To this effect, she sent, the next morning, a message that pleaded indisposition, to M. Vinstreigle; yet that included an assurance, that he might depend upon her performance, on the following evening, at his concert.
Once more, therefore, she consigned herself to practice; but vainly she attempted to sing; her voice was disobedient to her desires: she had recourse, however, to her harp; but she was soon interrupted, by receiving the following letter from Harleigh.
‘To Miss Ellis.
‘With a satisfaction which I dare not indulge—and yet, how curb?—I have learnt, from Ireton, that you have renounced the rehearsals. ’Tis, but, however, the trembling joy of a reprieve, that, while welcoming hope, sees danger and death still in view. For me and for my feelings your disclaim all consideration: I will not, therefore, intrude upon you, again, my wishes or my sufferings; yet as you do not, I trust, utterly reject me as a friend, permit me, in that capacity, to entreat you to deliberate, before you finally adopt a measure to which you confess your repugnance. Your situation I know not; but where information is withheld, conjecture is active; and while I see your accomplishments, while I am fascinated by your manners, I judge your education, and, thence, your connections, and original style of life. If, then, there be any family that you quit, yet that you may yourself desire should one day reclaim you; and if there be any family—leave mine alone!—to which you may hereafter be allied, and that you may wish should appreciate, should revere you, as you merit to be revered and appreciated—for such let me plead! Wound not the customs of their ancestors, the received notions of the world, the hitherto acknowledged boundaries of elegant life! Or, if your tenderness for the feelings—say the failings, if you please,—the prejudices, the weaknesses of others,—has no weight, let, at least, your own ideas of personal propriety, your just pride, your conscious worth, point out to you the path in society which you are so eminently formed to tread. Or, if, singularly independent, you deem that you are accountable only to yourself for your conduct, that notion, beyond any other, must shew you the high responsibility of all actions that are voluntary. Remember, then, that your example may be pleaded by those who are not gifted, like you, with extraordinary powers for sustaining its consequences; by those who have neither your virtues to bear them through the trials and vicissitudes of public enterprise; nor your motives for encountering dangers so manifest; nor your apologies—pardon the word!—for deviating, alone and unsupported as you appear, from the long-beaten track of female timidity. Your example may be pleaded by the rash, the thoughtless, and the wilful; and, therefore, may be pernicious. An angel, such I think you, may run all risks with impunity, save those which may lead feeble minds to hazardous imitation.
Is this language plain enough, this reasoning sufficiently sincere, to suit the character of a friend? And as such may I address you, without incurring displeasure? or, which is still, if possible, more painful to me, exciting alarm? O trust me, generously trust me, and be your ultimate decision what it may, you shall not repent your confidence!
‘A.H.’
This was not a letter to quiet the shaken nerves of Ellis, nor to restore to her the modulation of her voice. She read it with strong emotion, dwelling chiefly upon the phrase, ‘long-beaten track of female timidity.’—Ah! she cried, delicacy is what he means, though he possesses too much himself to mark more strongly his opinion that I swerve from it! And in that shall I be wanting?—And what he thinks—he, the most liberal of men!—will surely be thought by all whose esteem, whose regard I most covet!—How dreadfully am I involved! in what misery of helplessness!—What is woman,—with the most upright designs, the most rigid circumspection,—what is woman unprotected? She is pronounced upon only from outward semblance:—and, indeed, what other criterion has the world? Can it read the heart?
Then, again perusing her letter, You, alone, O Harleigh! she cried, you, alone, escape the general contagion of superficial decision! Your own heart is the standard of your judgment; you consult that, and it tells you, that honour and purity may be in the breasts of others, however forlorn their condition, however mysterious their history, however dark, inexplicable, nay impervious, the latent motives of their conduct!—O generous Harleigh!—Abandoned as I seem—you alone—Tears rolled rapidly down her cheeks, and she lifted the letter up to her lips; but ere they touched it, started, shuddered, and cast it precipitately into the fire.
One of Miss Matson’s young women now came to tell her, that Mr Harleigh begged to know whether her commissions were prepared for London.
Hastily wiping her eyes, she answered that she had no commissions; but, upon raising her head, she saw the messenger descending the stairs, and Harleigh entering the room.
