“The very touch of it penetrates my marrow,” he said, after putting it away in his pocket as though it were red-hot; “but for all my dread of its infamous contents, I have read it a hundred times. If I am tossing about at night, unable to sleep from thinking of it, I cannot help making a light, and reading it again.”
“Did you ever talk to her about it?” I asked, and I am sure I was trembling all over; for I felt that Jo Erring, with all his prospects, was now a wreck and would never be himself again.
“Not about this, directly,” he answered, “but she has told me that she was engaged to Bragg. She treated it so coolly that I thought perhaps such things are common, and that I am unreasonable to feel as I do. I am not familiar with the ways of good society; it may be that love is only an amusement, to be indulged in with every agreeable person; it may be that a woman is none the less a true woman for having been caressed and fondled by different men, and that it is no fault for a young girl to spend half a night with a lover who is liable to be succeeded in a month by another, but if such is the social creed, something convinces me that society is wrong, and that my revolting manhood is right.”
He rose from his chair, and walked up and down in the dark part of the room again, and I could not help thinking of what Mr. Biggs had said: That every one has a private history.
“I do not know who broke the engagement,” he said, returning to the fire at last, “but I have evidence in this letter that it was not Mateel, therefore it is fair to suppose that the insolent dog who sent this, tired of the contract, and broke it off. The girl was heart-broken, no doubt, and was brought West with the hope that she would encounter an ignorant fellow with industrious habits, but no sensibility, who could comfortably support her until old age and death came to the relief of her heart, but who could never hope to have her love, for that she had given already, although it was not wanted. Through the cruel neglect of God I became the man who is expected to labor early and late that she may be made as comfortable as possible, in her affliction. I receive nothing in return for this except the knowledge that as another man did not want her love, I may have her to care for, as her family is not well-to-do, and somebody must do it.
“Whenever I knock at my heart’s door, it is opened by a skeleton hand, and this letter handed out to me; if ambition beckons to me now, the fleshless fingers of an inexorable devil hold me back; and instead of pushing on, I sit down and cry that I have been so disgraced through no fault of my own. They thought I was a rough country boy, lacking so delicate a thing as a heart, and that I would be content with a broken flower because it had once been very beautiful; I doubt if they thought of me at all, except that I was industrious and healthy, as all the consideration was for Mateel, who had been wounded and hurt.”
I listened to the wind blowing on the outside, and I thought it was more mournful than I had ever heard it before.
“I cannot tell you how much my marriage to Mateel would have done for me had this letter never been written, for I should have divined its existence though it had never fallen in my way. Before I read it I was as happy as it is possible for a man to be, though the fear often oppressed me that a dark shadow would fall across my path, for I had always been taught to believe that great sorrow followed great happiness. The shadow has come, and the devils are probably content with its black intensity. I was proud that the home I had provided for Mateel was better than any she had ever lived in before, and was kind and careful of her that she might bless the day we met; I was proud to be known as a progressing, growing man that her father might be proud of me, as he knew how hard my boyhood was, but I see now that they all regarded me as a convenience; a trusty packhorse of great endurance, and I know that my years of work for Mateel were not worthy of a man’s ambition. I can never tell you, though I would willingly if I could, how great is the burden I must bear from this time forward. Hope has been killed within me, except hope to die, and my ambition has been cruelly trampled upon and killed by a man I never wronged.”
He sat crouching before the fire, like a man who had been beaten without cause by superior numbers, and who felt humiliated because his oppressors had escaped, and he could not be avenged upon them.
“Until six weeks ago, Mateel was a perfect woman in my eyes, and the queen of my heart; but since that time I have begun to criticise her (to myself; she does not know it), and if I become an indifferent husband, the fault is her own. I cannot be the same as I was before, for I shall be inclined to look upon her simply as the convenience she undertook to become, instead of my wife. If she fails to be convenient—and I fear I shall be a hard critic—I cannot help observing it in my present state of mind, though I shall remark it only to myself. She has deliberately deceived me, but in spite of it I love her, and every night-wind brings me word that it is not returned. The very wheels in the mill give voice to her entreaty to Bragg to remember that she will never love me; every sound mocks me that my wife is proud of her love for another, and piteously begs that it may never be forgotten. Since reading the letter I have never kissed my wife, or put my arms about her, and I hope God may strike me dead if ever I do either again.”