In the meantime, month after month had passed away. Winter had melted into the promises of spring; and the gay flowers of summer had ripened into the fruits of luxuriant autumn. A full year had run its magic round since Theresa gave herself up to Jasper, for better for worse, till death should them part.
The slender, joyous maiden had expanded into the full-blown, thoughtful, lovely woman, who was now watching at the oriel window, alone, at sunset for the return of her young husband.
Alone, ay, alone! For no child had been born to bless their union, and to draw yet closer the indissoluble bonds which man may not put asunder. Alone, ay, alone! as all her days were now spent, and some, alas! of her nights also. For the first months of her wedded life, when the pain of concealment had been once removed, Theresa was the happiest of the happy. The love, the passion, the affection of her boy bridegroom seemed to increase daily. To sit by her side, during the snowy days of winter, to listen to her lute struck by the master hand of the untaught improvisatrice, to sing with her the grand old ballads which she loved, to muse with her over the tomes of romance, the natural vein of which was not then extinguished in the English heart, to cull the gems of the rare dramatists and mighty bards of the era, which was then but expiring; and, when the early days of spring-time gave token of their coming, in the swelling flower-bud and bursting leaf, to wander with her through the park, through the chase, to ride with her over the heathery moorland hills, and explore the wild recesses of the forest, to have her near him in his field-sports, to show her how he struck the silvery salmon, or roused the otter from his sedgy lair—these seemed to be the only joys the boy coveted—her company his chiefest pleasure, the undisturbed possession of her charms his crowning bliss.
But passion is proverbially short-lived; and the most so with those who, like Jasper, have no solidity of character, no stability of feeling, no fixed principles, whereon to fall back for support. One of the great defects of Jasper’s nature was a total lack of reverence for any thing divine or human—he had loved many things, he never had respected one. Accustomed from his earliest boyhood to see every thing yield to his will, to measure the value of every thing by the present pleasure it afforded him; he expected to receive all things, yet to give nothing. He was in fact a very pattern of pure selfishness, though no one would have been so much amazed as he had he heard himself so named.
Time passed, and he grew weary, even of the very excess of his happiness—even of the amiability, the sweetness, the ever-yielding gentleness of his Theresa. That she should so long have charmed one so rash and reckless was the real wonder, not that she should now have lost the power of charming him.
Nevertheless so it was; the mind of Jasper was not so constituted as to rest very long content with any thing, least of all with tranquillity—
For quiet to hot bosoms is a hell!
and his, surely, was of the hottest. He began as of old to long for excitement; and even the pleasures of the chase, to which he was still devoted, began to prove insufficient to gratify his wild and eager spirit. Day after day, Theresa saw less of him, and ere long knew not how or where many of his days were spent. Confidence, in the true sense of the word, there never had been between them; respect or esteem, founded upon her real virtues and rare excellences, he had never felt—therefore, when the heat and fierceness of passion died out, as it were, by the consumption of its own fuel, when her personal charms palled on him by possession, when her intellectual endowments wearied him, because they were in truth far beyond the range of his comprehension, and therefore out of the pale of his sympathies, he had nothing left whereon to build affection—thus passion once dead in his heart, all was gone at once which had bound him to Theresa.
He neglected her, he left her alone—alone, without a companion, a friend, in the wide world. Still she complained not, wept not, above all, upbraided not. She sought to occupy herself, to amuse her solitude with her books, her music, her wild flights into the world of fancy. And when he did come home from his fierce, frantic gallops across the country with the worst and wildest of the young yeomanry, from his disgraceful orgies with the half gentry of the nearest market-town, she received him ever with kindness, gentleness and love.
She never let him know that she wept in silence; never allowed him to see that she noticed his altered manner; but smiled on him, and sang to him, and fondled him, as if he had been to her—and was he not so?—all that she had on earth. And he, such is the spirit of the selfish and the reckless of our sex, almost began to hate her, for the very meekness and affection with which she submitted to his unkindness.