He apologised for hastening her, in a calm and formal style, palpably intended for the hearing of the young woman; but, upon shutting the door, and seeing the glistening eyes of Ellis, calmness and formality were at an end; and, approaching her with a tenderness which he could not resist, ‘You are afflicted?’ he cried. ‘Why is it not permitted me to soothe the griefs it is impossible for me not to share? Why must I be denied offering even the most trivial assistance, where I would devote with eagerness my life?—You are unhappy,—you make me wretched, and you will neither bestow nor accept the consolation of sympathy? You see me resigned to sue only for your friendship:—why should you thus inflexibly withhold it? Is it—answer me sincerely!—is it my honour that you doubt?—’
He coloured, as if angry with himself even for the surmize; and Ellis raised her eyes, with a vivacity that reproached the question; but dropt them almost instantaneously.
‘That generous look,’ he continued, ‘revives, re-assures me. From this moment, then, I will forego all pretensions beyond those of a friend. I am come to you completely with that intention. Madness, indeed,—but for the circumstances which robbed me of self-command,—madness alone could have formed any other, in an ignorance so profound as that in which I am held of all that belongs to propriety. Does not this confession shew you the reliance you may have upon the sincerity with which I mean to sustain my promised character? Will it not quiet your alarms? Will it not induce you to give me such a portion of your trust as may afford me some chance of being useful to you? Speak, I entreat; devise some service,—and you shall see, when a man is piqued upon being disinterested, how completely he can forget—seem to forget, at least!—all that would bring him back, exclusively, to himself.—Will you not, then, try me?’
Ellis, who had been silent to recover the steadiness of her voice, now quietly answered, ‘I am in no situation, Sir, for hazarding experiments. What you deem to be your own duties I have no doubt that you fulfil; you will the less, therefore, be surprised, that I decidedly adhere to what appears to me to be mine. Your visits, Sir, must cease: your letters I can never answer, and must not receive: we must have no intercourse whatever; partial nor general. Your friendship, nevertheless, if under that name you include good will and good wishes, I am far from desiring to relinquish:—but your kind offices—grateful to me, at this moment, as all kindness would be!’—she sighed, but hurried on; ‘those, in whatever form you can present them, I must utterly disclaim and repel. Pardon, Sir, this hard speech. I hold it right to be completely understood; and to be definitive.’
Turning then, another way, she bid him good morning.
Harleigh, inexpressibly disappointed, stood, for some minutes, suspended whether resentfully to tear himself away, or importunately to solicit again her confidence. The hesitation, as usual where hesitation is indulged in matters of feeling, ended in directing him to follow his wishes; though he became more doubtful how to express them, and more fearful of offending or tormenting her. Yet in contrasting her desolate situation with her spirit and firmness, redoubled admiration took place of all displeasure. What, at first, appeared icy inflexibility, seemed, after a moment’s pause, the pure effect of a noble disdain of trifling; a genuine superiority to coquetry. But doubly sad to him was the inference thence deduced. She cruelly wanted assistance; a sigh escaped her at the very thought of kindness; yet she rejected his most disinterested offers of aid; evidently in apprehension lest, at any future period, he might act, or think, as one who considered himself to be internally favoured.
Impressed with this idea, ‘I dare not,’ he gently began, ‘disobey commands so peremptory; yet—’ He stopt abruptly, with a start that seemed the effect of sudden horrour. Ellis, again looking up, saw his colour changed, and that he was utterly disordered. His eyes directed her soon to the cause: the letter which she had cast into the fire, and from which, on his entrance, he had scrupulously turned his view, now accidentally caught it, by a fragment unburnt, which dropt from the stove upon the hearth. He immediately recognized his hand-writing.
This was a blow for which he was wholly unprepared. He had imagined that, whether she answered his letter or not, she would have weighed its contents, have guarded it for that purpose; perhaps have prized it! But, to see it condemned to annihilation; to find her inexorably resolute not to listen to his representations; nor, even in his absence, to endure in her sight what might bring either him or his opinions to her recollection; affected him so deeply, that, nearly unconscious what he was about, he threw himself upon a chair, exclaiming, ‘The illusion is past!’
Ellis, with gravity, but surprise, ejaculated, an interrogative, ‘Sir?’
‘Pardon me,’ he cried, rising, and in great agitation; ‘pardon me that I have so long, and so frequently, intruded upon your patience! I begin, indeed, now, to perceive—but too well!—how I must have persecuted, have oppressed you. I feel my error in its full force:—but that eternal enemy to our humility, our philosophy, our contentment in ill success, Hope,—or rather, perhaps, self-love,—had so dimmed my perceptions, so flattered my feelings, so loitered about my heart, that still I imagined, still I thought possible, that as a friend, at least, I might not find you unattainable; that my interest for your welfare, my concern for your difficulties, my irrepressible anxiety to diminish them, might have touched those cords whence esteem, whence good opinion vibrate; might have excited that confidence which, regulated by your own delicacy, your own scruples, might have formed the basis of that zealous, yet pure attachment, which is certainly the second blessing, and often the first balm of human existence,—permanent and blameless friendship!’
