My mind was occupied in these and similar reveries for several weeks
after the death of the stranger. My wife and children had hoped,
after that event, that I should have returned to the habits which had
pervaded the last six years of my existence, and which they had felt so
eminently productive of gratification and delight. In this hope they
found themselves deceived. My domestic character was, for the present
at least, wholly destroyed. I had a subject of contemplation that did
not admit of a partaker, and from this subject I could not withdraw
my thoughts, so much as for an instant. I had no pleasure but in that
retirement, where I could be unseen and unheard by any human eye or
ear. If at any time I was compelled to join the domestic circle, I
despatched the occasion that brought me there as speedily as possible;
and even while I remained in it, was silent and absent, engrossed with
my own contemplations, and heedless and unobservant of every thing
around me.
My abstraction was not however so entire as to prevent me from
sometimes stealing, in a sort of momentary interregnum of thought, in
that pause where the mind rests upon the chain already passed over,
and seems passively to wait for the sequel, a glance at my family. I
looked at them without knowing what it was that I did, and without
the intention to notice what I saw. Yet, even in this state of mental
abstraction, visible objects will sometimes succeed in making their
impression. I perceived that my wife and children suffered from my
behaviour. I remarked a general air of disconsolateness, and a mild
unexpostulating submission, to what nevertheless the heart deeply
deplored. They did not presume to interrupt me; they did not by prying
and inquisitive speeches attempt to extort from me the secret of the
alteration they saw; but it was manifest they conceived some great and
radical calamity had poisoned the heart of our domestic joy.
It was these symptoms thus remarked by me, that first roused me from
the inebriation of my new condition. I was compelled to suspect that,
while I revelled in visions of future enjoyment, I was inflicting
severe and unmerited pains on those I loved. It was necessary, if
I valued their happiness, that I should descend from the clouds of
speculation and fancy, and enter upon the world of realities.
But here I first found a difficulty to which, during the reign of my
intoxication, I had been utterly insensible. I was rich; I could raise
my family, as far as the power of money extended,--money, which may
in some sense be styled the empress of the world,--to what heights I
pleased. I had hitherto committed the fault, so common to projectors,
of looking only to ultimate objects and great resting places, and
neglecting to consider the steps between. This was an omission of high
importance. Every thing in the world is conducted by gradual process.
This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe.
Nothing is abrupt; one thing is so blended and softened into another,
that it is impossible to say where the former ends and the latter
begins.
This remark is fully applicable to the situation which was now
before me. Yesterday I was poor; to-day I was possessor of treasures
inexhaustible. How was this alteration to be announced? To dissipate
the revenues of princes, to purchase immense estates, to launch into
costly establishments, are tasks to which the most vulgar mind is
equal. But no man stands alone in the world, without all trace of
what he has been, and with no one near, that thinks himself entitled
to scrutinise his proceedings and his condition. Least of all was
this my case. I was bound to certain other persons by the most sacred
obligations; I could not separate myself from them; I could not render
myself a mere enigma in their eyes; though, in the language of the
world, the head of my family, they were my natural censors and judges.
I was accountable to them for my conduct; it was my duty, paramount to
all other duties, to stand as a fair, upright, and honourable character
in their estimation.
If these remarks be true taken in a general view, they are much more so
when applied to my particular case. There are men who live in the midst
of their families like an eastern despot surrounded with his subjects.
They are something too sacred to be approached; their conduct is not
to be reasoned upon; the amount of their receipts and disbursements is
not to be inspected; their resources are unknown; no one must say to
them, What dost thou? or, why hast thou thus conducted thyself? Even
these persons will not escape the tax to which all men are liable.
They cannot kill the general spirit of enquiry; the mystery in which
they wrap themselves will often serve as an additional stimulus; they
will finally encounter the judgment and verdict of all. For myself,
I had lived in the midst of my family upon a system of paternal and
amicable commerce. I had suffered too deeply from a momentary season
of separation and mystery, not to have been induced to renounce it
decisively and for ever.
