And in the climax of her hysterical passion she was almost ready to lay down her young life that her beloved might step over it into liberty and light.
“Oh, why, oh, why did he ever ruin his hopes by wedding me? Why? Oh, I know too well why. Poor Alick! it was out of the goodness of his heart that he did it! He was always so good to me from my infancy up, calling me his child, giving me everything I needed, doing all I asked. And when he saw me a poor little motherless and homeless girl, he took pity on me, and raised me up and put me on his bosom and comforted me and tried to love me; but he cannot, because I am not lovable; and now, even now, he never gives me an unkind word or look, only stays away from me because he cannot love me, and he is too honest to feign a love he cannot feel. Oh, Alick! I would die to make you free and happy again, if it were not a sin! I would, dear, I would!”
Such was the burden of her lamentations in her hours of secret suffering.
No word of these sad plaints reached his ears. Her paroxysms of anguish would have exhausted themselves, or she would have obtained some degree of self-command before his late return home; so that though pale and sad, and bearing the traces of recent tears, she met him with composure; for she remembered, poor child, his abhorrence of an ugly, weeping face.
But now he had no mercy on her; she seemed to him a fetter that galled him, and he pitied himself and not her.
Sometimes, when she looked even more than usually pale and ill, he wondered whether she was going to die; but he wondered without alarm, and even without pity.
Drusilla spent the long winter evenings in reading. She read a great number of books, but they were not always the most judiciously chosen, or the best calculated to cheer her spirits or strengthen her mind.
Among the new works that Alexander brought home one night and threw carelessly upon the table, was Mrs. Crowe’s “Night Side of Nature.”
And this book subsequently fell into Drusilla’s hands, and she seized and read it with avidity. And worse than all, she read it in her lonely night watches in that isolated country house.
The work, written with great power to prove the reality of the re-appearance of departed spirits in this world, and filled with accredited stories of apparitions, haunted houses, marvellous visions, presentiments, omens, warnings, dreams, et cetera, had a great fascination for Drusilla, and night after night she pored over its dark pages with a morbid fervor.