But it was not all.
Though Cornelius had been, was still, very fond of me, he had never of course been in love with me. He was in love with Miriam, and if he had enough self-control and self-respect not to show more of the feeling than it was becoming for a child like me to see, he loved too ardently not to be for ever betraying himself to jealous and watchful eyes like mine. His look rested on her with a tenderness and a passion, his voice addressed her in lingering accents, of which he was himself unconscious. His very tones changed in uttering her name, just as the meaning of his face became different when he looked at her. If I had known the frail and fleeting nature of human feelings, I might not have trusted these first signs of a first passion; but all I knew of love was what the fairy tales had told me, and in them I had never read but of loves that had no ending, and were not less ardent than enduring. That Cornelius might one day be less absorbed in Miriam, less oblivious of me, was a thought I never knew nor cherished. The future, when I could forget the present enough to think of the future, had but one image—Cornelius eternally loving Miriam, eternally forgetting me.
But even this was not all.
Miriam was in all the beauty of womanhood; Cornelius in all the fervour of man's young love. She was with him almost all the day long, not alone, but with the check of a constant presence that irritated the fever liberty and untroubled solitude might have soothed to satiety; and this, or I am much deceived, she knew well. He had to repress himself perpetually, in a way which must have been wearying and painfully irksome. His temper was too generous to wreak itself upon me, but I became conscious of a most galling and yet most inevitable truth: in that studio where I had won my place by so much perseverance; where I had shown to Cornelius a faith so entire and unshaken; where I, a child, and restless as all children are more or less, had been the patient slave of his art; where Cornelius had always welcomed me with a greeting so sincere and so cordial in its very homeliness; yes, there, even there, I was no longer welcome. Daily, hourly, I read in his face, in his eyes, in his voice, that my presence was burdensome, my absence a release. I knew it, and I had to endure it; I had to be ever drinking this last sickening drop of a cup that was never drained. I was jealous: and the word sums up all my miseries. I was also what is called a precocious child, and perhaps I felt more acutely than many; I say perhaps, for jealousy is an instinct,—is not the dog jealous of its master?—assuredly it is not a feeling that waits for years or knowledge. It is the very shadow of love; and who yet watched the birth of love in a human heart?
I loved Cornelius as an ardent and jealous daughter loves her father, and I was miserable because he bestowed on another that which I neither could wish for, nor even imagine the wish to claim. As was my love, so was my jealousy, filial and childlike: a jealousy of the heart, in which not the faintest trace of any other feeling blended. It was sinful, but it was pure. I did not suffer because Cornelius was in love with Miriam, but because he loved her. If, at twelve, I could have understood and separated feelings that blend so strangely in the heart, I know that I would not have envied Miriam one spark of the passion, but I know that I would still, as I did bitterly, have grudged her every atom of the tenderness. If I did not feel jealousy in that mysterious intensity which has stung so many hearts to madness. I felt it in its calmer bitterness and more patient sorrow. The peculiar agony of this tormenting passion seems to me to lie in the blending of two most opposite feelings: love, from which it springs, and hatred, which it engenders; it has thus the warmth of one and the fierceness of the other, and there also lies the evil and the danger. I loved Cornelius, I detested Miriam. My only salvation from what might have been the utter ruin of my soul, heart, mind, and whole nature, was that I loved him infinitely more than I hated her; woe to me had it been otherwise!
But even as it was, I suffered—and justly—from my sin as well as from my sorrow; and most unhappily I brooded over both unsuspected. Cornelius had detected my jealousy, treated it as a jest, and forgotten it; Kate had, I believe, vaguely conjectured its existence, but I was little with her and on my guard; the only one who really knew what I suffered and why I suffered, was the one who had first inflicted and who now daily embittered the wound. Yes, Miriam knew it: I saw it in her look, in her speech, in her manner; and, if anything could render me more unhappy, it was the consciousness that my miserable weakness lay bare for her to triumph over.
Thus, and more than thus, I felt. Our true life lies in our heart; from within it, according as we feel with force or weakness, we rule the outward world in which we are cast. Strange and dramatic incidents make not the eventful life: it borrows its charm or tragic power from the ebb and flow of feelings. There never was a child who led a more sheltered existence in a more sheltered home; whose life was less varied by adventure beyond the routine of daily joys and sorrows; and yet to all that I felt then I may trace the whole of my future destiny. When I look back on the past, I feel that but for that which preceded, the plain incidents that are to follow would seem, even to me, tame and trifling; but the stakes make the game, and when happiness has to be lost or won the heart will leap at each throw of the dice, and beat fast or slowly with the faintest alternations of hope and despair.
I remember well one day at the close of winter. They both felt tired, and sat on the low couch where I had so often sat by him or watched him sleeping; he now exerted himself to amuse her as he had once done for me; I sat at a table by the window; a book lay open before me, but I could not read; I seemed all eyes, all ears, all sense for them.
"You must sit to me some day for a Mary Magdalene," said Cornelius.
"You spoke of a Juliet the other day," she replied, with a careless smile; "what am I not to be?"