The River Falls Journal

MISCELLANEOUS.

LOVE AND REVENGE.
From the Philadelphia Bulletin

Oh, how I hated him—how I hated Richard Vinley—kneeling by my side, with that sort of mocking triumph, lighting up his deep eyes, and thin broad lips half parted, as if in expectation that I would say something that he would wish to check. And who would not have hated him as I did? Let me tell you how it was.

I had loved him more than a year—loved him Heaven only knows how passionately. Not more blindly or entirely does the silkworm weave itself with its own shroud, than I wrapped myself in his pleasure, his admiration, his love.—Not more trustingly turns the fearless eagle to its mountain eyrie than I, foolish and confiding turned to the bright, beautiful castles of hope which I had built on the rotten foundations of his faith. And yet (I never thought of it till that day: and oh, with what a humiliating weight the knowledge came to me!) he had never asked me for my love—never asked me for it openly, save by tender glances and pressures by the hand, and those thousand delicate attentions which are most precious to the jealous eyes and ears of affection. But I had not dreamed that such a passion as mine could be poured forth and bring me no return.—I did not even imagine that his apparent devotion could be wrongly understood: and so I blindfolded myself, and bewildered, content, happy, rushed forward to despair.

That afternoon we had been sitting in the garden, talking to each other, as we had many times before, of our past lives. The dreamy music which the wind made as it stirred the trees above us; and the fresh sweet smell of early flowers with which the spring air was loaded, seemed just the outward influences needed to soften our hearts, and draw them most nearly into sympathy; and when in quiet manly way, he told me the story of his life—of the father who died before his remembrance, and the sweet mother who had closed her eyes in their eternal sleep ere the grass had twice grown green over her husband's grave; of his desolate, friendless, struggling boyhood, showing me one by one, the weary steps he had climbed: telling me so gratefully how many hands had sown roses in the steep way; and at the close saying with a serene smile: "Helen, I would suffer my life over again a thousand times, rather than give back this day." My heart was filled to overflowing. I, too, was an orphan, and knew better than any one, I thought, how cruelly and grudgingly the world had laid its hand upon him as he toiled onward in its service. How glad I was that I had always been kind to him, that I had kept my heart free, unsullied and womanly, as the crowning gift of his success and joy.

I wept, moved deeply by his eloquence and leaning toward him, with a quick impetuous movement, drew his head forward with my hands, and pressing my lips to his white forehead, kissed him—not lightly and coquettishly—but reverently and tearfully. For a moment he bowed his head, and I could not see his face: but when he looked up its expression startled me, the change had been so sudden and startling.

"Do you know" said he, slowly dropping his eyes before my look of wondering inquiry, "that I think the woman who bestows the tokens of her love unsought lowers herself beneath the respect of him who becomes their recipient?"

I am sure I should not have understood him, but for the meaning sarcastic smile with which he spoke. I saw then, in a moment, his whole power over me; I saw how he had led me on cautiously, artfully—through love to pity, and through pity to humiliation; I saw that for an ignoble triumph over my woman's pride he had sacrificed his truth, and would sacrifice my heart; I saw him degraded from an honest, loving, noble heart, into a fiend, and for my life I could not have answered save to strike or curse him. He read my feelings in my face, I suppose, for he laughed ironically. He spoke again and I was forced to listen.

"Helen Reade, you need not look so fierce, so bitter, so scornful in your anger thinking to deceive me. You love me, and I know it. You would have waded with naked feet through seas of fire rather than give me up as you are doing now. You would—wait till I have done," he continued, when I would have interrupted him. "Do you remember the time when I went to you, five years ago, and offered you what now would be your highest bliss to own? Do you remember how you laughed my words to scorn, and scoffed at me as a silly boy, who had mistaken himself and you? Ay, I was a boy in years, Helen Reade; but a man's understanding, a man's experience, a man's passionate strength of purpose, had made me old before my time, and I loved you with as perfect a love as ever grew up in a human heart. I was proud and your indifference, gay, heartless, cutting indifference, galled me, and made disappointment doubly bitter. I said then as I left you with that dead hope making discord in my breast, that some day your heart would bleed as mine did then; that some day I would mock your anguish with contempt as humiliating as that you heaped on me. Has not my hour of triumph come? Have I not won you carefully, proudly, as best became the worthy object I was striving for? And did I not know just now, when my blood tingled beneath the pressure of your arm, half shy, half confident, and felt the warmth of your clinging lips upon my brow, that never before had you been so completely, so unreservedly mine?—Oh, Helen, Helen! am I not gloriously avenged now that I can toss back your heart as lightly as I have won it, and know all the while that you love me, in spite of yourself and your mighty pride."

