Everything in mental acquisition
that her brother might have been, if he would, and everything in
all gracious charms and admirable qualities that no one but
herself could be,—this was Adelina.
I will not expatiate upon her beauty; I will not expatiate
upon her intelligence, her quickness of perception, her powers of
memory, her sweet consideration, from the first moment, for the
slow-paced tutor who ministered to her wonderful gifts. I
was thirty then; I am over sixty now: she is ever present to me
in these hours as she was in those, bright and beautiful and
young, wise and fanciful and good.
When I discovered that I loved her, how can I say? In
the first day? in the first week? in the first month?
Impossible to trace. If I be (as I am) unable to represent
to myself any previous period of my life as quite separable from
her attracting power, how can I answer for this one detail?
Whensoever I made the discovery, it laid a heavy burden on
me. And yet, comparing it with the far heavier burden that
I afterwards took up, it does not seem to me now to have been
very hard to bear. In the knowledge that I did love her,
and that I should love her while my life lasted, and that I was
ever to hide my secret deep in my own breast, and she was never
to find it, there was a kind of sustaining joy or pride, or
comfort, mingled with my pain.
But later on,—say, a year later on,—when I made
another discovery, then indeed my suffering and my struggle were
strong. That other discovery was—
These words will never see the light, if ever, until my heart
is dust; until her bright spirit has returned to the regions of
which, when imprisoned here, it surely retained some unusual
glimpse of remembrance; until all the pulses that ever beat
around us shall have long been quiet; until all the fruits of all
the tiny victories and defeats achieved in our little breasts
shall have withered away. That discovery was that she loved
me.
She may have enhanced my knowledge, and loved me for that; she
may have over-valued my discharge of duty to her, and loved me
for that; she may have refined upon a playful compassion which
she would sometimes show for what she called my want of wisdom,
according to the light of the world’s dark lanterns, and
loved me for that; she may—she must—have confused the
borrowed light of what I had only learned, with its brightness in
its pure, original rays; but she loved me at that time, and she
made me know it.
Pride of family and pride of wealth put me as far off from her
in my lady’s eyes as if I had been some domesticated
creature of another kind. But they could not put me farther
from her than I put myself when I set my merits against
hers. More than that. They could not put me, by
millions of fathoms, half so low beneath her as I put myself when
in imagination I took advantage of her noble trustfulness, took
the fortune that I knew she must possess in her own right, and
left her to find herself, in the zenith of her beauty and genius,
bound to poor rusty, plodding me.
No! Worldliness should not enter here at any cost.
If I had tried to keep it out of other ground, how much harder
was I bound to try to keep it out from this sacred place!
But there was something daring in her broad, generous
character, that demanded at so delicate a crisis to be delicately
and patiently addressed. And many and many a bitter night
(O, I found I could cry for reasons not purely physical, at this
pass of my life!) I took my course.
My lady had, in our first interview, unconsciously overstated
the accommodation of my pretty house. There was room in it
for only one pupil. He was a young gentleman near coming of
age, very well connected, but what is called a poor
relation. His parents were dead. The charges of his
living and reading with me were defrayed by an uncle; and he and
I were to do our utmost together for three years towards
qualifying him to make his way. At this time he had entered
into his second year with me. He was well-looking, clever,
energetic, enthusiastic; bold; in the best sense of the term, a
thorough young Anglo-Saxon.
I resolved to bring these two together.
