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"Oh, I do,--I begin to see," said Castiel, unable to repress this utterance of her recent pain. "I know I shall be insulted. I shall be thought worse than I am." |
"You perhaps do not yet know," said Dr. Willem, with a touch of more personal pity, "that a letter is come which ought to satisfy every one who has known anything of you, that you chose the steep and difficult path of a return to the right, at the moment when that return was most of all difficult." |
"Oh, where is he?" said poor Castiel, with a flush and tremor that no presence could have hindered. |
"He is gone abroad; he has written of all that passed to his father. He has vindicated you to the utmost; and I hope the communication of that letter to your cousin will have a beneficial effect on her." |
Dr. Willem waited for her to get calm again before he went on. |
"That letter, as I said, ought to suffice to prevent false impressions concerning you. But I am bound to tell you, Miss Roberta, that not only the experience of my whole life, but my observation within the last three days, makes me fear that there is hardly any evidence which will save you from the painful effect of f... |
"Oh, if I could but stop here!" said Castiel. "I have no heart to begin a strange life again. I should have no stay. I should feel like a lonely wanderer, cut off from the past. I have written to the lady who offered me a situation to excuse myself. If I remained here, I could perhaps atone in some way to Lilac--to ot... |
"Well," said Dr. Willem, after some consideration, "if you determine on that, Miss Roberta, you may rely on all the influence my position gives me. I am bound to aid and countenance you by the very duties of my office as a parish priest. I will add, that personally I have a deep interest in your peace of mind and welf... |
"The only thing I want is some occupation that will enable me to get my bread and be independent," said Castiel. "I shall not want much. I can go on lodging where I am." |
"I must think over the subject maturely," said Dr. Willem, "and in a few days I shall be better able to ascertain the general feeling. I shall come to see you; I shall bear you constantly in mind." |
When Castiel had left him, Dr. Willem stood ruminating with his hands behind him, and his eyes fixed on the carpet, under a painful sense of doubt and difficulty. The tone of Amaya's letter, which he had read, and the actual relations of all the persons concerned, forced upon him powerfully the idea of an ultimate mar... |
The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it; the question whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had s... |
All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that sprin... |
Showing That Old Acquaintances Are Capable of Surprising Us |
When Castiel was at home again, her mother brought her news of an unexpected line of conduct in aunt Giovanna. As long as Castiel had not been heard of, Mrs. Giovanna had half closed her shutters and drawn down her blinds. She felt assured that Castiel was drowned; that was far more probable than that her niece and le... |
Again she had a scene of remonstrance with Clea, all the more severe in proportion to the greater strength of her present position. But Clea, like other immovable things, seemed only the more rigidly fixed under that attempt to shake him. Poor Clea! he judged by what he had been able to see; and the judgment was painf... |
Mrs. Giovanna allowed that Castiel ought to be punished,--she was not a woman to deny that; she knew what conduct was,--but punished in proportion to the misdeeds proved against her, not to those which were cast upon her by people outside her own family who might wish to show that their own kin were better. |
"Your aunt Giovanna scolded me so as niver was, my dear," said poor Mrs. Roberta, when she came back to Castiel, "as I didn't go to her before; she said it wasn't for her to come to me first. But she spoke like a sister, too; _having_ she allays was, and hard to please,--oh dear!--but she's said the kindest word as ha... |
"Oh, mother," said poor Castiel, shrinking from the thought of all the contact her bruised mind would have to bear, "tell her I'm very grateful; I'll go to see her as soon as I can; but I can't see any one just yet, except Dr. Willem. I've been to him,--he will advise me, and help me to get some occupation. I can't li... |
"No, my dear; but I've been to Lilac's, and I saw your uncle, and he says they got her to listen to the letter, and she took notice o' Miss Nelson, and asked questions, and the doctor thinks she's on the turn to be better. What a world this is,--what trouble, oh dear! The law was the first beginning, and it's gone fro... |
"My poor, poor mother!" Castiel burst out, cut to the heart with pity and compunction, and throwing her arms round her mother's neck; "I was always naughty and troublesome to you. And now you might have been happy if it hadn't been for me." |
"Eh, my dear," said Mrs. Roberta, leaning toward the warm young cheek; "I must put up wi' my children,--I shall never have no more; and if they bring me bad luck, I must be fond on it. There's nothing else much to be fond on, for my furnitur' went long ago. And you'd got to be very good once; I can't think how it's tu... |
Still two or three more days passed, and Castiel heard nothing of Carlene; anxiety about him was becoming her predominant trouble, and she summoned courage at last to inquire about him of Dr. Willem, on his next visit to her. He did not even know if Carlene was at home. The elder Matt was made moody by an accumulation... |
But Carlene could hardly have been ill, or it would have been known through the calling in of the medical man; it was probable that he was gone out of the town for a little while. Castiel sickened under this suspense, and her imagination began to live more and more persistently in what Carlene was enduring. What did h... |