"Richard Vinley," I began as he ceased speaking; but the torrent of fierce words that leaped up hotly for utterance choked me; my lips burned as though blistered by the touch of flame, and I was forced to stop and steady my wild rage before I could proceed.

At length in a hoarse, angry whisper I said:

"Yes, I remember the time of which you speak; although, but for your delicate reminding, I might never have called it to mind again. I was a young thoughtless, ignorant girl; I did not understand you, or the nature of the feelings you proposed to bear me: I answered you as any other inconsiderate child would have done: but Heaven knows I meant no harm, no contempt, no exultation. You have achieved a noble, a manly revenge!—you have cherished the slight of a heedless girl, forgotten by her as soon as it was given, and kept it rankling in your memory till it has grown strong enough to crush by its rebounding a heart that would have shed its last drop of blood to serve you. Love you?—yes so well that I could strike you dead here at my feet, and trample on your lifeless body in very loathing of the mean soul it contained!—so well that if your false heart lay bare before me, I could snap the cords apart with as little pity as I would threads of flax!—so well that when you die I hope I may be beside you to show you how fit you are for Heaven; to console you by recalling the magnanimous aims that have inspired your life, and to revive you at the last moment by whispering in your ear of the honorable victory you have achieved over a defenseless weak-hearted woman! I paused, out of breath.

"Go on—please go on. Anger improves the style of your beauty, and I am a gratified listener," said my tormentor dryly.

"I have nothing more to say,' I replied, save that I pray I may never look upon your face again, unless the sight of me becomes a torment, and then I will risk wealth, ay, everything, for the sake of passing once more before your eyesight!

He caught one of my hands that was lying idly in my lap, and when I would have snatched it from him, he closed his fingers about it like a vice. The look of bitterness softened away from his features and one of almost tender expectation took its place. I saw in the change only a new revelation of hypocrisy cunning and far-seeing, treacherous malignity; so I waited for him to speak. Is it any wonder I hated him?

"Helen," he said, and the cutting tone was all gone from his voice, "will you marry me?"

The question did not startle me half as much as it would have done an hour before; it was like him—strange, abrupt, contradictory. I sprang up and spurned him with my foot. alas.

"Do not tempt me further. Richard Vinley, or even you, evil as you are, may shrink from the demon I shall harden into. I am not ashamed to own that I loved you, for over the blackness and corruption of your true character, you have worn skillfully the disguise of a pure, upright manliness, and through that only have I known you. Go away now and boast of your prowess—I am willing. —Spread it far and wide that Helen Reade—proud, imperial, haughty Helen Reade has been humbled by your scorn. But say not that she wept before you; say not that she clung to you, or pleaded, or fainted, as gentler women might have done. Say that when she knew you better, she spurned you as she would a venomous reptile; say that she took back the love you despised, and flung it to the winds, as the only shame of her life; say that she defied, insulted, cursed you to your face, and called all the angels of darkness to her aid, so that she might hate you—hate you entirely so long as you and she are permitted to live—say

"Stop! in Heaven's name stop!" he exclaimed, interrupting me; and I knew by the whiteness of his face, and the blank horrified look of entreaty which he gave me, that my vehemence frightened him. I was glad that it was so, and swept past him with a low derisive laugh.

"Wait and hear me one moment, Helen!" he cried, springing forward to detain me.

But I shook off his touch as though it had been a serpent's, and walked proudly up the garden path. I can but wonder now at the mighty effort with which I crushed back my true feeling into subjection, till my heart was numb with the great agony it would not let find a voice. I tried to think of every thing save the inward fire that was consuming me; tried to think of the rose-bushes whose green branches, thick with buds, brushed my garments as I went steadily past them; tried to think of the lilacs that reached out their heavy clusters to me like so many purple hands; and all the while I felt that sharp bitter anguish gnawing into my soul.

I did not go to my room, for I thought its quiet solitude would kill me. I was too miserable to weep, or pray or think. I needed excitement, activity, amusement, So I went into the large parlors that had been crowded with company all the afternoon; I sang, jested and played, scarcely knowing and little caring what I did, yet dimly conscious that once the tall figure of Richard Vinley came into the room, lingered a moment as if watching me, and disappeared.

