Forest Days: A Romance of Old Times

by G. P. R. James

The moment they were gone she clasped her hands together, and burst into tears--tears, not calm and soothing; tears, not bitter and purifying; but tears of fierce and passionate anger at meeting, perhaps, kinder treatment than she deserved. Seating herself upon the step to the window, she sobbed for a few minutes with uncontrollable vehemence; and then, starting up, she approached the lamp, and once more read the lines she had received.

They seemed to change the current of her thoughts again, for her eye fixed upon vacancy, the paper dropped from her hand, and once or twice she uttered, in a low, solemn voice, the word "Return!"

"Oh no!" she cried at length, "no; I cannot return. What! return to my father's house, with every object that my eyes could light upon crying out upon me, and telling me what I was once, and what I am now,--to have the jeers and smiles and nods of my companions, and be pointed at as the light-o'-love and the wanton!--to be marked in the walk, and in the church, to be shunned like a leper, to be pitied by those who hate me most, and looked cold upon by those who loved me! No, no, no! I can never return. There is no return in life from any course that we have once taken.--I feel it, I know it now. We may strive hard, we may look back, we may stretch forth our arms towards the place from which we set out; but we can never reach it again, struggle however we may. No, no; I must forward! I have chosen my path, I have sealed my own fate, and by it I must abide!"

She paused and thought for several minutes, and as she did so, it would seem, the fears and apprehensions, the doubts and anxieties, that dog the steps of sin, the hell-hounds that are ever ready to fall upon their prey the moment that lassitude overtakes it on its onward course, seized upon the heart of poor Kate Greenly with their envenomed teeth.

Yes, you may struggle on, poor thing; you may burst away, for an instant, from the fangs that hold, you may get a fresh start and run on, thinking that you have distanced them, but those fell pursuers, Fear and Apprehension, Doubt and Anxiety, are still behind you, and shall hunt you unto death!

They were now, for the first time, tearing the sides of their victim; and the shapes they assumed may be discovered by the words that broke from her in her mental agony--"He will never surely abandon me!--he will never surely ill-treat me! after all that he has promised, after all that he has told me, after all that he has sworn! He will never surely be so base, so utterly base!--and yet why has he not come on with me? Why, after two poor days' companionship, send me on with serving-men? If he needs must to London, why not take me with him?--But no," she continued, soothing herself with fond hopes, "no, it cannot be; he has some weighty business on hand requiring instant dispatch. Doubtless his journey was too swift and fatiguing for a woman.--Oh, yes, he will come back to me soon.--Perhaps he is already at his castle--perhaps I may see him to-morrow:" and she clapped her pretty hands with joy at the happiness which imagination had called up.

At that moment, however, by one of those strange turns of thought which the mind sometimes suddenly takes, whether we will or not--like a bird struggling away from the hand that would hold it--the image of poor Ralph Harland rose up before her, and the satisfaction she felt at the idea of again seeing her seducer, seemed to contrast itself painfully in imagination with the anguish which he must endure at never beholding more the object of his earliest love, and knowing that she was in the arms of another.

"What," she asked herself, "what would be my own feelings under such circumstances?" and the answer which naturally sprang to her lips from the eager and passionate heart that beat within her bosom, was, "I should kill some one and die!"

The contemplation, however, was too painful; she would think of it no more. Sorrow and repentance had not yet sufficiently taken hold of her, to render it difficult for Kate Greenly to cast away thought with the usual lightness of her nature, and she answered the reproaches of conscience, as usually happens, with a falsehood.

"Oh, he will soon find some one to console him!" she said; and for fear of her own better judgment convicting her of an untruth, she hastened to employ herself on the trifles of the toilet, and to seek in sleep that repose of heart which her waking hours were never more to know. But there was a thorn in her pillow too, and her nights had lost no small portion of their peace.