"Upon my release I returned gladly to their joyous household, welcomed I could not say with what joyous affection. Soon afterwards I found a position in the office of a law firm and got my start in life.
"And now I cross the path of some things that cannot be written. But you who know what my life and character had been will nobly understand: remember your last words to me.
"One day I offered my hand to the daughter. I told her the whole truth: that there was some one else—not free; that no one could take the place of this other was filling at the moment, and would always fill. Nevertheless, if she would accept me on these conditions, everything that it was in my power to promise she could have.
"She said that in time she would win the rest.
"A few weeks later that letter came from you, bringing the intelligence that changed everything. (Do you remember my reply? I seem only this moment to have dropped the pen.) As soon as I could control myself, I told her that now you were free, that it was but justice and kindness alike to her and to me that I should give here the chance to reconsider the engagement. A week passed, I went again. I warned her how different the situation had become. I could promise less than before—I could not say how little. A month later I went again.
"Ah, well—that is all!
"The summer after my marriage I travelled to Virginia regarding a landsuit. One day I rode far out of my course into the path of the country where you lived. I remained some days strolling over the silent woods and fields, noting the bushes on the lawn, such as you had carried over into Kentucky, hunting out the quiet nooks where you were used to read in your girlhood. Those long, sweet, sacred summer days alone with you there before you were married! O Jessica! Jessica! Jessica! Jessica! And to this day the sight of peach blossoms in the spring—the rustle of autumn leaves under my feet! Can you recall the lines of Malory? 'Men and women could love together seven years, and then was love truth and faithfulness.' How many more than seven have I loved you!—you who never gave me anything but friendship, but who would in time, I hope, have given me everything if I had come back. Ah, I did come back! Many a time even now as soon as I have hurried through the joyous gateways of sleep, I come back over the mountains to you as naturally as though there had been no years to separate and to age. Let me tell you all this! My very life would be incomplete without it! I owed something to you long before I owed anything to another: a duty can never set aside a duty. And as to what I have owed you since, it becomes more and more the noblest earthly that I shall ever leave unpaid. I did not know you perfectly when we parted: I was too young, too ignorant of the world, too ignorant of many women. A man must have touched their coarseness in order to appreciate their refinement; have been wounded by untruthfulness to understand their delicate honour; he must have been driven to turn his eyes mercifully away from their stain before he can ever look with all the reverence and gratitude of his heart and soul upon their brows of chastity.
"But of my life otherwise. I take it fir granted that you would know where I stand, what I have become, whether I have kept faith with the ideals of my youth.
"I have succeeded, perhaps reached now what men call the highest point of their worldly prosperity, made good my resolve that no human power should defeat me. All that Macbeth had not I have: a quiet throne of my own, children, wife, troops of friends, duties, honours, ease. There have been times when with natural misgiving lest I had wandered too far these many summers on a sea of glory, I have prepared for myself the lament of Wolsey on his fall: yet ill fortune had not overwhelmed me or mine.
"All this prosperity, as the mere fruit of my toil, has been less easy than for many. I may not boast the Apostle that I have fought a good fight, but I can say that I fought a hard one. The fight will always be hard for any man who undertakes to conquer life with the few simple weapons I have used and who will accept victory only upon such terms as I have demanded. For be my success small or great, it has been won without inner compromise or other form of self-abasement. No man can look me in the eyes and say I ever wronged him for my own profit; none may charge that I have smiled on him in order to use him, or call him my friend that I might make him do for me the work of a servant.