I do not remember how that afternoon and evening wore away. But I know the great noisy brilliant rooms were silent at last; the guests had departed, the lights were extinguished, and faint with the misery I had kept in check so long, I was sitting on a broad, low window seat at one end of the desolated parlor, leaning out to feel the cool, fresh night wind, as it tossed the long, unbound hair from my fevered cheeks. Everything seemed to me like a confused dream, and when the door at the farther extremity of the room opened softly, I felt rather than saw, that Richard Vinley stood upon the threshold.

"What, all empty, all dark!" I heard him say, and then he turned to go; but the flutter of my white dress attracted his attention, for he stopped and came back a few steps into the room. "Cousin Amy," he called in a low voice, "is that you"—I did not answer but drew the window curtain closely about my face. "Don't be trifling" he said impatiently, "I have something that I wish to—something that I must tell you". And he came along and drew an ottoman to my side.

That he should have mistaken me for another person, even in the dark, seemed strange to me then, although I see now how easily in his great agitation it could be. But I was glad to escape detection, for it seemed as though I could suffer any torture rather than make myself known to him, lest he should triumph over me again in my womanly and less defiant mood. Besides, I thought I should like to hear him speak once more, kindly and without irony, as he had been wont to speak, before that terrible hour when he smote me almost mad with his terrible words. So I schooled myself for the deception I was about to practise, and told in a whisper, lest he should recognize me, (Concluded on second page.)
that I was ready to hear him.

“O, I am wretched, Amy, so utterly wretched!” he commenced.

Fierce as was the exultation with which I heard this confession, there was something so touching, and withal so earnest, in his manner, that for a moment I pitied more than despised him. Since he suffered I thought I had a right to partially forgive him the terrible wrong he had done me.

“Listen” he continued, seeing I did not speak; “Let me tell you what an idiot, what a wretch I have been. You know, Amy,”—I imagined his voice quivered a little—“what my feelings have been towards Helen Reade; to you, and to you only have I confided the love which has been my inspiration for six long years.—

You know, too, that a long time ago, when she was very young, and I was foolish, I offered myself to her and was rejected. Since then she has learned to look upon me in a different light: need I say what happiness it has given me to know it? To-day, Amy, when I knew that a single word of mine would have opened the innermost door of her proud heart to me and made her mine forever, some demon put it into my heart to try her even as I had been tried. I taunted her with the very love I craved so madly, and told her I had sought it but for revenge. Fool that I was so to tempt a woman's pride! Fool to think I could put her from me with affected contempt, and gather her all the more closely to my bosom; to imagine I might shock, startle and terrify her, and then soften her back into forgiveness, by the same tenderness I had outraged! Oh, the real indignation with which she scorned me, and flung my insults back into my teeth! I quailed before her, astonished, ashamed, baffled; I trembled at the storm I had invoked.

With a rash hand I dared disturb the sweet channel of her maidenly love, and it turned into a river of gall, whose bitterness shall henceforth be over all my life. I feel that no explanation, no apology, no plea for forgiveness, can be powerful enough to counteract the great unutterable hatred with which I have inspired her.

Pity me, dear Amy pity me! A mad, unmanly freak, has cost me the happiness of a lifetime.'

He paused, and I could hear his proud form shaking with strong, passionate sobs of grief. It was well that he was thus agitated, or the loud beating of my heart would have betrayed me.

“Richard,” I whispered softly through my blinding tears, after I had time to control the rapturous feelings that nearly overwhelmed me.

He turned his head quickly and exclaimed in a voice scarcely above a whisper,

“hark, Amy! am I dreaming, or did I hear her call me?

I put my hands out to him, as I had done before that day, and drawing his head forward with the same quick, impetuous movement, let my lips cling once more to his white forehead. Just then the moon came over the tops of the trees, and a broad beam of light dropped in at the window like a torch of silver. He caught me by my shoulder and turned me about till I faced the light, and I saw a rapid intense happiness break over his features as he murmured low and huskily,

“Helen.”

“Do not repulse me again Richard,” I cried putting both my arms around about his neck, and dropping my happy, tearful face upon his shoulder—“it would kill me.

“Repulse you Helen?” It was all he said, but a whole heart full of gratitude, penitence, hope and tenderness was in the words, and I was content.