Formed for each other, our love was sudden and resistless as the bolt of heaven: the first glance of those dear speaking eyes gave me a new being, and awaked in me ideas never known before.
The strongest sympathy attached me to him in spite of myself: I thought it friendship, but felt that friendship more lively than what I called my love for Sir George; all conversation but his became insupportable to me; every moment that he passed from me, I counted as lost in my existence.
I loved him; that tenderness hourly increased: I hated Sir George, I fancied him changed; I studied to find errors in a man who had, a few weeks before, appeared to me amiable, and whom I had consented to marry; I broke with him, and felt a weight removed from my soul.
I trembled when Rivers appeared; I died to tell him my whole soul was his; I watched his looks, to find there the same sentiments with which he had inspired me: that transporting moment at length arrived; I had the delight to find our tenderness was mutual, and to devote my life to making happy the lord of my desires.
Mrs. Melmoth’s letter brought me my father’s commands, if unmarried, to continue so till his return.
He added, that he intended me for a relation, to whose family he had obligations; that, his affairs having suffered such a happy revolution, he had it in his power, and, therefore, thought it his duty, to pay this debt of gratitude; and, at the same time, hoping to make me happy by connecting me with an amiable family, allied to him by blood and friendship; and uniting me to a man whom report spoke worthy of all my tenderness.
You may remember, my dearest Bell, how strongly I was affected on reading those letters: I wrote to Rivers, to beg him to defer our marriage; but the manner in which he took that request, and the fear of appearing indifferent to him, conquered all sense of what I owed to my father, and I married him; making it, however, a condition that he should ask no explanation of my conduct till I chose to give it.
I knew not the character of my father; he might be a tyrant, and divide us from each other: Rivers doubted my tenderness; would not my waiting, if my father had afterwards refused his consent to our union, have added to those cruel suspicions? might he not have supposed I had ceased to love him, and waited for the excuse of paternal authority to justify a change of sentiment?
In short, love bore down every other consideration; if I persisted in this delay, I might hazard losing all my soul held dear, the only object for which life was worth my care.
I determined, if I married, to give up all claim to my father’s fortune, which I should justly forfeit by my disobedience to his commands: I hoped, however, Rivers’s merit, and my father’s paternal affection, when he knew us both, would influence him to make some provision for me as his daughter.