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Page 47
"We were married, there, in Troy in the quietest and most unpretending
manner. Why the fact has never transpired I cannot say. I certainly
took no especial pains to conceal it at the time, though I
acknowledge that after our separation I did resort to such measures as
I thought necessary, to suppress what had become gall and wormwood to
my pride.
"My first move after the ceremony was to bring her immediately to New
York and to this house. With perhaps a pardonable bitterness of
spirit, I had refrained from any notification of my intentions, and it
was as strangers might enter an unprepared dwelling, that we stepped
across the threshold of this house and passed immediately to my
father's room.
"'I can give you no wedding and no honeymoon,' I had told her. 'My
father is dying and demands my care. From the altar to a death-bed
may be sad for you, but it is an inevitable condition of your
marriage with me.' And she had accepted her fate with a deep
unspeakable smile it has taken me long months of loneliness and
suffering to understand.
"'Father, I bring you my bride,' were my first words to him as the
door closed behind us shutting us in with the dread, invisible
Presence that for so long a time had been relentlessly advancing upon
our home.
"I shall never forget how he roused himself in his bed, nor with what
eager eyes he read her young face and surveyed her slight form
swaying towards him in her sudden emotion like a flame in a breeze.
Nor while I live shall I lose sight of the spasm of uncontrollable
joy with which he lifted his aged arms towards her, nor the look with
which she sprang from my side and nestled, yes nestled, on the breast
that never to my remembrance had opened itself to me even in the
years of my earliest childhood. For my father was a stern man who
believed in holding love at arm's length and measured affection by the
depth of awe it inspired.
"'My daughter!' broke from his lips, and he never inquired who she was
or what; no, not even when after a moment of silence she raised her
head and with a sudden low cry of passionate longing looked in his
face and murmured,
"'I never had a father.'
"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. I say I wonder now: then I only thought of
braving it out.
"Straight as a dart, but with that look on her face, she came towards
us. 'Did I hear aright?' were the words that came from her lips.
'Have you married me, a woman beneath your station as I now perceive,
because you were commanded to do so? Have you not loved me? given me
that which alone makes marriage a sacrament or even a possibility?
and must you leave this house made sacred by the recumbent form of
your dying father if I remain within it?'
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