A Manifest Destiny

by Julia Magruder

It was even so. She knew now, at last, and the knowledge had come to her when inexorable necessity compelled her to separate herself forever from the man who, not suddenly, but by a system of gradual evolution—from the crude emotions of her girlhood through the growing consciousness of later years—had now manifested himself to her as all her heart could desire, all her spirit could crave, all her mature womanhood could need. She realized that he had long been this to her, but with a thick veil between herself and him which had hid the truth from her. The reading of the letter given her by Mr. Cortlin had torn that veil apart, and she saw him as he was, the man of her ideal. She did not, at the same moment, see her own heart as it was. This vision had come to her with her renewed intercourse with Horace, who had appeared before her now the ripe product of the noble possibilities which she had vaguely perceived in him once, when she had cared too little to think deeply of him in any way.

Oh, to have kept the place she had once had at his dear side! To have shared with him the privations of a life that would have been narrow and obscure indeed compared with the one which she had known in its stead, but, oh, how rich in the way she had now come to count riches!

Thoughts like these she had to fight against. Perhaps in the end they would conquer, and would hunt her to the death; but now, until she could get out of the country, she must put them down.

She had only a few days left, and she determined to devote a part of these to some farewell visits among the tenants. As far as she had been able to do, she had made friends with these poor folk, and had given what she could to relieve their necessities; but, in comparison with what was needed, the money at her command had seemed pitifully small.

When Lady Hurdly, dressed in her deep widow’s mourning, descended the steps of her stately residence and entered the waiting carriage, whose black-liveried servants saluted her respectfully, she had a consciousness that servants and tenants alike must feel a certain commiseration for the great lady, such as they had known her, now sunk to poverty as well as obscurity. This feeling made her manner a little colder and prouder then usual as she sat alone in the sunshine of a lovely autumn morning and was driven between the beautiful English hedgerows and through the fertile fields which she had learned to love. How soon would all be changed for her! And changed to what? The isolated exile of a place filled with the haunting memories of the past—her mother, whom she had lost forever, and her young lover, who was as absolutely lost to her.

Strangely to herself, it was the latter that she felt to be the keener pain. To the former she was reconciled; as we do, sooner or later, reconcile ourselves to the inevitable; but the supreme sting of this other grief was that she felt it need not have been. Sitting there in her carriage, the object of much eager attention, she felt so desolate and wretched that it was with difficulty that she kept back her tears.

She dreaded the ordeal before her. She felt that she must take leave of these people and say a word of kindness to them, since she was so miserably unable to do more; but these visits were always depressing. Since the tenants had discovered that they had a sympathetic listener in her, they had luxuriated in the pouring out of their sorrows. Of course they had not ventured to accuse her husband of being connected with them, but the lesson was one that he who ran might read.

So, when the carriage stopped at the door of the first cottage, she had made up her mind that she could not stand much in the way of these miserable confidences to-day, and would make her visits short.

But when she entered the house she was conscious of a total change of atmosphere. Every creature in the room gave proof of this, according to his or her kind. The old woman who sat knitting by the hearth looked up at her with a dim twinkle in the eyes that had heretofore expressed nothing but a consciousness that things were bad and getting worse; and the children, who, indeed, had taken little count of the depression of their elders, now manifestly shared their relief from it. It was their mother who, with a strange smile of hope on her careworn face and a fervent clasping together of her work-worn hands, made the explanation to the visitor.