“Lady, though I am a pirate, recoil not from me. I am sensible to the feelings of honor, and need not be feared by any lady; in the uprightness of my soul I have dared to love you; deign to cast but one look on me, and let me believe I may hope.
Lorenzo.”
Agnes read this over and over again in nervous trepidation, then folded it, and put it by.
She was a victim to strong contending emotions. She felt she knew not what for Lorenzo, but he was a pirate. She could not imagine that she loved: no, she did not; but she was grateful to the man as she had always seen him, gentle and kind, and apparently unstained by any crime: but she recoiled from the pirate. It would appear that even her gratitude could not succeed in mantling the hideousness of that name. Yet he was always so respectful to her! Could a pirate at heart be so? And if he were a pirate, such as she had heard those men were, could he write to her in that manner? No, it could not be. And joy glistened in her face as she seemed to congratulate herself on having come to a conclusion that was so favourable to Lorenzo.
Upon this she seemed to fall into an agreeable reverie: pleasure seemed to play on her face, as she thought she had successfully washed away the stain from the man on which her sentiments had already been anchored. Distressing thoughts, however, will force themselves on the happiest moments of our existence. At the height of her self-gratulation, the idea of the pirate again occurred.
“But who is he?” she inquiringly muttered, “what is he—a—? Oh! no, I cannot, I will not, I must not think of him,” and she burst into a flood of tears. She wept and wept: now roused herself to extraordinary firmness, and resolutely dried her tears, but it was to let them flow in larger and fuller currents a moment after.
She was weeping over the ruined hopes of her own feelings:—of her first love.
Agnes had been born and brought up in the seclusion which necessarily surrounds a residence in the West Indies. She had seen but few persons besides the neighbours that had their plantations in the vicinity of her father’s estate. She had never met any one on whom she could pour out the love that a tropical nature had lavished upon her. Her feelings at the moment when she got into the position which led to her meeting with Lorenzo were strong and fresh, and were in that state in which the mysterious law of human sociality required, that they should find an object on which they could alight and rest. They had alighted on Lorenzo—not by reasoning—not by calculation. They had alighted on Lorenzo, because they had alighted on him. Her feelings had flown and rested upon him, either independently of her volition, or so closely united with it, that it was not possible to say whether she loved, because she chose to love, or whether she loved because she found herself loving.
Such was the nature of her love: but if nature had implanted in her, feelings that were so strong, pure, and good, education had taught her that to control them was also necessary. She reflected that, above all instances, that was the one in which she required all the power that she might possess to restrain herself; for common prudence itself, unassisted by the imparted precepts of propriety, was sufficient to make her careful how she fostered the feelings, which had already risen in her breast.