The meaning of the life I was about to enter upon was now distinctly
before me. What it appeared to me, I well knew it was, in very
reality, for I was now freed from my love. I had sacrificed all for
duty. I could see now to what the blind obedience of that duty had
led me. What I was I now knew.
My soul was clear from hypocrisy—there was not any lie upon it now. I
had confessed all. My very life was laid open to my heart’s core. My
love was gone, as well by his will as my own, forever.
What had I accomplished? I had preserved the chaste name of wife.
I had preserved the honor of my husband and the reputation of his
children. And to do it, I was beneath his roof, and was about to
submit myself to his embraces without love.
For these considerations of honor and reputation, I was about to
lead voluntarily a life of prostitution, distinguished from it only
by the social fiction of a name, and I felt myself more degraded for
all this honorable hire than she who accepts her paltry dole in the
streets.
I was, moreover, about to fulfil functions from which every fibre
of my body shrunk with abhorrence. I was there to give life to
offspring created in my own degradation, in violation of my will
and nature, the effete offspring of blood kin, children to die
feebly before their time, or perhaps to come into the world, they,
or their children, deformed, or dumb, or blind, or imbecile. I, who
was perfect myself, and formed to receive and transmit the sacred
treasure of a new life, was to become voluntarily the matricide of
the more perfect conceptions which should be mine.
Better, in the agony of that thought, I said, better death than
this—better self-immolation of body and soul; it were far less a
crime.
And then, shuddering with horror upon the brink to which duty had led
me, I supplicated my soul imploringly for light, as I asked myself
the great question: Does any law of God sanction, shall any law of
man have the power to continue, the bond of marriage where no love
exists?
And I answered it, as my children, if they inherit aught of my
nature, shall at last approve, as the world shall at last come to
understand.
Thus was I at once and forever severed from all former relations and
left alone in the world.
I write these last words quietly, here at my writing desk; but that
inquisition of my brain, it was terrible—more terrible even than the
death I had accepted in parting from him.
But my decision was made, and I was calm then.
I knew in that moment the rest of a fearful struggle of the brain—the
poor weak brain of a woman—that swept the world, though, beneath her
feet.
There was grief in that family, when I became in that decision
myself, and stood a stranger among them; when the social fabric, his
children, their father, false pride, conventional position—all had
overthrow; when my mother’s wrongs had revenge, and my father’s love
had justification, in the child of his life-wronged wife!
But their grief was joy to the agony of calm in which I made that
decision.
Not a tear came to my eye when I told it them; not a pulse stirred
in my breast. How inconceivable to them all this agony.
My husband was even still solicitous to preserve the form of a union,
now no longer possible in reality. One of those formality doctors
of the soul was sent for—his uncle Francis. O! after all the agony
I had passed through, I might have been spared the sight of one of
those whose words had sanctioned and stamped upon me, as if by the
authority of God, all this misery.
But how weak and idle to me were his words about theological sin
and social infamy. They fell on my ear, in constant repetition,
meaningless as the dropping of the beads of a rosary.
He told me I was imperiling my soul, and he left me with some formal
expression of pious horror, when I told him I would willingly incur
that risk.
* * * * *
And now I was alone in the world—my life still before me—severed from
every living relation—to be lived or ended. What new connections must
I assume? Unsupported, helpless, alone, where should I go? What must
I do?
In those past ages the convent doors would have been open to me; but
my intelligence, the intelligence of the very age in which I lived,
forbade me the immolation of my living body and my free soul.
And then came to me again the idea of suicide.
I did not shrink from this thought superstitiously, as fearing to
rush unbidden into the presence of the offended deities. I had no
such thought. It meant to me only rest from this great burden and
weariness of life—to lie down and sleep while it was yet day—to sleep
forever.
But I was too calm for the rashness of this act—too strong. If they,
who retired to the cloister from a sense of a superstitious duty,
willingly endured its burden, I, with larger intelligence, could not
sink beneath their lower thought, and weakly die. No, I had committed
no crime that I should die; nor were my past misfortunes a reason why
I should voluntarily impose new ones upon my life to come. I knew I
was in the world to live. Vigor of body, of mind, passions, desires,
reason, all that goes to make up a human soul, were in the full tide
of existence; and I was here surely not to contemplate death, but to
fulfil the functions of life—of a new life.
For I had absolutely died in that decision to live free from my
bond. I was dead to all past relations and connections. I was dead
to the social world around me, as if I had never lived before. The
consciousness of my identity was gone. Every eye rested strangely
upon me. I was as a child new born. I would have put out my hands
simply as a child, for I was in the living world, again, a stranger;
new born, with a life in perfect maturity.