Firm, however, as I had imagined my renunciation to have been, I was
now thrown back upon what I had most avoided. I had a secret source
of advantage, the effects of which were to be participated by those I
loved, while the spring was to remain for ever unknown. What I most
sought upon this occasion, was, that my family should share my good
fortune, and at the same time be prevented from so much as suspecting
that there was any thing mysterious connected with it. To effect
this, I presently conceived that it would be necessary to sacrifice
the sudden and instantaneous prosperity I had proposed to myself,
and introduce the reverse of our condition by slow, and, as far as
possible, insensible degrees.
One thing on which I determined, preparatory to the other measures
I had in view, was to remove from my present habitation, and take
up my residence for a time in the city of Constance. In the cottage
of the mountains it was impossible to make any material alteration
in my establishment. My property was of the narrowest extent; nor
would it be easily practicable in a country, the inhabitants of
which were accustomed to a humble allotment, considerably to enlarge
it. My house was frugal, if not mean; and, unless it were first
pulled down and built over again, the idea of introducing servants,
equipage, or splendour into it, would be absurd. My design was not
to make a long abode where I now was; but, as soon as my family
should be sufficiently prepared for the transition, to return to my
native country. I believed in the mean time, that, in the capital
of the bishopric, where my name was scarcely remembered by a single
individual, I should be more at liberty to proceed as circumstances
suggested, than in my present rural situation, where every neighbour
regarded himself as vested with a sort of inquisitorial power over all
around him.
To account for this measure to my family, I felt it incumbent on me
to confess to them a certain pecuniary acquisition. The story that
most readily suggested itself, was that of the stranger having left
behind him a certain sum of which he made a donation to me. This,
though in the plain and direct sense of the terms it were false, yet
in its spirit bore a certain resemblance to the truth; and, with that
resemblance, in spite of the rigid adherence to veracity, that first
ornament of a gentleman, that most essential prerequisite to the
regard and affection of others, which I had hitherto maintained, I was
induced to content myself. What could I do? I was compelled to account
for appearances; I was forbidden by the most solemn injunctions to
unfold the truth. I should indeed have felt little complacence in the
disclosure; I should have been reluctant to announce a circumstance
which, as I began to feel, introduced a permanent difference and
separation between me and my family.
The sum at which I fixed the legacy of the stranger was three thousand
crowns. I was not inattentive to the future; I should have been glad,
by my present account, to have furnished a more ample solution for
circumstances which might occur hereafter. But some regard was due
to probability. An unknown, a solitary man, broken with age, who
arrived on foot, and who declined all aid and attendance, must not be
represented as possessing mines of treasure.
It was some time before I could prevail on myself to break my story to
the inhabitants of my cottage. As the time approached when I was to
bid an everlasting farewell to rural obscurity and a humble station,
they seemed to adorn themselves in new charms. I was like the son of a
king, who had hitherto been told by his attendants that he was a mere
villager, and who, while his youthful imagination is dazzled by the
splendour that awaits him, yet looks back with a wistful eye upon his
mirthful sports, his former companions, and the simple charms of her
who first obtained his guileless love. I announced my acquisition and
my purpose with a faltering tongue and a beating heart.
I could perceive that my tale produced few emotions of pleasure in
those who heard it. Julia and her mother, especially, were warmly
attached to their retirement; and the scenes which had witnessed
so many pleasurable incidents and emotions. Chagrin, in spite of
themselves, made a transient abode upon their countenances; but the
unresisting mildness of the one, and the considerate attachment of the
other, prevented, for the present, their sensations from breaking out
into words. The feelings, however, that they consigned to silence, did
not entirely escape the notice of the lively little Marguerite. She
sympathised with them, probably without being aware that they were
sad. She came towards me, and, with much anxiety in her enquiring
face, asked why we must go away from the cottage? If I had got some
money I might go to the town, and buy sweetmeats, and ribands, and new
clothes, and a hundred more pretty things, and bring them home. For
her part, she should be better pleased to put on her finery, and make
her feast in the pretty old summer-house, now she was again permitted
to go and play in it, than in a palace all stuck over with emeralds
and rubies. Her mother wiped away a tear at the innocent speech of her
darling, kissed her, and bid her go and feed the hen and her chickens.
Charles was the only one in whom I could observe any pleasure at
my intelligence. He was not as yet skilful enough to calculate the
advantages that three thousand crowns could purchase. But I could see
joy sparkle in his eyes, as I announced my intention of bidding adieu
to retirement, and taking up my rest in the capital of the district.
