Is not this an unjustifiable, a cruel accusation? Why have I this keen this jealous sensibility? Is it not dishonourable to my understanding?
Yet should there be real danger, and I blind to it! Should I neglect to warn her, or rather to guard and preserve her from harm, where shall I find consolation?
Oliver! There are times when these fears haunt me so powerfully that my heart recoils, my blood freezes, and my whole frame is shaken with the terrific dream!—A dream?—Yes, it must be a dream! If not, the perversion of his mind and the obduracy of his heart are to me wholly incomprehensible!
I must be more guarded—Wrongfully to doubt were irreparably to injure!
My first care must be to be just.
Mark, Oliver, how these wanderings of the mind mislead and torment me! One minute I must fly, to recover myself, and not to disturb and way-lay others; the next I must stay, to protect her who perhaps is best able to protect herself!
I have no plan: I labour to form one in vain. That single channel into which my thoughts are incessantly impelled is destructive of all order and connexion. The efforts of the understanding are assassinated by the emotions of the heart; till the reproaches of principle become intolerable, and the delusions of hope distracting!—A state of such painful inutility is both criminal and absurd.
The kindness of the father, brother, and aunt, the sympathising tenderness which bursts from and overcomes the benign Anna, the delay of the marriage—Oliver!—I was recapitulating the seeming inspirations of my good angel, and have conjured up my chief tormentor!—This delay!—Where does it originate?—With whom?—With—! I must fly!—This of all motives is the most irrefragable! I must fly!—But when, or how, or where, what I must undertake, whither go, or what become, is yet all vague and incoherent conjucture.
F. HENLEY
LETTER LXXIV
Sir Arthur St. Ives to Abimelech Henley