A marble statue would as quickly have aroused a feeling of passion in my heart. She was cold and did not seem to realize that I was not a model husband, for I was her attentive and watchful companion. She seemed thoroughly satisfied, while my heart was hardening into stone.
In July we visited a flower show in Regent's Park, accompanied by two English ladies, both married, romantic and full of sentiment. In our rounds, we met a lady in company with a gentleman and a little boy. She was about eighteen years old, with dark melting eyes under a perfectly arched brow, and a broad low forehead, over which her black hair was banded in massive silken waves. Her complexion was so deeply brunette as to be almost olive. The blood was rich and flowing in her cheeks, and her lips were two full ripe riven cherries, when she spoke parting over large pearly teeth. Her head was exquisitely poised on shoulders of superb mould, and her form and gait queenly. We were on the opposite side of a wonderful erica admiring its masses of pink flowers. Our eyes met. I stood as if spell bound. I had never before seen a perfect beauty and all of my own chosen type. She was exactly my opposite, I, high florid; she intensely brunette.
The color came into her cheek and mounted to her very hair when she caught my fixed gaze. One of our English friends noticed this. Afterwards in our walks, we met again and again the lady in the brown shawl—for so our friends called her. Whenever we met, my eyes instinctively sought those of the unknown, and always caught her glance in return, and at every such encounter her face crimsoned. This was remarked by our two lady friends and caused them to banter me. They told my wife to be on her guard; that if I were not already married, they would say I had certainly met my fate.
Ah! little did they dream they were speaking truth—that this girl was my fate for weal or for woe! I heard the unknown's voice several times without catching her words. It sank into my very soul. I became absent minded throughout the remainder of the day. Belle joined the ladies in declaring that the "brown shawl" had bewitched me.
Mr. Jamison, I have a very decided theory of true marriage. The Bible is a mass of oriental rubbish! Forgive me, I do not mean to offend. I reverence the bible, but not every word of it. It is made up of ingots of gold covered and almost hidden within masses of sand—grains of truth and Godly wisdom, in bulks of chaff. It is made up of God's wisdom and oriental fable legend and poetry. You reverence the gold, the grains—the sands and the chaff. I wash out the sand, and pick out the gold; winnow away the chaff, and gather up the rich grains.
Nothing to me in the book of Genesis, reveals more deep knowledge of human nature, than the account of the creation of Adam; he was made from the dust of the ground, and his soul was breathed into him by the breath of God. When a man dies, his body returns to the dust, his soul goes back to its maker. God created man! male and female, created he them! They were then good. He afterward separated the female from the male. Each thus became imperfect—each became a part and not a whole. There is a constant yearning in them for reunion. When the true Eve unites with her Adam, they become one, and their union is bliss. When so united, no man shall put them asunder. The union is founded directly on natural and, not on moral or religious laws. The natural laws speak within, and draw irresistibly two hearts to be mated. Whoever obeys the impulse find a Heaven on earth. Others, falsely-mated, may not find absolute misery, but, it is equally certain, true happiness is never theirs. Men and women are made for each other; not one man for one certain woman, but in classes. A man finds his physical mate in one of a certain class. If her moral qualities be not fitted by education, he should wait with a well grounded hope of finding another in the same class, whose bringing up will have better fitted her for him.
Now, the woman in the brown shawl was my mate, that is one of the proper class. I could not get her out of my mind, and my wife's coldness, constantly made me yearn for her. Travel was distasteful to Belle, so that before the fall had set in, we were again at home. I did not love my wife, she did not love me. She was fully satisfied to live with me in the proud dignity given us by our vast estates.
Besides his plantation, negroes and stock, my father had left me largely over a hundred thousand dollars in money and convertible bonds and mortgages. I resolved to turn all of these into cash, and to abandon wife and country. I got all in readiness; executed and left with my lawyers papers conveying every thing else to Belle; went to New York on some pretended business and sailed for Europe, writing home that I would never return. I sought the American colonies and hotels in every country, in a sort of vague hope that I could find the woman in the brown shawl. She was my fate. I was mad with the one idea. I was no libertine, Mr. Jamison. I simply yearned for her, not asking what the result would be should she be found. I drifted into the East and wandered through Russia, Turkey, Greece, Palestine and Egypt. I did not meet her; and could get no tidings of her.
[ [1] The reader may take all reference to this gentleman as fact or fiction, as his own fancy suggests.