Mrs. Gurney's apology

by Mary Jary Gurney

It was not so hard a conquest. My requirements were simple and natural. I was surrounded by everything unreal and artificial. I demanded the society of a living man, free from the education and influences of a family holding all these foolish theories that deprive us of the real enjoyments of life—one who could look upon water as water, and drink it without a homily—look upon food, not as a subject of prayer, but of mastication—enjoy the sunshine and air as sunshine and air, and talk with men and women as such without shrinking from them as heterodox, or loving them as orthodox too well—one who could listen to music and find it pleasant to the ear, and not be exercised whether God intended it should be agreeable—who could contemplate a picture not as an engine of the devil, but a work of art—one who could enjoy all delights as requirements of nature, and not as subjects of a deep concern. In Mr. Taylor I found such a man. He looked upon all these things as, indeed, I also saw them; but with him it was not a matter which cost him questioning. He knew it all without thought, and without education, as they call it. He lived in the intuitive knowledge of it.

In the interchange of kindred thoughts about these things we lived day by day, until, unconsciously, I found myself craving every word he spoke. I found his presence, which took me back to the men of my ancestral pride, a necessity of my life, and, at last, I felt myself for the first time beneath an influence of love.

The night that followed this discovery, when I knelt down by my bedside, his image stood between me and the far-off height on which my subjected brain had placed God.

And when I saw him there, I struggled, as I had been led to believe was duty, to dash down the image that stood at once in the way of my human vows and in the very presence of the stern methodical God of their education.

Yet there it stood, and there it must stand forever. Yes, dear E * * *, I loved him almost before I knew it; and he I felt, moreover, loved me, though not a word was spoken between us. It was not his to speak, and I would have concealed from my very inmost self the fact of this love.

But it could not be so forever. To maintain the form of a superiority, where none existed, became at last an impossibility. We loved, and the expression of it I foresaw could no longer be controlled by either, and so it came first from my lips. He was riding beside me, and did not reply to me. He said, out into the air, into the heavens: God has given me too great a joy. Then he turned to me and said: I have loved you from the first day I saw you. I loved you because I felt it was my destiny; other than this I know not why; I only know I loved you.

Dear E * * *, he was so beautiful, so noble then, in the expression of that love so long concealed. The earth whirled around me, and his arm caught me falling unconsciously. When I came to myself I was resting on his bosom, confident of its strength as of a breastplate of iron, though I saw his eyes dim with tears.

We rode homewards in silence. There was a beauty in the very stones beneath our feet. The wayside flowers had an odor too exquisite to the sense. The air and sky were filled with an influence too beautiful for earth. I was very, very happy. Could this feeling have rested in me, I had been content—faithful to my duty, as I had been taught—to have lived ever so. But my heart was now craving constantly the repetition of that moment. It could not be satisfied but in his presence. Hitherto patient only under a sense of wrong, I now began to be agitated by a passion in which every feeling of my life had centred.

It is not necessary to recount all the conflicts which it brought to me, nor to trace the way in which my nobler nature sunk gradually before the threatened penalty of social destruction; it is enough to say that I was borne by it to the decision which involved my destiny, and I yielded to the social law for the last time, because I had not yet come to that point at which a woman, driven to the very presence of death by the pressure of a false relation, thinks at last for herself, and hesitates no longer how to shape her course, should even the remaining wreck of her life be dashed to destruction.

Last autumn I began to feel myself breaking down. I could live thus no longer. When the time came we usually went to London, a while before the opening of Parliament, I felt that the crisis had come. If I went down with my husband in any hope of escaping the feelings that were mastering me, I knew well that on my return this life of passion would only recommence at sight of its object. If I remained alone, I believed I had strength to put it from me—I believed I could part with him, if for the days or weeks that would follow, after I had left him, I might meet no other gaze than God’s—if I might exhaust the despair that I well knew would follow in silence.