His veins swelled with the blood of his ancestors; his mind was inured
to the contemplation of their prowess. Already sixteen years of age,
he had secretly burned to go forth into the world, to behold the
manners of his species, and to establish for himself a claim to some
rank in their estimation. He had pined in thought at the mediocrity
of our circumstances, and the apparent impossibility of emerging; for
he regarded the duty of contributing his labour to the subsistence of
the family, as the first of all obligations; and the more the bent of
his spirit struggled against it, the more resolutely he set himself to
comply.
The rest of the family were no sooner retired, than Marguerite, finding
in what I had just announced to all, an occasion from the use of which
she could not excuse herself, took this opportunity of unburthening the
grief which had long been accumulating in her mind.
“St. Leon,” said she, “listen kindly to what I am going to say to
you, and assure yourself that I am actuated by no spleen, resentment,
or ill-humour, but by the truest affection. I perceive I have lost,
in your apprehension, the right of advising you. I am no longer
the partner of your counsels; I am no longer the confident of your
thoughts. You communicate nothing but what you cannot suppress; and
that you communicate to your whole family assembled. Heaven knows how
dear to me is every individual of that family! but my love for them
does not hide from me what is due to myself. I know that a husband, who
felt as a husband ought, and, give me leave to say, as I have deserved
you should feel towards me, could not act as you have acted to-night.
“You must excuse my reminding you of some things which you seem to have
forgotten. I would not mention them, if they had not been forgotten
when they ought to have been remembered. I have lived seventeen years
with you; my whole study had been your advantage and pleasure. Have
you any thing to reproach me with? Point out to me, if in any thing I
could have added to your pleasure, and have neglected it! What I have
done, has not been the ceremonious discharge of a duty; it has been
the pure emanation of an attachment that knew no bounds. I have passed
with you through good fortune and ill fortune. When we were rich, I
entered with my whole heart into your pleasures, because they were
yours. When we were poor, I endured every hardship without a murmur; I
watched by you, I consoled you, I reconciled you to yourself. I do not
mean to make a merit of all this: no! Reginald! I could not have acted
otherwise if I would.
“Do me the justice to recollect, that I have not been a complaining or
irritable companion. In all our adversities, in the loss of fortune,
and the bitter consequences of that loss, I never uttered a reproachful
word. What poverty, sorrow, hunger and famine never extorted from me,
you have at length wrung from my bleeding heart. St. Leon! I have known
your bosom-thoughts. In no former instance has your affection or your
confidence been alienated from me; and that consoled me for all the
rest. But now, for three months, the case has been entirely altered.
You have during all that time been busy, pensive, and agitated; but I
have been as much a stranger to your meditations as if I had never been
accustomed to be their depository. You have not scrupled to inflict a
wound upon me that no subsequent change will ever be able to cicatrise.
Nor indeed do I see any likelihood of a change. You announce our
removal to Constance; what we are to do next, with what views, or for
what purpose, I am ignorant.
“I have made my election. My heart is formed for affection, and must
always feel an uneasy void and desolation without it. If you had thus
robbed me of your attachment in an early period of our intercourse, I
know not upon what extremity my disappointment and anguish might have
driven me. They are harder to bear now; but I submit. It is too late
either for relief or remedy. What remains of my powers and my strength
I owe to my children. I will not seduce them from their father. They
may be benefited by his purse or his understanding, though, like me,
they should be deprived of his affection. You may be their friend when
I am no more. I feel that this will not last long. I feel that the main
link that bound me to existence cannot be snapped, and thus snapped by
unkindness worse than death, without promising soon to put a period to
my miseries. I shall be your victim in death, after having devoted my
life to you, in a way in which few women were ever devoted to their
husbands.
“But this is not what I purposed chiefly to say. This is what my
situation and my feelings have unwillingly wrung from me. Though you
have injured me in the tenderest point, I still recollect what you
were to me. I still feel deeply interested in your welfare, and the
fair fame you are to transmit to your children. I entreat you then to
reflect deeply, before you proceed further. You seem to me to stand
upon a precipice; nor do the alteration that has taken place in your
manners, and the revolution of your heart, lead me to augur favourably
of the plans you have formed. What is this stranger? Whence came he?
