed by the hand of violence, and never, with my consent, will be renewed, unless we can make a new covenant, to which the bow of heaven's peace shall be an everlasting sign; till passion shall be exalted by esteem, love sustained by confidence, and religion pure and undefiled be the sovereign principle of our lives."
CHAPTER LIV.
The Tombs!—shall I ever forget my first visit to that dismal abode of crime, woe, and despair?—never!
I had nerved myself for the trial, and went with the spirit of a martyr, though with blanched cheek and faltering step, into the heart of that frowning pile, on which I could never gaze without shuddering.