"I have followed up to this hour, my fair cousin, in the path you
have marked out for me. It has brought me back, in this chamber, to
the point from which I started under your guidance, and if it had
brought me back unchanged--if it restored me my energy, my hope,
and my prospect of fame, I should pray Heaven that it would also
give me back my love, and be content--more than content, if it gave
me back also my poverty. The sight of my easel, and of the
surroundings of my boyish dreams of glory, have made my heart
bitter. They have given form and voice to a vague unhappiness,
which has haunted me through all these absent years--years of
degrading pursuits and wasted powers--and it now impels me from
you, kind and lovely as you are, with an aversion I cannot control.
I cannot forgive you. You have thwarted my destiny. You have
extinguished with sordid cares a lamp within me, that might, by
this time, have shone through the world. And what am I, since your
wishes are accomplished? Enriched in pocket, and bankrupt in
happiness and self-respect.
"With a heart sick, and a brain aching for distinction, I have come
to an unhonored stand-still at thirty! I am a successful tradesman,
and in this character I shall probably die. Could I begin to be a
painter now, say you? Alas! my knowledge of the art is too great
for patience with the slow hand! I could not draw a line without
despair. The pliant fingers and the plastic mind must keep pace to
make progress in art. My taste is fixed, and my imagination
uncreative, because chained down by certainties; and the
shortsighted ardor and daring experiments which are indispensable
to sustain and advance the follower in Raphael's footsteps, are too
far behind for my resuming. The tide ebbed from me at the accursed
burning of my pencils by your pitiless hand, and from that hour I
have felt hope receding. Could I be happy with you, stranded here
in ignoble idleness, and owing to you the loss of my whole venture
of opportunity? No, Fanny?--surely no!
"I would not be unnecessarily harsh. I am sensible of your
affection and constancy. I have deferred this explanation unwisely,
till the time and place make it seem more cruel. You are at this
very moment, I well know, awake in your chamber, devoting to me the
vigils of a heart overflowing with tenderness. And I would--if it
were possible--if it were not utterly beyond my powers of self
sacrifice and concealment--I would affect a devotion I cannot feel,
and carry out this error through a life of artifice and monotony.
But here, again, the work is your own, and my feelings revert
bitterly to your interference. If there were no other obstacle to
my marrying you--if you were not associated repulsively with the
dark cloud on my life, you are not the woman I could now enthrone
in my bosom. We have diverged since the separation which I pleaded
against, and which you commanded. I need for my idolatry, now, a
creature to whom the sordid cares you have sacrificed me to, are
utterly unknown--a woman born and educated in circumstances where
want is never feared, and where calculation never enters. I must
lavish my wealth, if I fulfil my desire, on one who accepts it like
the air she breathes, and who knows the value of nothing but
love--a bird with a human soul and form, believing herself free of
all the world is rich in, and careful only for pleasure and the
happiness of those who belong to her. Such women, beautiful and
highly educated, are found only in ranks of society between which
and my own I have been increasing in distance--nay, building an
impassable barrier, in obedience to your control. Where I stop,
interdicted by the stain of trade, the successful artist is free to
enter. You have stamped me _plebeian_--you would not share my slow
progress toward a higher sphere, and you have disqualified me for
attaining it alone. In your mercenary and immovable will, and in
that only, lies the secret of our twofold unhappiness.
"I leave you, to return to Europe. My brother and my friends will
tell you I am mad and inexcusable, and look upon you as a victim.
They will say that, to have been a painter, were nothing to the
career that I might mark out for my ambition, if ambition I must
have, in politics. Politics in a country where distinction is a
pillory! But I could not live here. It is my misfortune that my
tastes are so modified by that long and compulsory exile, that
life, here, would be a perpetual penance. This unmixed air of
merchandise suffocates me. Our own home is tinctured black with it.
You yourself, in this rural Paradise you have conjured up, move in
it like a cloud. The counting-house rings in your voice,
calculation draws together your brows, you look on everything as a
_means_, and know its cost; and the calm and means-forgetting
_fruition_, which forms the charm and dignity of superior life, is
utterly unknown to you. What would be my happiness with such a
wife? What would be yours with such a husband? Yet I consider the
incompatibility between us as no advantage on my part--on the
contrary, a punishment, and of your inflicting. What shall I be,
anywhere, but a Tantalus--a fastidious _ennuye_, with a thirst for
the inaccessible burning in my bosom continually!
"I pray you let us avoid another meeting before my departure.
Though I cannot forgive you as a lover, I can think of you with
pleasure as a cousin, and I give you as your due ('damages,' the
law would phrase it,) the portion of myself which you thought most
important when I offered you my all. You would not take me without
the fortune, but perhaps you will be content with the fortune
without me. I shall immediately take steps to convey to you this
property of Revedere, with an income sufficient to maintain it, and
I trust soon to hear that you have found a husband better worthy of
you than your cousin--
"Philip Ballister."