'Ah! you little truant,' said she, in a voice of kindness, 'where have you been so long? My son has visited me in your absence; he passed through this part of the country, in his way to the seat of a friend. He staid with me two days, during which I sent half a dozen messages to Morton Park, but you were flown away, it seems, nor could I learn any tidings of you. Augustus,' continued she, without observing the emotions she excited, 'had scarcely quitted the house an hour when you arrived.'
I made no reply; an unaccountable sensation seized, and oppressed, my heart—sinking on the sopha, I burst into a convulsive flood of tears.
My friend was struck: all the indiscretion of her conduct (as she has since told me) flashed suddenly into her mind; she felt that, in indulging her own maternal sensations, she had, perhaps, done me an irreparable injury, and she shuddered at the probable consequences. It was some moments before either of us recovered;—our conversation was that evening, for the first time, constrained, reserved, and painful; and we retired at an early hour to our respective apartments.
I spent the night in self-examination. I was compelled to acknowledge, to myself, that solitude, the absence of other impressions, the previous circumstances that had operated on my character, my friendship for Mrs Harley, and her eloquent, affectionate, reiterated, praises of her son, had combined to awaken all the exquisite, though dormant, sensibilities of my nature; and, however romantic it might appear to others, and did appear even to myself, I felt, that I loved an ideal object (for such was Augustus Harley to me) with a tender and fervent excess; an excess, perhaps, involving all my future usefulness and welfare. 'People, in general,' says Rousseau, 'do not sufficiently consider the influence which the first attachments, between man and woman, have over the remainder of their lives; they do not perceive, that an impression so strong, and so lively, as that of love, is productive of a long chain of effects, which pass unobserved in a course of years, yet, nevertheless, continue to operate till the day of their deaths.' It was in vain I attempted to combat this illusion; my reason was but an auxiliary to my passion, it persuaded me, that I was only doing justice to high and uncommon worth; imagination lent her aid, and an importunate sensibility, panting after good unalloyed, completed the seduction.
From this period Mrs Harley was more guarded in her conduct; she carefully avoided the mention of her son.—Under pretence of having an alteration made in the frame, she removed his picture from the library; but the constraint she put upon herself was too evident and painful; we no longer sought, with equal ardour, an interchange of sentiment, reserve took place of the tender confidence of friendship; a thousand times, while I gazed upon her dear averted countenance, I yearned to throw myself upon her bosom, to weep, to unfold to her the inmost recesses of my mind—that ingenuous mind, which languished for communication, and preyed upon itself! Dear and cruel friend, why did you transfix my heart with the barbed and envenomed arrow, and then refuse to administer the only healing balsam?
My visits to Mrs Harley became less frequent; I shut myself up whole days in my apartment, at Morton Park, or wandered through its now leafless groves, absorbed in meditation—fostering the sickly sensibility of my soul, and nursing wild, improbable, chimerical, visions of felicity, that, touched by the sober wand of truth, would have 'melted into thin air.' 'The more desires I have' (observes an acute, and profound French Philosopher[4]) 'the less ardent they are. The torrents that divide themselves into many branches are the least dangerous in their course. A strong passion is a solitary passion, that concentrates all our desires within one point.'
[4:] Helvetius.
CHAPTER XIX
I had not seen my friend for many days, when, on a dark and stormy night, in the month of January, between nine and ten o'clock, the family at Morton Park were alarmed, by a loud and violent knocking at the hall door.