'
"Sirs, it is impossible for me to continue without revealing depths of
pride and bitterness in my own nature, from which I now shrink with
unspeakable pain. So far from being touched by this scene, I felt
myself grow hard under it. If he had been disappointed in my choice,
queried at it or even been simply pleased at my obedience, I might
have accepted the wife I had won, and been tolerably grateful. But to
love her, admire her, glory in her when Evelyn Blake had never
succeeded in winning a glance from his eyes that was not a public
disapprobation! I could not endure it; my whole being rebelled, and a
movement like hate took possession of me.
"Bidding my wife to leave me with my father alone, I scarcely waited
for the door to close upon the poor young thing before all that had
been seething in my breast for a month, burst from me in the one cry,
"'I have brought you a daughter as you commanded me. Now give me the
blessing you promised and let me go; for I cannot live with a woman I
do not love.'
"Instantly, and before his lips could move, the door opened and the
woman I thus repudiated in the first dawning hour of her young bliss,
stood before us. My God! what a face! When I think of it now in the
night season--when from dreams that gloomy as they are, are often
elysian to the thoughts which beset me in my waking hours, I suddenly
arouse to see starting upon me from the surrounding shadows that
young fair brow with its halo of golden tresses, blotted, ay blotted
by the agony that turned her that instant into stone, I wonder I did
not take out the pistol that lay in the table near which I stood, and
shoot her lifeless on the spot as some sort of a compensation for the
misery I had caused her.
Pages:
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155