Why did he hide himself, and why was he pursued by the officers of
justice? Had he no relations? Was his bequest of the sum he had about
him his own act, and who is the witness to its deliberateness or its
freedom? You must not think that the world is inattentive to the
actions of men or their circumstances; if it were, the fame we prize
would be an empty bauble. No, sir, a fair fame can only be secured by
unequivocal proceedings. What will, what can, be thought of your giving
shelter to an unknown, a man accused of crimes, a man never beheld even
by an individual of your own family, and upon the strength of whose
alleged bequest you are about to change the whole mode of your life?
“Nor, Reginald, must you think me credulous enough to imagine that
you have now disclosed the whole or the precise truth. Three thousand
crowns is not a sum sufficient to account for what you propose, for
the long agitation of your thoughts, or for the change of character
you have sustained. You must either be totally deprived of rational
judgment, or there must be something behind, that you have not
communicated. What do you purpose in going to reside in the midst of a
city foreign to the manners of a Frenchman, distracted with internal
broils, and embittered to us by the recollection of the extremities
we personally suffered in it? Is your ambition sunk so low, that it
can be gratified by such a transition? No; you mean more than you
have announced; you mean something you are unwilling to declare.
Consider that meaning well! Put me out of the question! I am nothing,
and no longer desire to be any thing. But do not involve yourself in
indelible disgrace, or entail upon your memory the curses of your
children!”
What a distress was mine, who, in return to so generous and noble an
expostulation, could impart no confidence, and indulge no sincerity!
I felt a misery, of which, till this hour, I had been unable to form
a conception. Fool that I was, I had imagined that, when endowed with
the bequests of the stranger, no further evil could approach me! I had,
in my visionary mood, created castles and palaces, and expatiated in
the most distant futurity! and here I was, stopped and disappointed at
the threshold, in the very first step of my proceedings. What I could
however I did; I poured forth to Marguerite, not the secrets of my
understanding, but the overpowering emotions of my soul.
“Best, most adorable of women!” cried I, “how you rend my heart with
the nobleness of your remonstrances! Never was man blessed with a
partner so accomplished and exemplary as I have been! Do you think
your merits can ever be obliterated from my memory? Do you think the
feelings of gratitude and admiration can ever be weakened in my bosom,
or that the strength and singleness of my attachment can suffer decay?
Bear me witness, Heaven! I know no creature on the face of the earth
that can enter into competition with you; there is not the thing
in nature that I prize in comparison. I love you a thousand times
better than myself, and would die with joy to purchase your ease and
satisfaction. I can never repay the benefits you have conferred on me;
I can never rise to an equality with you.
“What anguish then do you inflict upon me, when you talk of becoming
the victim of my unkindness? Believe you I can endure, after having
dissipated your patrimony and drawn you with me into exile, after
having experienced from you a tenderness such as man never in any other
instance obtained from woman, to entertain the idea of embittering the
remainder of your life, and shortening your existence? I should regard
myself as the most execrable of monsters. I could not live under the
recollection of so unheard-of a guilt. If you would not have me abhor
myself and curse existence, live, confide in me, and be happy!
“Oh, Marguerite! how wretched and pitiable is my situation! Make some
allowance for me! I have a secret that I would give worlds to utter,
but dare not. Do not imagine that there is, or can be, any decay in my
affection! Confide in me! Allow to necessity, what never, never could
be the result of choice! In all things else, you shall know my inmost
heart, as you possess the boundless and unalterable affections of my
soul.”
Marguerite was somewhat, but not wholly, soothed by the earnestness of
my protestations. She saw, for the prescience of the heart is never
deceived, that a blow was given to the entireness of our affection,
from which it would never recover. She felt, for in truth and delicacy
of sentiment she was much my superior, that the reserve, in which I
persisted, and for which I deprecated excuse, might be sufficiently
consistent with a vulgar attachment, but would totally change the
nature of ours. She was aware that it related to no ordinary point,
that it formed the pole-star of my conduct, that it must present itself
afresh from day to day, and that in its operation it amounted to a
divorce of the heart. She submitted however, and endeavoured to appear
cheerful. Though she felt the worm of sorrow gnawing her vitals, she
was unwilling to occasion me an uneasiness it was in her power to
withhold. She was struck with the consistency and determination of my
resistance, and expostulated no more.
