Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851

by Various

We assured him that we accepted his kindness as it was meant; and he then went on.

"Harley (that was the name of the steward) suspected that you had had a quarrel in that quarter; and in the course of some inquiries he had made, he discovered that your antagonist, as he supposed, had been shot, and his fears, following up this discovery, led him to apprehend nothing less than a criminal prosecution. Finding that I was personally acquainted with the gentleman, he entreated me to ascertain exactly how the case stood. I knew nothing more. Harley threw out some vague conjectures as to the cause of this supposed quarrel; but they were so very vague, that I thought it best to dismiss them from my mind altogether, and to obtain the information I sought from the principal himself. You must remember that I have not yet heard your version of the affair; and that I am now about to give you his.

"It is about a month since I first saw him. He was in a small room leading from his bedchamber, and was apparently suffering great pain. An extraordinary change had taken place in him since I had formerly known him. His person was emaciated almost to a skeleton, showing his angular and ungainly form at a distressing disadvantage. His face had withered away to a narrow point under the large bones of his head, which looked larger than ever, with his great shock hair starting out from it on all sides. The skin of his face had become crimped and yellow; but the most remarkable change of all was, that his hair, a dark auburn when I knew him, was quite silvery, not exactly white or gray, but gleaming all over. This gave him almost an unearthly appearance.

"The weather was cold, and pinched him; and after the first few words of recognition were over, he told me that the changes of the season affected him severely. A bullet was lodged somewhere in his shoulder, and the easterly winds always inflicted excruciating agonies upon him in consequence. This led to an inquiry as to how it happened, which brought out the whole narrative."

Forrester here entered into all the details, which were accurate enough in the main, only that they were drawn from the dwarf's point of sight, and colored by his own vehemence and malice. We constantly stopped Forrester, to set him right on particular points; and long before he had wound up the story, we found ourselves embroiled in assertions and rejoinders, which must have greatly bewildered him. Without wasting time over matters with which the reader is already acquainted, I will confine myself to the only new facts Forrester had to relate to us.

On the night when we had the rencontre with the little demon, the ball, as I apprehended, had struck him in the scuffle, and entering the fleshy part of the arm, had settled in the back. Crawling off in considerable pain, when he found that his appeal to Astræa was useless, and bleeding the whole way, he regained a carriage which was waiting for him at a little distance, and drove back to London. His intention was to return the next day; but loss of blood, agony of mind, prostration of strength, and physical pain rendered the journey impossible. For several days his life hung on a thread, and two or three months elapsed before he was able to move about the house. An awful change had passed over him in the mean while! It cost even Astræa some struggle to hide the shock which Forrester's description of his sufferings inflicted on her. Poor Astræa! she had need to shut her heart against pity, and to crush all tenderness out of her nature. This was her work—and mine! What would have become of her if she had allowed herself to look back upon it, and think, and feel? No, no; she dared not look there with a woman's eyes or a woman's heart. It would have killed her, had she felt it, and given way to it. And so she sat and listened, and looked cold and angry by turns, as if his miseries were an impertinence and a wrong to her; trying to take refuge against remorse in a great bravery of hate and contempt!

He related the whole history to Forrester who had been in his confidence about the marriage from the beginning. We had no suspicion of the inordinate love, suppressed, chafed, galled, and tortured into madness, he had borne to Astræa all through those years of malediction, during which he had exhausted every form of threat and appeal to enforce his rights. He had hoped on wildly to the last. He had watched the progress of my attachment to her, and had encouraged it under a frantic delusion, that the final detection of it would place her at his mercy. His mind had been so wrought upon by this terrible passion, and the plots and schemes he was forever weaving to win or ensnare her, that much of his conduct which had appeared to me monstrous and absurd, became susceptible of a sufficiently obvious solution.

He assigned as a reason for not having adopted legal means to compel the fulfillment of the contract, his fear of driving Astræa to extremities. He had always apprehended that the moment he adopted any step of that kind, she would make her escape from him; and his policy was to keep on terms with her, at all events, and by a system of small, perpetual persecution, to subjugate her at last.

And now that she was gone, and that she had put the world between them, what course did he intend to pursue? Implacable vengeance against me—peace and pardon for her! This unintelligible being, whose person was not more hideous than his mind, had yet in the depths of his nature one drop of sweetness that redeemed and made him human. This love had survived all hatreds and revenges; and now that hope was over, that its object never could soothe his agonies or reward his devotion, that even the sufferings he was undergoing on her account only rendered him more repulsive in her eyes, nothing but tenderness and forgiveness toward her remained, with the bitterest regrets and self-accusations for the wrongs he had done her and the issues to which he had forced her. How such a flower of noble and delicate feeling could have sprung up in such a soil was, indeed, inexplicable. But it is wonderful how a great sorrow purifies and strengthens the soul!

But for me? There was no clemency for me. The concentrated venom of his nature was reserved for a man who had robbed him of the miserable right of persecuting Astræa. Had I simply made her unhappy by awakening a passion in her heart, and then abandoning her upon the discovery of her situation (which was exactly what he appeared to have calculated upon), he would have forgiven me; he might have even been grateful to me for having humiliated her, and cast her helpless at his feet. But the crime I had committed in loving her too well to forsake her, admitted of no palliation. He could extract nothing out of it but vengeance. The sleepless hostility with which the Indian follows the trail of his foe, is not more vindictive and persevering than the feelings of hatred with which he coiled himself up for the spring which he was nursing all his strength to make upon me. He had not yet been able to get out of the house—but he was coming! No inducements, no arguments, founded on mercy or justice, could move him to sue for a dissolution of the marriage. He was determined to hold that horror over our heads, so that the vulture should tear our hearts, and shriek "despair!" in our ears forever and ever. He had the power in his own hands to embitter our whole lives, and could distill the last dregs of the poison that was to rack and madden us.