EVERYTHING in mental acquisition that her brother might have been, if he
would, and everything in all gracious charms and admirable qualities that
no one but herself could be,—this was Adelina.
I will not expatiate upon her beauty; I will not expatiate upon her
intelligence, her quickness of perception, her powers of memory, her
sweet consideration, from the first moment, for the slow-paced tutor who
ministered to her wonderful gifts. I was thirty then; I am over sixty
now: she is ever present to me in these hours as she was in those, bright
and beautiful and young, wise and fanciful and good.
When I discovered that I loved her, how can I say? In the first day? in
the first week? in the first month? Impossible to trace. If I be (as I
am) unable to represent to myself any previous period of my life as quite
separable from her attracting power, how can I answer for this one
detail?
Whensoever I made the discovery, it laid a heavy burden on me. And yet,
comparing it with the far heavier burden that I afterwards took up, it
does not seem to me now to have been very hard to bear. In the knowledge
that I did love her, and that I should love her while my life lasted, and
that I was ever to hide my secret deep in my own breast, and she was
never to find it, there was a kind of sustaining joy or pride, or
comfort, mingled with my pain.
But later on,—say, a year later on,—when I made another discovery, then
indeed my suffering and my struggle were strong. That other discovery
was—
These words will never see the light, if ever, until my heart is dust;
until her bright spirit has returned to the regions of which, when
imprisoned here, it surely retained some unusual glimpse of remembrance;
until all the pulses that ever beat around us shall have long been quiet;
until all the fruits of all the tiny victories and defeats achieved in
our little breasts shall have withered away. That discovery was that she
loved me.
She may have enhanced my knowledge, and loved me for that; she may have
over-valued my discharge of duty to her, and loved me for that; she may
have refined upon a playful compassion which she would sometimes show for
what she called my want of wisdom, according to the light of the world’s
dark lanterns, and loved me for that; she may—she must—have confused the
borrowed light of what I had only learned, with its brightness in its
pure, original rays; but she loved me at that time, and she made me know
it.
Pride of family and pride of wealth put me as far off from her in my
lady’s eyes as if I had been some domesticated creature of another kind.
But they could not put me farther from her than I put myself when I set
my merits against hers. More than that. They could not put me, by
millions of fathoms, half so low beneath her as I put myself when in
imagination I took advantage of her noble trustfulness, took the fortune
that I knew she must possess in her own right, and left her to find
herself, in the zenith of her beauty and genius, bound to poor rusty,
plodding me.
No! Worldliness should not enter here at any cost. If I had tried to
keep it out of other ground, how much harder was I bound to try to keep
it out from this sacred place!
But there was something daring in her broad, generous character, that
demanded at so delicate a crisis to be delicately and patiently
addressed. And many and many a bitter night (O, I found I could cry for
reasons not purely physical, at this pass of my life!) I took my course.
My lady had, in our first interview, unconsciously overstated the
accommodation of my pretty house. There was room in it for only one
pupil. He was a young gentleman near coming of age, very well connected,
but what is called a poor relation. His parents were dead. The charges
of his living and reading with me were defrayed by an uncle; and he and I
were to do our utmost together for three years towards qualifying him to
make his way. At this time he had entered into his second year with me.
He was well-looking, clever, energetic, enthusiastic; bold; in the best
sense of the term, a thorough young Anglo-Saxon.