Ellis looked visibly touched and disturbed as she answered, ‘I am very sensible, Sir, of the honour you do me, and of the value of your approbation: it would not be easy to me, indeed, to say—unfriended, unsupported, nameless that I am!—how high a sense I feel of your generous judgment: but, as you pleaded to me just now,’ half smiling, ‘in one point, the customs of the world; you must not so far forget them in another, as not to acknowledge that a confidence, a friendship, such as you describe, with one so lonely, so unprotected, would oppose them utterly. I need only, I am sure, without comment, without argument, without insistance, call this idea to your recollection, to see you willingly relinquish an impracticable plan: to see you give up all visits; forego every species of correspondence, and hasten, yourself, to finish an intercourse which, in the eye of that world, and of those prejudices, those connections, to which you appeal, would be regarded as dangerous, if not injurious.’
‘What an inconceivable position!’ cried Harleigh, passionately; ‘how incomprehensible a state of things! I must admire, must respect the decree that tortures me, though profoundly in the dark with regard to its motives, its purposes,—I had nearly said, its apologies! for not trifling must be the cause that can instigate such determined concealment, where an interest is excited so warm, so sincere, and, would you trust it, honourable as mine!’
‘You distress, you grieve me,’ cried Ellis, with an emotion which she could not repress, ‘by these affecting, yet fruitless conflicts! Could I speak ... can you think I would so perseveringly be silent?’
‘I think, nay I am convinced, that you can do nothing but what is dictated by purity, what is intentionally right; yet here, I am persuaded, ’tis some right of exaggeration, some right stretched, by false reasoning, or undue influence, nearly to wrong. That the cause of the mystery which envelopes you is substantial, I have not any doubt; but surely the effects which you attribute to it must be chimerical. To reject the most trivial succour, to refuse the smallest communication—’
‘You probe me, Sir, too painfully!—I appear, to you, I see, wilfully obstinate, and causelessly obscure: yet to be justified to you, I must incur a harsher censure from myself! Thus situated, we cannot separate too soon. Think over, I beg of you, when you are alone, all that has passed: your candour, I trust, will shew you, that my reserve has been too consistent in its practice, to be capricious in its motives. I can add nothing more. I entreat, I even supplicate you, to desist from all further enquiry; and to leave me!’
‘In such utter, such impenetrable darkness?—With no period assigned?—not even any vague, any distant term in view, for letting in some little ray of light?—’
He spoke this in a tone so melancholy, yet so unopposingly respectful, that Ellis, resistlessly affected, put her hand to her head, and half, and almost unconsciously pronounced, ‘Were my destiny fixed ... known even to myself....’
She stopt, but Harleigh, who, slowly, and by hard self-compulsion, had moved towards the door, sprang back, with a countenance wholly re-animated; and with eyes brightly sparkling, in the full lustre of hope and joy, exclaimed, ‘It is not, then, fixed?—your destiny—mine, rather! is still open to future events?—O say that again! tell me but that my condemnation is not irrevocable, and I will not ask another word!—I will not persecute you another minute!—I will be all patience, all endurance;—if there be barely some possibility that I have not seen and admired only to regret you!—that I have not known and appreciated—merely to lose you!’
‘You astonish, you affright me, Sir!’ cried Ellis, recovering a dignity that nearly amounted to severity: ‘if any thing has dropt from me that can have given rise to expressions—deductions of this nature, I beg leave, immediately, to explain that I have been utterly misunderstood. I see however, too clearly, the danger of such contests to risk their repetition. Permit me, therefore, unequivocally, to declare, that here they end! I have courage to act, though I have no power to command. You, Sir, must decide, whether you will have the kindness to quit my apartment immediately;—or whether you will force me to so unpleasant a measure as that of quitting it myself. The kindness, I say; for however ill my situation accords with the painful perseverance of your ... investigations ... my memory must no longer “hold its seat,” when I lose the impression I have received of your humanity, your goodness, your generosity!... You will leave me, Mr Harleigh, I am sure!’
Harleigh, as much soothed by these last words, as he was shocked by all that had preceded them, silently bowed; and, unable, with a good grace, to acquiesce in a determination which he was yet less entitled to resist, slowly, sadly, and speechless, with concentrated feelings, left the room.
‘All good betide you, Sir!—and may every blessing be yours!’—in a voice of attempted cheerfulness, but involuntary tremour, was pronounced by Ellis, as, hastily rising, she herself shut the door.
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