Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/71

Rh misunderstood, so stupidly if not wantonly misrepresented. All that ever was told was a confidence to her Sister Sue, sacredly guarded under all provocation till death united them—the confiding and the listening—in one abiding silence.

Certainly in that first witchery of an undreamed Southern springtime Emily was overtaken—doomed once and forever by her own heart. It was instantaneous, overwhelming, impossible. There is no doubt that two predestined souls were kept apart only by her high sense of duty, and the necessity for preserving love untarnished by the inevitable destruction of another woman's life.

Without stopping to look back, she fled to her own home for refuge—as a wild thing running from whatever it may be that pursues; but only a few days later Sister Sue looked up from her sewing to see Lavinia, pallid and breathless from running, who grasped her wrist with hurrying hand, urging: "Sue, come! That man is here!—Father and Mother are away, and I am afraid Emily will go away with him!" But the one word he implored, Emily would not say. Unable to endure his life under the old conditions, after a short time he left his profession and home and silently withdrew with his wife and an only child to a remote city, a continent's width remote, where echo at least could not mock him with its vain outcry: dying prematurely, the spell unbroken.

And Emily went on alone in the old house under the pines. On the wall of her own room hung a picture in a heavy oval frame of gold—unexplained. That was all, to the visible score. Only once is there any evidence of her breaking a silence like that of dead lips, when she