CHAPTER II
A Pro and a Con
With a pen flowing quick from feelings of the most generous warmth, Edgar wrote the following letter:
To Dr. Marchmont.
Accuse me not of precipitance, my dear Doctor, nor believe me capable of forgetting the wisdom of your suggestions, nor of lightly weighing those evils with which your zeal has encompassed me, though I write at this instant to confess a total contrariety of sentiment, to call back every promise of delay, and to make an unqualified avowal, that the period of caution is past! Camilla is not happy—something, I know not what, has disturbed the gay serenity of her bosom: she has forbid me to enquire the cause;—one way only remains to give me a claim to her confidence.—O Doctor! wonder not if cold, tardy, suspicious—I had nearly said unfeeling, caution, shrinks at such a moment, from the rising influence of warmer sympathy, which bids me sooth her in distress, shield her from danger, strengthen all her virtues, and participate in their emanations!
You will not do me the injustice to think me either impelled or blinded by external enchantments; you know me to have withstood their yet fuller blaze in her cousin: O no! were she despoiled of all personal attraction by the same ravaging distemper that has been so fierce with her poor sister; were a similar cruel accident to rob her form of all symmetry, she would yet be more fascinating to my soul, by one single look, one single word, one sweet beaming smile, diffusing all the gaiety it displays, than all of beauty, all of elegance, all of rank, all of wealth, the whole kingdom, in some wonderful aggregate, could oppose to her.
Her face, her form, however penetrating in loveliness, aid, but do not constitute, her charms; no, 'tis the quick intelligence of soul that mounts to her eyes, 'tis the spirit checked by sweetness, the sweetness animated by spirit, the nature so nobly above all artifice, all study—O Doctor! restore to me immediately every vestige, every trait of any promise, any acquiescence, any idea the most distant, that can be construed into a compliance with one moment's requisition of delay!
Edgar Mandlebert.
Cleves Park, Friday Evening.
Camilla, meanwhile, shut up in her room, wept almost without cessation, from a sense of general unhappiness, though fixed to no point, and from a disturbance of mind, a confusion of ideas and of feelings, that rendered her incapable of reflection. She was again followed by Eugenia, and could no longer refuse, to her tender anxiety, a short detail of the attack which occasioned her disorder; happy, at least, in reciting it, that by unfolding the cause, there no longer remained any necessity to repress the effects of her affliction.
To her great surprise, however, Eugenia only said: 'And is this all, my dear Camilla?'
'All!' exclaimed Camilla.
'Yes, is it all?—I was afraid some great misfortune had happened.'