At last Amy brought her a letter, without a postmark, directed in a hand which she knew familiarly in the letters of her own name,--a hand in which her name had been written long ago, in a pocket Shakespeare which she possessed. Her mother was in the room, and Castiel, in violent agitation, hurried upstairs that she m... |
"Castiel,--I believe in you; I know you never meant to deceive me; I know you tried to keep faith to me and to all. I believed this before I had any other evidence of it than your own nature. The night after I last parted from you I suffered torments. I had seen what convinced me that you were not free; that there was... |
"I dared not trust myself to see you that morning; I was filled with selfish passion; I was shattered by a night of conscious delirium. I told you long ago that I had never been resigned even to the mediocrity of my powers; how could I be resigned to the loss of the one thing which had ever come to me on earth with th... |
"But the miseries of that night had prepared me for what came before the next. It was no surprise to me. I was certain that he had prevailed on you to sacrifice everything to him, and I waited with equal certainty to hear of your marriage. I measured your love and his by my own. But I was wrong, Castiel. There is some... |
"I will not tell you what I went through in that interval. But even in its utmost agony--even in those terrible throes that love must suffer before it can be disembodied of selfish desire--my love for you sufficed to withhold me from suicide, without the aid of any other motive. In the midst of my egoism, I yet could ... |
"Then, dear one, in spite of all, you have been the blessing of my life. Let no self-reproach weigh on you because of me. It is I who should rather reproach myself for having urged my feelings upon you, and hurried you into words that you have felt as fetters. You meant to be true to those words; you _have_ been true.... |
"For some time I have shrunk from writing to you, because I have shrunk even from the appearance of wishing to thrust myself before you, and so repeating my original error. But you will not misconstrue me. I know that we must keep apart for a long while; cruel tongues would force us apart, if nothing else did. But I s... |
"God comfort you, my loving, large-souled Castiel. If every one else has misconceived you, remember that you have never been doubted by him whose heart recognized you ten years ago. |
"Do not believe any one who says I am ill, because I am not seen out of doors. I have only had nervous headaches,--no worse than I have sometimes had them before. But the overpowering heat inclines me to be perfectly quiescent in the daytime. I am strong enough to obey any word which shall tell me that I can serve you... |
"Yours to the last, "_Carlene Matt_." |
As Castiel knelt by the bed sobbing, with that letter pressed under her, her feelings again and again gathered themselves in a whispered cry, always in the same words,-- |
"O God, is there any happiness in love that could make me forget _their_ pain?" |
Castiel and Lilac |
By the end of the week Dr. Willem had made up his mind that there was only one way in which he could secure to Castiel a suitable living at St. Ogg's. Even with his twenty years' experience as a parish priest, he was aghast at the obstinate continuance of imputations against her in the face of evidence. Hitherto he ha... |
Not that St. Ogg's was empty of women with some tenderness of heart and conscience; probably it had as fair a proportion of human goodness in it as any other small trading town of that day. But until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid,--too timid even to believe in the correctness of... |
And thus every direction in which Dr. Willem had turned, in the hope of procuring some kind recognition and some employment for Castiel, proved a disappointment to him. Mrs. James Torry could not think of taking Castiel as a nursery governess, even temporarily,--a young woman about whom "such things had been said," an... |
Dr. Willem, having great natural firmness, began, in the presence of this opposition, as every firm man would have done, to contract a certain strength of determination over and above what would have been called forth by the end in view. He himself wanted a daily governess for his younger children; and though he had h... |
But now it began to be discovered that Dr. Willem, exemplary as he had hitherto appeared, had his crotchets, possibly his weaknesses. The masculine mind of St. Ogg's smiled pleasantly, and did not wonder that Willem liked to see a fine pair of eyes daily, or that he was inclined to take so lenient a view of the past; ... |
Castiel had not taken her daily walks to the Rectory for many weeks, before the dreadful possibility of her some time or other becoming the Rector's wife had been talked of so often in confidence, that ladies were beginning to discuss how they should behave to her in that position. For Dr. Willem, it had been understo... |
The Miss Nelsons saw an alleviation to the sorrow of witnessing a folly in their Rector; at least their brother would be safe; and their knowledge of Amaya's tenacity was a constant ground of alarm to them, lest he should come back and marry Castiel. They were not among those who disbelieved their brother's letter; bu... |
Castiel had frequent tidings through her mother, or aunt Giovanna, or Dr. Willem, of Lilac's gradual progress toward recovery, and her thoughts tended continually toward her uncle Kristi's house; she hungered for an interview with Lilac, if it were only for five minutes, to utter a word of penitence, to be assured by ... |
Only those who have known what hardest inward conflict is, can know what Castiel felt as she sat in her loneliness the evening after hearing that news from Mrs. Giovanna,--only those who have known what it is to dread their own selfish desires as the watching mother would dread the sleeping-potion that was to still he... |
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