“This love has absorbed me to the extent of destroying my ambition to achieve something excellent with pen or pencil. What dreams have I not woven around this central idea—dreams impossible of fulfilment, yet nearly as blissful as reality.
“In a few days Mr. Doring will be here. He has written me that he intends to come to talk over our future. So you shall see him.”
One evening soon after as Westfield was returning to the house he met Miss Hill accompanied by a stranger. “It is Doring,” he said, and his heart sank. Intuitive moments come to all of us, when the hidden is revealed, when souls stand naked before our eyes, stripped of the cloaks and without the props which make them fair and imposing to ordinary perception. Such a moment came to Westfield, and he saw Louis Doring with an inner sight to which everything was made plain, and as he looked his face grew white to the lips and his eyes became fixed and glassy like those of the dead.
“God help her,” he groaned inwardly, as he passed on. “The man is a fool—a stupid, brainless, flabby character—a dull dolt with regular features and a straight figure made imposing by the tailor’s skill, and a selfish heart. Exactly the kind of beast that can dazzle women as brainless as himself. But how has he bewitched her? Why do I ask, when I know that the destinies of the grandest and sweetest souls, a grim and perverse fate often rules? The ‘highest suffer most,’ the ‘strongest wander farthest and most hopelessly are lost.’
“How can I bear it? It crucifies me to know that that wax-faced, tailor-made biped has been carried in her mind as a hero and worshipped. And now after years of deception he will destroy her whole life.
“I see how it came about. The scandal invented by the community suggested it to him—sowed the seeds in both their heads. We live under the influence of suggestion of one kind or another all the time. What is the force of public opinion but this on a gigantic scale? The wretch has sighed and maundered and posed before her about his sufferings until he awoke her sympathy, and he will hang on to her and will not give her up because he is attracted by the magnetism of her strength of character. And she, deluded soul, idealizes him, endows him with splendid qualities—in short, sees in him that which is in herself. She will go straight to her destruction, and I can’t save her. Until I saw him I believed the best of him; but now I know what is before her if she should marry him. It will be like awaking from a blissful trance—it will be just that. O my heart of light! O, my tall young pine! The tragedy of your life is more than I can bear.”
Going hastily to his room he made ready and tore away to the country for a few days. “I could not endure to see the creature again,” he said, as his train pulled out of the station.
When he returned everything was going on as usual at the house, yet nothing was the same to him, nor could it ever be again. He did not speak of Doring to Miss Hill, but she herself went back to the subject, chiding him for going away.
“I saw Mr. Doring,” he answered, curtly, “and didn’t like him. You may think my opinion of him is colored by jealousy, but I am sure it is not. I hope you will never marry him.”