We went to Constance. We bade adieu to the scene of a six years’
happiness, such as the earth has seldom witnessed. I alone had
occasioned some imperfection in that happiness. There were times indeed
when, sitting in affectionate communion with my wife, and surrounded by
my children, my sensations had been as delicious as the state of human
existence ever had to boast. I felt my heart expand; I was conscious to
the unreserved union that subsisted among us; I felt myself identified
with all that I loved, and all for whom my heart was anxious. But the
curse entailed upon me from the earliest period to which my memory can
reach, operated even in the cottage of the lake. I was not formed to
enjoy a scene of pastoral simplicity. Ambition still haunted me; an
uneasiness, scarcely defined in its object, from time to time recurred
to my mind. If I thought I wanted nothing for myself, I deemed a career
of honour due to my children. Again, when I regarded honour as an
empty phantom, and persuaded myself that all conditions of life were
intrinsically equal, I recollected the fearful scene where hunger and
destruction had hung over us in Constance, and in imagination often
pictured to myself that scene as on the point of being renewed. The
sword of the demon, famine, seemed to my disturbed apprehension to be
suspended over us by a hair. Such had been the draught of bitterness
that occasionally detracted from this most enviable, as in retrospect I
am willing to denominate it, period of my existence.
We quitted our rural retreat, and took up our abode in a prosperous
mercantile city. I hired commodious apartments in one of the grand
squares, not far from the spot where the fairs are usually held.
Undoubtedly there was nothing in this residence very congenial to the
bent of my disposition, or the projects that fermented in my mind. I
had merely chosen it by way of interval, and to soften the transition
from what I had been, to what I purposed to be. In the multitude of
irresolute thoughts with which I laboured, the small distance of
Constance from the cottage of the lake, made me feel as if the removal
thither was one of the gentlest and most moderate measures to which I
could have recourse.
I had never been less happy and at peace with myself than I was now.
From general society and the ordinary intercourse of acquaintance
I had long been estranged, and it was in vain that I endeavoured
to return to habits of that sort. The society which the city of
Constance afforded had few charms for me. It had no pretensions to the
politeness, the elegance, the learning or the genius, an intercourse
with which had once been familiar to me. It scarcely contained within
its walls any but such as were occupied in merchandise or manufacture.
The attention of its inhabitants were divided between these objects,
and the encroachments which were making upon the ancient religion by
the Confession of Augsburg and the dogmas of Calvin. The majority of
the inhabitants were protestants; and, a few years before, they had
expelled their bishop and the canons of their cathedral. Having however
miscarried in a religious war into which they had entered, these
dignitaries had been reinstalled in their functions and emoluments. The
situation thus produced was an unnatural one; and a storm was evidently
brewing more violent than any which the city had yet sustained. The
gloomy temper and melancholy austerity of the reformers were as little
congenial to my temper, as the sordid ignorance and selfishness of the
trading spirit of the community.
I therefore lived in a state of seclusion. I endeavoured to seek
amusement in such novelties and occupations as might present
themselves to a person disengaged from the general vortex. But, if
the distinguished sphere in which I had once moved disqualified me
for taking an interest in these puerilities, the anticipations in
which I indulged of the future disqualified me still more. My domestic
scene too no longer afforded me the consolation and relief I had been
accustomed to derive from it. Marguerite exerted herself to appear
cheerful and contented; but it was an exertion. I began to fear that
the arrow of disappointment had indeed struck her to the heart. I was
anxiously occupied in considering what I was to do next. I hoped that
our next step might operate to revive her gaiety, and by additional
splendour amuse her solicitude. I began to fear that I had taken a
wrong method, and entered the career of a better fortune with too much
caution and timidity. At all events I felt that we no longer lived
together as we had done. There was no more opening of the heart between
us, no more infantine guilelessness and sincerity, no more of that
unapprehensive exposure of every thought of the soul, that adds the
purest zest to the pleasures of domestic life. We stood in awe of each
other; each was to the other in some degree an intrusive and unwelcome
spy upon what was secretly passing in the mind. There may be persons
who regard this as an evil very capable of being endured; but they must
be such as never knew the domestic joys I once experienced. The fall
from one of these conditions of life to the other was too bitter.