Page:Household Words - Volume 12.djvu/107



  stood on the deck together,—I and my husband—I, shrouded in warm wrappings, with folded arms, leaning against him. How strong he was! How firm he stood! How delightful it was to me to lean there so! It was late, and a wild night; a strong wind blowing, and our ship bounding on over high-swelling waves. It should have been moonlight—the moon was at the full—but only now and then a wind-rent in the clouds let her pale light through.

We did not talk, the wild wind would have blown our words away, and my heart and soul were very full. Leaning there I thought I had found life-long peace, a refuge from all trouble and distress. What a beautiful future I pictured! We were both young: I some five years the younger: a mere girl in age and in appearance, yet all too old at heart. Measuring life by the bitterness of gained experience, by its pain, and not by the number of its days and years, I was no longer young. My life had long been a struggle; a series of conflicts in which I always came off heart-wounded, sometimes hand-disabled, never subdued. I had been ever at war with circumstance. There was a strange and secret strength somewhere within me, that would not be crushed out: that would not let me yield. But though too strong to submit myself a willing slave to any imposed yoke, my nature was not strong enough, I was not wise enough, to gather all powers of soul, and heart, and mind together, into conscious possession, and then yield meekly, quietly, and entirely to the recognition of the controlling power of a higher will. So I had fought on as blindly as vehemently, doing battle boldly for real and unreal rights, resenting deeply both real and supposed injuries.

No mere woman can live long so,—at war with all around,—I had grown heart-sick, and utterly weary; soon I should have lain down, and yielded. But a great change came to me. While I had been struggling and striving in a night of great darkness, in which the things after which my ambition prompted me to reach always eluded my eager hands, God laid in my path, at my very feet, a good gift.

I was a governess when my husband began to woo me. I was his equal by birth, but what did that serve me? He was far above me in station now, was handsome, and much courted and admired. The daughters of the family with whom I lived would have been proud to win him, but he turned from them with his simple, frank indifference, and bent the power of his nature to loving me! I was rather small, generally very quiet in manner, not beautiful, and not plain. I believe I had a certain dignity of my own, which had been useful to me in my unprotected state. I felt that when I chose I could compel respect, and gloried in the power, though it made me more feared than loved.

I do not know what it could have been in me that served to draw my husband's notice upon me, and then to win me his love. I think, for his was a most faithful heart, that he must have regarded me, first, for the sake of some real or imagined likeness to my brother, my dead brother, who had been his friend. And yet it was hardly me he loved; of my real nature, its force, its aspirations, its vehement unrest, he knew nothing. He loved me as he saw me, looking through some medium of his own interposing.

Of course he was my first lover. Who else would have turned from our three household Graces,—the grown-up daughters of the family—brilliant, accomplished, dowered, and, apparently, sweet-tempered, as they were, to me? poor, plain, and proud, as I was considered. So, of course, he was my first lover! If I loved him aright I could not tell,—if I ever loved him as a wife should love, I do not even now know. I felt it infinitely sweet and strange to be beloved to be the object of such manly, protecting tenderness as his. I asked no questions,—when I could once believe in his love, I gave myself up, abandoned my whole being utterly, to the great, new joy. There was nothing to distract my mind, nothing to divide my affection with him, and I had very large capacity of loving. His loving me was a sufficient proof of his goodness, of his disinterestedness, and great-heartedness. I was satisfied, and Harold could not long doubt that I loved him, and I am sure he never suspected me of accepting him for any other reason. He could see my eyes well over with delight,

VOL. XII.