“After these arrangements were completed I determined to put the ocean between me and my persecutor. On my twenty-sixth birthday—just ten years from the day which saw me a bride—I landed in America. Alas! how changed were all my prospects, how altered all my feelings! I was still in the prime of life, but hope and joy and all the sweet influences of affection were lost to me forever, and after wandering from place to place I finally took up my abode in Elmsdale, rather from a sense of utter weariness than from any anticipation of peace. I little knew that Providence had prepared for me so sweet a rest after all my sufferings. I little knew that peace and hope, aye, and even happiness, were yet in store for me. Resigning a name to which I had no longer any claim, I resumed my family name of Norwood, and sought to appear in society as the widowed rather than as the divorced wife. I have thus avoided painful remarks and impertinent questionings, while I was enabled to secure for myself a quiet retreat from the turmoil of the world. Perhaps to you, Charles Allston, I ought to have been more frank, but surely you cannot blame me for shrinking from the disclosure of such bitter and degrading memories. You have now learned all my early history—you have seen my error and you have traced its punishment—let me now unfold the page which can reveal the present.
“A fancy, light as the gossamer which the wind drives on its wing, first led to my marriage. I was a child in heart and mind and person, when I became the victim of arts which might have misled a wiser head and a less susceptible heart. Left to myself I should probably have forgotten my first love fancy even as one of the thousand dreams which haunt the brain of youth. But if, after my marriage, I had experienced kindness and tenderness from my husband, the feeling would have deepened into earnest and life-long affection, instead of curdling into hatred and contempt within my bosom. The love of my girlhood was blighted even as a flower which blossoms out of time, and loneliness has hitherto been my lot through life. Will you deem me too bold, my friend, if I tell you that from you I have learned my first lesson in womanly duty? Till I knew you I dreamed not of the power of a fervent and true passion—till I beheld you I believed my heart was cold and dead to all such gentle impulses. You have taught me that happiness may yet be found even for me. In loving you I am but doing homage to virtue and wisdom and piety—in bowing down before your image I am but worshipping the noblest attributes of human nature enshrined within your heart. I dared not pour out the fullness of my joy until I had told you my sad tale, but now that you know all—now that no shadow of distrust can fall upon the sunshine of the future, come to me, and assure me with your own dear voice that my troubled dream is now forever past, and that the dawn of happiness is breaking upon my weary heart!”
To comprehend the full effect of this letter on Charles Allston, the peculiarity of his character—his strict ideas of duty—his devotion to his holy calling—his shrinking dread of any thing which could, by any possibility, tend to diminish his influence over the consciences of his flock—and his long cherished dread of self-indulgence—must ever be borne in mind. He had loved Eleanor Norwood with a fervor startling even to himself, and according to his usual distrustful habits of thought, he had feared lest the very intensity of his feelings was a proof of their sinfulness. Accustomed to consider every thing as wrong which was peculiarly gratifying to himself—measuring by the amount of every enjoyment the extent of its wickedness—restraining the most innocent impulses because he conceived heaven could only be won by continual sacrifices—he had shrunk in fear and trembling at his own temerity when his overmastering passion led him to pour forth his feelings to the object of his love. He had retired to his apartment in a state of pitiable agitation, and while he awaited Mrs. Norwood’s reply with hope, he yet half repented of his proffered suit, lest there should have been too much of the leaven of mere earthly tenderness in the bosom which had vowed to forsake all its idols. This letter therefore produced a terrible revulsion in his feelings. His rigid sense of duty, and his adherence to divine rather than human laws, compelled him to behold in Eleanor Norwood only the wife of another. Vile and unworthy as Wallingford might be, he was to Allston’s view still the husband, and though the tie might be loosened by the hand of man it could only be entirely severed by the will of God. All the sternness of that long practised asceticism, which had given Allston such a twofold character, was called forth by the thought of the sin he had so nearly committed. The wild enthusiasm of his nature led him to regard Mrs. Norwood as a temptress sent to try the strength of his self-denying piety. He remembered the tale of the hermit, who for forty years abode in the wilderness, sinless in thought and in deed, while he kept his eye ever fixed upon the cross; but the moment of wavering came—the holy eremite turned his gaze for one single instant from the symbol, and Satan, who had long watched in vain, obtained the mastery over him whose life-long piety had not availed against a moment’s weakness. Allston shuddered as his busy fancy suggested the parallel between the monkish legend and his own present feelings. The thought of the disgrace which would attend him who, while reproving sin in others, could be accused of cherishing it in his own household—of the judgment which would fall upon him who should dare to minister to the people in holy things, while he bore the marks of a deadly leprosy within his own bosom—until at length the spiritual pride, which was in truth his besetting sin, subdued all lighter emotions.
