“I am calmer now. I must hurry on, for my breath is rapidly failing me. My brow burns: bathe it—there, that will do. And open the window. There is something in this gentle, balmy breeze, fragrant with a thousand odors, which calls back the memory of happy days, and almost makes me weep. God grant that none of you may ever suffer as I have suffered.
“I pass by three months, three long and weary months, during which I received no tidings of the fugitives. They had never been in P——; even my epistle announcing my departure to the south had never been received by Isabel, but had been sent, with most of the ensuing ones, as a dead letter to Washington. I traced the fugitives only for a single stage; there every clue to them was lost. At length I was about giving over in despair, when chance revealed what I had so long sought for in vain.
“Did you ever visit an Insane Hospital? You start. Ah! you know nothing of its horrors unless you have seen your dearest friend writhing beneath the keeper’s lash, or chained like a felon by his infernal fetters. Do you understand me? No! the truth is too horrible for you to suspect. Well, then, it was in visiting one of these loathsome prison-houses that I saw and recognised, in one of its miserable victims, my own, my lost, my now suffering Isabel.
“You need not think that I shall grow phrenzied by this harrowing recital. I have thought of it too often, and endured subsequent agonies too great, to suffer myself now to lose my reason in reciting it. But neither will I dwell upon that awful meeting. Suffice it to say that all my anger against Isabel departed when I saw her, who had once lain pure and trusting on my bosom, confined as a maniac, in a public hospital. Oh! I would give worlds could I shut out that horrid sight.
“I soon learnt all from the keeper. Isabel had been placed there nearly four months before, by a woman I instantly recognised from his description, to be the one I had procured at my marriage to wait upon Isabel. She had stated that the patient was a half sister, and had left an address where she might be found.
“As the rules of the establishment precluded all hope of my removing Isabel, in spite of my protestations that I was her husband, unless I brought her pretended relative, to corroborate my account, I was compelled to rest satisfied with the melancholy pleasure of knowing, that her disease should receive at my expense, the attention of the best physicians, and with the renewed hope of discovering her waiting woman, and thus removing my wife from what I felt was worse than death. Guilty as she was, she was still my wife, and I could not utterly desert her.
“I entertained little doubt of discovering this woman, although as might have been supposed, her address was fictitious. I had, in fact, a means of finding her out which I did not scruple to adopt. She had been an English woman, and had often boasted of rich relations across the Atlantic, to whom in her simple vanity, she one day expected to be heiress. As I knew that, at most, she could only have connived at my wife’s disgrace, and as I knew also that money was the touch-stone of every avenue to her heart, I had no doubt whatever as to the success of the scheme I intended to put in execution. It was simply this: I caused an advertisement to be extensively circulated, describing her and her relationship to her English cousin, and informing her that if she would apply at a certain office in P——, she would hear of something to her advantage. The bait took. She came in person; I was instantly sent for, and confronted her. But to come at once to the conclusion of this part of my story; she owned, upon my threats, and promises of forgiveness with a large sum of money if she would confess all, that she could satisfy every particular as yet unknown to me, of this melancholy tragedy.
“She stated, in effect, that Conway, from the first moment he had beheld Isabel, had entertained a passion for her, which neither the favor he had received from me, nor her own purity, nor the impassable barriers against its gratification, had enabled him to conquer. Indeed it is questionable if he ever cared to do so. Wilful, headstrong, remorseless, and careless of every thing but the gratification of his desires, he was perhaps one of the most hardened villains that ever cursed mankind; a villain the more dangerous, because his fascinating manners enabled him to wear the guise of virtue, and perpetrate his infamous designs without suspicion. But in laying himself out to seduce Isabel, he capped the climax of his villainy. For a long time, however, he only attempted to gain the good will of Isabel, and to seduce by large presents, her waiting woman to his side. As yet he had not ventured to breathe a word of his unholy passion to its object. But my departure opened new hopes. Flattered and deceived by the attentions paid him by Isabel,—attentions which I now learned with the wildest joy, were only paid to him because he was my friend,—he now resolved to make a bold throw in his perilous game. He knew my writing well. In a word, he forged a letter purporting to be from me, to Isabel, requesting her to join me in P——, under his escort; and by these means he placed my unhappy wife wholly in his power. As she would not travel without her waiting woman, he was forced to make her his confidant, and purchase her secrecy by large sums of money. But why linger on this awful history? Demons themselves would shudder at its relation. I cannot—yes! I must tell it. Repulsed by Isabel with scorn, when, on the second day, he ventured to declare his passion, he told her, with the mockery of a fiend, as he pointed to the lonely inn where they then were, that resistance was useless. Yes!—here, hold down your ear, closer, let me whisper it only; he used force; God of heaven, there was none to save her from the monster’s fangs!
“There—there—it is over: unhand me I say. But forgive me: I am well nigh crazed: I know not what I do. Some of that drink. Bless you for fanning my poor, aching brow; I believe sometimes that I am becoming a child again. Those tears have relieved me. I am so weak now that they come involuntarily into my eyes, but time was when it seemed as if they had been dried up forever at their fountain, and when, in my unutterable agony, I would have given worlds to weep.
“I forgot to tell you that I felled that hag to the ground like an ox, when she told me that fearful tale. I could not help it. A woman! and stand by merciless! Oh! my God it was too much.