MALBONE was a person of such ready, emotional nature, and such easy
expression, that it was not hard for Hope to hide from herself the
gradual ebbing of his love. Whenever he was fresh and full of spirits,
he had enough to overflow upon her and every one. But when other
thoughts and cares were weighing on him, he could not share them, nor
could he at such times, out of the narrowing channel of his own life,
furnish more than a few scanty drops for her.
At these times he watched with torturing fluctuations the signs
of solicitude in Hope, the timid withdrawing of her fingers, the
questioning of her eyes, the weary drooping of her whole expression.
Often he cursed himself as a wretch for paining that pure and noble
heart. Yet there were moments when a vague inexpressible delight stole
in; a glimmering of shame-faced pleasure as he pondered on this visible
dawning of distrust; a sudden taste of freedom in being no longer
fettered by her confidence. By degrees he led himself, still half
ashamed, to the dream that she might yet be somehow weaned from him, and
leave his conscience free. By constantly building upon this thought, and
putting aside all others, he made room upon the waste of his life for a
house of cards, glittering, unsubstantial, lofty,--until there came some
sudden breath that swept it away; and then he began on it again.
In one of those moments of more familiar faith which still alternated
with these cold, sad intervals, she asked him with some sudden impulse,
how he should feel if she loved another? She said it, as if guided by
an instinct, to sound the depth of his love for her. Starting with
amazement, he looked at her, and then, divining her feeling, he only
replied by an expression of reproach, and by kissing her hands with
an habitual tenderness that had grown easy to him,--and they were
such lovely hands! But his heart told him that no spent swimmer ever
transferred more eagerly to another’s arms some precious burden beneath
which he was consciously sinking, than he would yield her up to any
one whom she would consent to love, and who could be trusted with the
treasure. Until that ecstasy of release should come, he would do his
duty,--yes, his duty.
When these flushed hopes grew pale, as they soon did, he could at least
play with the wan fancies that took their place. Hour after hour,
while she lavished upon him the sweetness of her devotion, he was half
consciously shaping with his tongue some word of terrible revealing that
should divide them like a spell, if spoken, and then recalling it before
it left his lips. Daily and hourly he felt the last agony of a weak and
passionate nature,--to dream of one woman in another’s arms.
She, too, watched him with an ever-increasing instinct of danger,
studied with a chilly terror the workings of his face, weighed and
reweighed his words in absence, agonized herself with new and ever
new suspicions; and then, when these had accumulated beyond endurance,
seized them convulsively and threw them all away. Then, coming back to
him with a great overwhelming ardor of affection, she poured upon him
more and more in proportion as he gave her less.
Sometimes in these moments of renewed affection he half gave words to
his remorse, accused himself before her of unnamed wrong, and besought
her to help him return to his better self. These were the most dangerous
moments of all, for such appeals made tenderness and patience appear
a duty; she must put away her doubts as sins, and hold him to her; she
must refuse to see his signs of faltering faith, or treat them as
mere symptoms of ill health. Should not a wife cling the closer to her
husband in proportion as he seemed alienated through the wanderings of
disease? And was not this her position? So she said within herself, and
meanwhile it was not hard to penetrate her changing thoughts, at least
for so keen an observer as Aunt Jane. Hope, at length, almost ceased to
speak of Malbone, and revealed her grief by this evasion, as the robin
reveals her nest by flitting from it.
Yet there were times when he really tried to force himself into a
revival of this calmer emotion. He studied Hope’s beauty with his eyes,
he pondered on all her nobleness. He wished to bring his whole heart
back to her--or at least wished that he wished it. But hearts that have
educated themselves into faithlessness must sooner or later share the
suffering they give. Love will be avenged on them. Nothing could
have now recalled this epicure in passion, except, possibly, a little
withholding or semi-coquetry on Hope’s part, and this was utterly
impossible for her. Absolute directness was a part of her nature; she
could die, but not manouvre.
It actually diminished Hope’s hold on Philip, that she had at this
time the whole field to herself. Emilia had gone for a few weeks to the
mountains, with the household of which she was a guest. An ideal and
unreasonable passion is strongest in absence, when the dream is all pure
dream, and safe from the discrepancies of daily life. When the two girls
were together, Emilia often showed herself so plainly Hope’s inferior,
that it jarred on Philip’s fine perceptions. But in Emilia’s absence the
spell of temperament, or whatever else brought them together, resumed
its sway unchecked; she became one great magnet of attraction, and all
the currents of the universe appeared to flow from the direction where
her eyes were shining. When she was out of sight, he needed to make no
allowance for her defects, to reproach himself with no overt acts of
disloyalty to Hope, to recognize no criticisms of his own intellect or
conscience. He could resign himself to his reveries, and pursue them
into new subtleties day by day.
There was Mrs. Meredith’s house, too, where they had been so happy. And
now the blinds were pitilessly closed, all but one where the Venetian
slats had slipped, and stood half open as if some dainty fingers held
them, and some lovely eyes looked through. He gazed so long and so often
on that silent house,--by day, when the scorching sunshine searched its
pores as if to purge away every haunting association, or by night, when
the mantle of darkness hung tenderly above it, and seemed to collect the
dear remembrances again,--that his fancy by degrees grew morbid, and
its pictures unreal. “It is impossible,” he one day thought to himself,
“that she should have lived in that room so long, sat in that window,
dreamed on that couch, reflected herself in that mirror, breathed that
air, without somehow detaching invisible fibres of her being, delicate
films of herself, that must gradually, she being gone, draw together
into a separate individuality an image not quite bodiless, that replaces
her in her absence, as the holy Theocrite was replaced by the angel. If
there are ghosts of the dead, why not ghosts of the living also?” This
lover’s fancy so pleased him that he brought to bear upon it the whole
force of his imagination, and it grew stronger day by day. To him,
thenceforth, the house was haunted, and all its floating traces of
herself visible or invisible,--from the ribbon that he saw entangled in
the window-blind to every intangible and fancied atom she had imparted
to the atmosphere,--came at last to organize themselves into one
phantom shape for him and looked out, a wraith of Emilia, through those
relentless blinds. As the vision grew more vivid, he saw the dim figure
moving through the house, wan, restless, tender, lingering where they
had lingered, haunting every nook where they had been happy once. In the
windy moanings of the silent night he could put his ear at the keyhole,
and could fancy that he heard the wild signals of her love and despair.