That evening Mrs. Norwood sat in her quiet room, with the light of a shaded lamp falling upon the gentle beauty of a face now lighted up with hope, and which, but for the restless and hurried glance which was occasionally turned upon the quaintly fashioned clock, might have seemed the picture of placid happiness. A soft glow flushed her cheek, her eyes were full of radiance, and, as she raised her head in the attitude of a listener, a smile of almost childlike joyousness parted her flexible lips. A step resounded on the gravel walk without. Her first impulse led her to spring forward to welcome the expected visitant, but womanly pride checked her in mid career, and she yet stood in half uncertainty when the door opened to admit a servant who handed her a small parcel. Her cheek grew ashy pale as she broke the seal. A paper dropped from the envelop—it was her own letter to Allston; and she sank into a chair as she unfolded the note which accompanied it. Written in Allston’s hand, yet so blotted, and traced in such irregular characters, that the agitation of the writer might well be divined, were these words:
“I will not express the agony of mind with which I have perused the enclosed papers. I have been tried almost beyond my strength, but I have been mercifully spared the commission of a crime at which my soul shudders. I will not upbraid you, madam, for your cruel concealment; your own conscience will be your accuser, and it will not fail to remind you that your deception has nearly hurled me from an eminence which it has been the labor of my life to reach. But you have been only an instrument in the hands of a higher power. I fancied myself superior to temptation, and God has sent you to teach me the necessity of closer watchfulness over my still frail nature. Eleanor Norwood, I have loved you as I never loved earthly creature before, but sooner would I suffer the keenest pangs of that chronic heartbreak, to which the martyrdom of the pile and fagot is but pastime, than take to my arms the wife of a living husband. You have made me wretched but you cannot make me criminal. Henceforth we meet no more on earth, for I have vowed to tear your image from my heart, though, even now, every fibre bleeds at the rude sundering of such close knit ties. Receive my forgiveness and my farewell.”
When Mrs. Norwood’s faithful old servant entered the room, about an hour after the receipt of this letter, she found her mistress lying senseless on the floor. Suspecting something like the truth, the woman prudently gathered up the papers from view, and then summoned assistance. Mrs. Norwood was carried to her apartment and medical aid was immediately procured. The physician pronounced her to be suffering from strong nervous excitement, and, after giving her a sleeping draught, prescribed perfect quiet for the next few days. But ere morning she was in a state of delirium, and fears were entertained for her intellect if not for her life. Several days passed in great uncertainty, but at length hope revived and Mrs. Norwood once more awoke to consciousness. Feeble as an infant, however, she required great care to raise her from the brink of the grave, and the springs of life, so sadly shattered by long continued sorrow, were now in danger of being broken by a single stroke. Disease seemed undetermined in its final attack, and at length assumed the form under which it most frequently assists the insidious labors of secret sorrow. A hectic cough now racked her feeble frame, and it was evident that consumption would soon claim another victim. Just at this time a letter, sealed with black, was forwarded to Mrs. Norwood’s address, and after being withheld from her several weeks, by advice of her physician, was finally given to her because all hope of prolonging her life was at an end. The perusal of this letter seemed rather to soothe than to excite the sinking invalid. “It comes too late,” was her only exclamation as she deposited it in a little cabinet which stood beside her bed, and from that moment she made no allusion to its contents.
It was remarked in the village that Mr. Allston had become excessively severe in his denunciations of error, while his habits had become more rigid and reserved than ever. His former persuasive eloquence had given place to violent and bitter revilings of sin, while those who applied to him for religious consolation were terrified rather than attracted by the threatenings of the fiery zealot. Once only did he seem moved by gentler feelings. An aged clergyman, who occasionally visited him from a distant town, was summoned to the bedside of Mrs. Norwood, and when he returned to Mr. Allston’s study he feelingly described the bodily pangs and angelic patience of the gentle sufferer. The frame of the stern man shook as he listened, and tears—such tears as sear rather than relieve the heart—fell from his eyes. It was one of the last struggles of human feeling in the breast of one who vainly fancied himself marked out for a higher than human destiny—one more was yet to come, and then earth held no claim upon his heart.
It was not long delayed, for the time soon arrived when the bell tolled for her whose sorrowful life and early death had been the penalty of a single error. Allston stood beside the coffin and saw within its deep shadow the pale and stony features of the being whom he had loved; and even while his heart smote him as the shortener of her brief and melancholy span of life, he yet nerved himself with the high, stern resolve of one who suffers in the cause of duty. With that cold brow beneath his gaze, he poured forth, from the depths of an agonized heart, a prayer whose solemn eloquence thrilled every listener like a voice from the grave. No sound escaped his lips as the clods of the valley fell rattling on the coffin-lid which shrouded the heart so sorely tried in life, but, in the deep midnight, groans and bitter cries, which rived his stern bosom, were heard issuing from the pastor’s lonely closet.
Mrs. Norwood’s old servant inherited the property in Elmsdale, and one of her first duties was to place in Mr. Allston’s hands the cabinet which she said her mistress had requested might be given him after her death. It contained only Mrs. Norwood’s letter and her lover’s reply, together with a third, in an unknown hand, bearing a black seal. This last was dated some months earlier than the others, and contained the tidings of Mr. Wallingford’s death. He had fallen a victim to his own misdeeds in Italy, and at the moment when Allston had considered himself the subject of a temptation intended to try his strength, the divorced wife was in reality free from every shadow of a tie.
Why had she not disclosed these tidings to her scrupulous lover? Ask rather why she who had twice suffered from man’s wayward nature, and who had escaped from the vices of one only to perish by the too rigid virtues of another, should place trust in any earthly affection? Sick of life, hopeless of future peace, sinking under a fatal disease, she had taken a lesson from the inferior creation: