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Title: Mrs. Gurney's apology
        In justification of Mrs. ——'s friendship

Author: Mary Jary Gurney

Release date: March 12, 2023 [eBook #70275]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: William Brotherhead

Credits: Bob Taylor, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. GURNEY'S APOLOGY ***





  Transcriber’s Note
  Italic text displayed as: _italic_




  MRS. GURNEY’S
  APOLOGY.




  MRS. GURNEY’S
  APOLOGY.

  IN JUSTIFICATION
  OF
  MRS. ——’S FRIENDSHIP.

  [Illustration: Decoration]

  PHILADELPHIA.
  WILLIAM BROTHERHEAD.
  No. 218 South Eighth Street.
  MDCCCLX.




  [_Entered, according to the Act of Congress, July 23, 1860, by_
  WILLIAM BROTHERHEAD, _in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of
  the United States, for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania._]




PREFACE.


In presenting to the world the extraordinary document which follows,
the Publisher deems it fit, by way of Preface, to advert briefly to
the principal circumstances and persons connected with this great
outrage, which it embodies, upon the sensibilities and morals of the
public—distinctly repudiating, himself, any endorsement of the views
of the misguided writer, and deeply regretting the scandal which has
attached in consequence of her acts to the influential Society of
Friends, and to the numerous high families, with which she is allied,
both in England and America.

The Gurney Family is known wherever on the Eastern or Western
continent, philanthropy, charity, liberality in its most
comprehensive meaning, scholarship and literary ability of the
highest order, or wealth in the most profuse exuberance, becomes
the theme of the social circle or the text of the author’s pen. It
is, moreover, one of the most notable and ancient of the English
aristocracy, dating from the time of the Conqueror, ever since when
they have held wealth and position in the County of Norfolk, where
nearly all the various members of the name still reside. In England’s
early and stormy days they rendered essential service to the State
in many famous battles both at home and abroad—for it was at a
comparatively recent date only that this till then redoubtable race
became identified, through some of its branches, with the pacific and
lowly doctrines of the Quakers.

They are closely connected with families here of the very highest
respectability of character—the celebrated John Joseph Gurney having
taken a wife from this city; and no man in the Society of Friends
ranked equal to him in his day, either in religious influence, mental
ability, or excellence of heart. His indeed gave the name to the
Gurneyite Orthodox Friends, of which branch of that sect he was the
acknowledged leader. He died about twelve years ago.

His only son, John Henry Gurney, who was the heir not merely of his
father’s wealth, and name, but of his good character, is the betrayed
husband of this story. He is the present representative in Parliament
of King’s Lynn, Norfolkshire, and is noted for his liberal political
sentiments. He is now forty years of age.

His wife, Mary Gurney, the author of this letter, was the daughter
and only child of Richard Hanbury Gurney, a first cousin of John
Joseph, and belonging to the elder, wealthier, and representative
branch of the race—he, Richard, deceased only within a few years,
having been a younger half-brother, and the only one, of the actual
head of the Family—the venerable Hudson Gurney, of Keswick, F.R.S.,
F.A.S., Ex-High Sheriff of Norfolk, etc., etc.

Whilst Hudson Gurney it is true inherited principally the patrimonial
estates, Richard, his half-brother, became the heir of his own
mother, who had been a Miss Hanbury of the wealthy family of London
brewers of that name. This fortune, over a million sterling, became
at Richard’s death the inheritance of his daughter Mary, the author
of this letter, now about twenty-eight years of age, and the mother
of two or three children.

Samuel Gurney the eminent banker and philanthropist was a brother of
John Joseph, and Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, whose labors and sacrifices to
improve the discipline of the great prisons on both continents have
won her a name to be envied, was his sister. Another sister was the
wife, and zealous assistant, of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, celebrated
in the annals of British Emancipation.

Mrs. Gurney is thus allied by descent and marriage with families of
the first note both in Europe and America, and holds in her own right
an almost princely estate. She was constantly, up to the very period
of her departure, anticipated in her lightest wish by a husband who
knew no will but her own. With such surroundings, elevating her
to the very highest sphere of English social life, with all its
splendors and attractions, and securing to her the enjoyment of
every rational pleasure, after thirteen years of married life, she
voluntarily renounced her husband, her children and family, not in
any moment of passion, but through a calm conviction of reason, as
she herself states, and left England, the mistress of a common groom
from her stables.

There can be no pardon nor extenuation for this great social crime.

But the motives which led to it are well worthy of the reader’s
patient consideration. They are stated in her letter with logical
precision, and at the same time with the apparent enthusiasm and
tenderness of a heart which had suffered and loved intensely; and
whatever the explanation, whether deducible from an exaggeration of
facts, or an artful use of language, her words really seem to be
stamped with the seal of social martyrdom.

Whilst the general tenor of the doctrines she enunciates cannot fail
to administer a shock to every healthy mind, it is not necessary for
the cause of morality, and it would be unjust indeed, to denounce her
letter _in toto_.

Every authentic history of personal experience forms a helpful
addition for the guidance and behavior of mankind.

The deplorable consequences of an early and hasty marriage, as
portrayed in her own history, may serve as a useful beacon to rash
youth in all ages to come.

Her earnest plea on behalf of Personal Merit cannot fail to win its
way to many hearts—at least in this Country, the foster-home of the
plebeiance and of democracy.

But to her concluding argument especially are attention and respect
due.

The investigations heretofore made in this Country and Europe have
developed a frightful catalogue of diseases and deaths resulting
from inter-marriages; and more recent examinations in the wards
of Hospitals, in the Asylums for Feeble-minded Children, in
Institutions for the Deaf and Dumb, and Blind, trace directly those
monstrosities and defects of organization, in a preponderating number
of cases, to marriages of this character. Whether her immediate
example furnished any confirmation on this head, the meagre details
of the whole affair, which have been permitted to be divulged, do not
afford any certain information; that it has been so in other branches
of her family, and that the dread of it was upon her own mind, is
most apparent in her letter.

Her authoritative and vehement invective against these internecine
marriages, it cannot be doubted, will draw prominent attention to the
subject; and on this account, and many others, some of which have
been indicated, Mrs. Gurney’s Letter requires at least no “apology”
for being made public.




MRS. GURNEY’S

APOLOGY.


  PARIS, _January_ —, 1860.

  DEAR E * * *:

Your name has been always on my lips and in my heart, and you alone
of all the world have never questioned me. I come to you again, E * *
*, as I have so often—as I did when we were children, when you folded
me trustfully in your arms—and say to you: I am as I was then; and I
hear you say: Tell me nothing, for I believe you always, and there
must be no questioning between us.

What I shall write to you will not be to cast a doubt upon our
perfect and entire sympathy by any explanation, but to fulfil what I
feel to be a duty towards you—to put you in possession of all that
may weigh in the least degree with those at all understanding my
nature, before whom you care to justify your steadfast attachment to
me, though the performance of this duty, dear E * * *, may impose
upon me the revelation of my inmost life. If, in your judgment,
there will be here presented aught of such justification, show it
to them, wholly or partially, just as you think well, remembering
that this is for your sake, not my own. My justification it would be
needful to make before a much wider tribunal, for I have perpetrated
an act which the whole conventional world have leagued together,
in ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy, to denominate a crime, and
I could expect little or no sympathy from that wide bar of public
judgment that knows nothing of me nor of my surroundings, and which
never could be made to comprehend my nature; or, comprehending it,
would not even then, at this day, be prepared to accept any argument
or explanation in extenuation of my course.

E * * *, you remember me at fourteen; you remember the time we
returned from the visit to Wymondham; you remember how, repulsing the
cold influences overcoming me in spite of myself, I dashed down in
the carriage the plain bonnet they had asked me to wear that day, and
stamped on it, and let all my hair fall down upon my shoulders, and
said: I am free. You remember it well. And then, at last, when the
carriage reached the house, how we threw ourselves into each other’s
arms, and I had no more courage, and feared to avow the act, telling
them you sat down on it—and you were still; and then how I cried all
night, that I denied the truth of my nature—that I was not free.

E * * *, that day repeated itself through my life—in every act, in
the worship of God, in my marriage, in the very conception of my
children; and I looked forward to its last repetition only in my
death.

It is past now—my living death is over. I have chosen between the
universal condemnation of the world and my own sense of right; not in
any sublime way, but in the simple, truthful way my nature craved.
I lie down in the evening and rise in the morning, for the first
time since a child, blessing God for my existence. Nothing can rob
me of this now but death alone. I have that treasure to a woman’s
heart that a woman can alone understand—the open avowal of the love
that controls her being. With it, part of it, all of it, is the man,
free from prejudice, filled with every noble aspiration, who is its
object. Should I, I ask you, have preferred the reputation which the
world accords to her who, yielding to its forms, becomes daily the
living lie it approves?

They who go on disposing of human instincts, human affections and
human brains in their own way, according to their own sense of right
and wrong, should go further; they should change their meeting-houses
and churches into monasteries and convents, and watch the religious
aspirations they would control by daily and nightly supervision.
Into their homes they should introduce harem espionage, that the
bodily instincts, which they hold in enforced compliance, may never
have an opportunity to assert the truth about themselves.

Heresy and adultery, the two excommunicative words, which social life
suspends over the doomed head of a woman who thinks and acts contrary
to its rules of action, have not that full power and effect they are
supposed to have. Nothing but actual physical imprisonment of the
body, and, if it were possible, of the mind, can prevent a woman from
becoming the secret avower of her belief and of her instincts. The
excommunicative words do not restrain from either offence; they only
develop that unquestionable vice of woman’s weakness, hypocrisy.

The brain, when infidel, is infidel by its own proper organization,
and they who assail its infidelity strike vainly at the God who made
it, and implanted it in every newborn soul; the body, when infidel
to the connection in which it is placed, is so by its own proper
instincts, and they, who attempt to control it, strike, likewise, at
a law of its creation.

When will narrow-minded, bigoted men learn that the one absolute,
controlling law of a woman’s nature is love—that it is the only
good and desirable thing about a woman—the only reliable thing
about her? They can trust her, with her love, to live in a house
of prostitution; they cannot control her, without it, by the most
absolute, social ostracism.

And this love, what is it? It is a power present always in the world,
which, recognized by two like natures, thenceforth binds them to
each other, beyond the control, and in violation, if need be, of any
other law—as my mother’s love bound her to my father, and my father’s
love bound him to her, and gave me my being—a being cradled in the
tenderest, truest passion that ever existed between two human beings.

How long have I been in ascertaining and yielding myself up to this
divine law! What wasted years! What subjections derogatory to the
vilest nature! What hypocrisy, dishonoring to God! What suffering
have I caused this man, assigned to me alone, since that day on which
I first in him recognized myself!

It seems so long ago; it seems far longer to me than the time makes
it; it seems as if an eternity had rolled backward to that day.

Oh, I had questionings of right and wrong in that fathomless interval
of despair, far other, far deeper, than all I had been taught or
could be taught by their lips—questionings that brought me to the
very brink of death.

Why should I have loved him? Why do I love him? What is it I love in
him? All this I have asked myself a thousand times, and there has
never been, can never be, an answer to all this questioning.

Yet I say now to you: Why should I not love him? What is there not to
love in him? My heart only answers: What is there in me that I should
be loved, that I should know that joy which in its tiniest moment
makes all years of other time a mockery?

And these questions do we ask each other daily and nightly forever.

And yet there is one reason, they say, why I should not have loved
him—one word there is which the world places as an impassable
barrier between us—a word that has never crossed my lips till now—a
meaningless word, and yet involving in their eyes a crime as great
as that adultery which I commit—just as great, for both are equally
meaningless as touching our relation.

And that word expresses the social position he bore me. Rather than
have been his lawful wife even, I might have been a king’s mistress,
or any nobleman’s paramour, with less offence.

And I, who was the reputable bawd of marriage rites, was I above
him? I, a daily offence against decency in obedience to the same
social law that would have forced him to life-long humility? Was I
above him? How? In what way? I, sunk, in the abasement of my own
weak unnatural compliance, below the veriest nameless outcast? Could
I be above anything? Was he not at least my peer? He, who, if we
leave too such vapid questions of distinction, is Hyperion to a Satyr
compared in person with me—short, fat, little body that I am!

I have silently asked myself in his arms, when I dared not soil our
lips with their utterance, about these words—groom and adulterer.
Yet well I knew that they had no relation to our love—that they
were but words—that a true soul no social contamination defiles or
degrades—that nobility unrecognized and virtue an outcast, wherever
placed, are eternally the same.

I had learned these lessons from a parent’s lips. The example of my
own true-hearted mother had taught me this. My own life had been
given me in violation of society’s teachings.

Noble-hearted woman! who could say (I their child, and the only one
that blessed at last their union, nearly a year old then:) Richard
Gurney, I have withholden from you nothing; I have sacrificed all
at the altar of love—even my little Marian—yet I ask no formal bond
of union in return; I care not for it. What I had when our little
one’s life began—what I have now—what I know nothing can deprive me
of now—your love—contents me. And he as nobly answered: Not for the
sake of it, Mary, for it will have but little acknowledgment from my
kindred or the world; but for the pride of the open avowal, and for
the sake of our little girl, I marry you.

And this love, so true, so self-immolating, met, as he anticipated,
with no approbation from his family. You remember how my husband, as
an especial favor, asked Miss ——, and would solicit the members of
his family, to accompany me to see my mother—a woman as far above
them all in every instinct of her soul as was my father—the true
representative of the Lords of Gournai and Le Braii.

Yet such was the affectation of superiority they always persevered in!

I know the world says we who are of English lineage never look so low
to find high things.

This is not, and was never, true of me nor of my blood. I would,
were it needful to find my ideal, as my father before me, search
through any situation, just as men dig down for jewels; and I would
have delved to the uttermost profound for that which I now possess.
But he whom I loved was not so far; he was near me by the permission
of that social law we have offended. The home of his family became
established near my own. He was oft actually beside me, and separated
only by that word from me; nay, he had right to touch me by
permission of this social law—was charged temporarily with the safety
of my life even—could speak to me, but respectfully—respectfully! He
who was in reality of kindred blood, and made for me—for me—whom they
paid court to, not because of the instinct of that blood, but because
of the narrow thrift of my kinsmen.

But enough of this. I might have spared myself the contempt that
tingles through my veins.

I loved him, E * * *; that was all. He became all I did, all I said,
my very life. If I say more I may err, for I truly know no more, and
shall never know more than this.

The whole scope and measure of a woman’s heart and brain, and the
whole purpose of her being, is love; and her whole knowledge forces
itself into one inquiry: Am I worthy of the love of him I love? And
does he love me? But I have thought over all this social matter, and
have asked myself if I could have loved him better if he had not been
what he was—if he had been a member of Parliament? Well, they had
been plenty in our family—there were, among the rest, uncle Hudson,
and cousin Charles, and cousin Edward Buxton, and cousin Priscilla’s
husband; so, too, father had consented to be; and finally, Jackey
himself was there, and filling Walpole’s chair, or at least the
edge of it. And what was it but too palpable a sham? We all knew
this—men and women—and we lived on it meanly, enjoying the empty
honor and the empty praises of those in truth below us, because they
so stupidly praised us. Oh, it was so foolish, all this member of
Parliament pride! I loved William rather because he was not a member
of Parliament—at least because it was not his aspiration. And then,
if he had been an elder of the meeting? He!—what think you of that,
E * * *? Or my Lord Bishop of Norwich—the Lord of diluted _pater
nosters_—was he above him? Are these the things to marry a breathing
woman to? Does any one think a _liaison_ with the Bishop would have
ennobled me?—or the embraces of the elder?

It is scarcely needful to say to you, my dear, that in the above
there is not the slightest personal disrespect intended to Mr. Pelham
or any other individual being.

True men are not such. A woman’s instincts repel such forms of men.
You may dress the real as meanly as an American slave, or you may
elaborate the attire of the counterfeit to the antipodes of this—to
pontifical robes—and the living soul of a woman will never fail to
distinguish the false from the true.

Why you yourself, E * * *, would have wept your eyes out, I am sure,
if I could have deliberately linked myself to the lifeless purpose
in which the vitality of such beings ends.

He is not one of these. He is a man, E * * *, whom I love. Do you
wonder I love him? It is because he is a man—a man, and not a hollow
make-believe.

It is so with every true woman. In her love she recognizes no
distinction of position. The gods of her idolatry, like the statues
of the Greeks—whether standing in a rough warehouse or in the
Louvre—remain unchanged in the calmness of their beauty and power. We
ask nothing more of them but themselves, to gaze upon them, to become
intoxicated, and to die with the love of them. Such seems to me the
man to whom, by the profoundest law of my nature, I yield my being.

But will the world understand this? Perhaps it is the accident of my
place and estate, that, surrounding me with what passes by the name
of power, made me see its emptiness—that, uniting me to the highest
representative of a religion in the person of a son who put it
lightly off, made its meaningless character apparent—that, teaching
me to strengthen a family distinction by the unconscious sacrifice of
myself to him in whose control I had been somehow left, taught me to
question if it were right, and at last to rise above and throw off
the chains of an unnatural compliance.

My intercourse and secret correspondence with you from my early
girlhood taught you how wayward, how passionate I was; and those
letters are so much a part of me that I cannot write anything again
as they were written.

You have preserved them; read them again, even to the days that
followed my unnatural blood-kin union and its results.

Blood-kin union it was. Intermarriage always.

There was the marriage of my husband’s uncle John with my aunt
Elizabeth, first cousins.

Blood-kin union of my husband’s father and mother, third cousins.

Intermarriage of my husband’s uncle, Henry Birkbeck, with Jane
Gurney, third cousins.

Intermarriage of my husband’s father with Mary Fowler, cousin of his
first wife.

Is it strange that such unions should prove unfortunate? Elizabeth
Gurney and Jane Birkbeck only survived their marriages a year. Jane
Gurney, my husband’s mother, lived but four or five years of marriage
life.

There, too, in the case of grandfather and aunt Agatha, was the
anomaly of father and daughter marrying sister and brother.

There was the marriage of my husband’s cousin Henry with Jane
Birkbeck, his second cousin.

Then came the marriage of Catharine Gurney with her first cousin,
Edward Buxton.

Then Rachel with Thomas Buxton, another pair of first cousins.

About a year thence, after the interesting grief on his part at
the death of his aunt Fry, our uncle Buxton, and his old Balls,
John Henry brought about his marriage with me, both of us the great
grandchildren of the same pair—I, a thoughtless girl then staying
at Earlham, and he nearly twice my age. But I don’t blame them.
Heaven knows their ignorance of my nature, and the utter want of
congeniality in everything between his and me.

You know the ideal my heart and passions craved, and you know this
reality circumstances and family considerations brought me; and
you know from the day of that marriage I was silent. For when body
and soul were in this, at last, both gone, I resolved to bear all
patiently and submissively—to act and be the lie to the last. Indeed,
as years wore on, it became almost my nature. I lost my inner light,
as they say. I became a woman to look down from my social position
and dwell in the proprieties forever.

There was then but one hope for me, and that hope was based upon the
fact that I could not write to you. The pure, simple instincts of my
girlhood, the ungratified passions, the real intelligence, lingered
in me still. I dared not write to you—to you, who knew me so well,
I dared not confess what my life had become. Yet more—I still had
faith in my nature, because I felt I was silently degrading the
crowning act of my mother’s life by my weak and unnatural submission.
I had faith over all when I first shrunk from the compliance with my
vow, and when I prayed its living fruit might be in her image and not
in mine. I felt then the force of nature * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Thus year after year passed away, and thus should I have lived and
died; but I saw him, I heard his voice, I learned daily his thoughts,
I revelled in his nature! Then I wrote to you again; my faith had
become a living power; I began a new life.

Then came the fall, as ever before. The influence of social restraint
was too terrible, and I sunk back as I did that day when we were
children. This last assertion and denial of my nature brought me to
the verge of death, but it brought me to reason also; and then, an
altered being, weak and broken down, I rose, and with one fearful,
silent struggle, that our sex’s nature alone can know, I was forever
free! Oh, the revelation of that hour! Life seemed in a moment no
longer hard and difficult. Its relations were simple, its passions
legitimate, its love supreme.

But let me narrate to you how I awakened to the reality of my
position, my after experience, and how at last I had the strength to
accomplish my emancipation.

The first few months of my married life I was truly not happy; but
I cannot speak of that period as one of unhappiness. Indeed, during
the whole spring I did not fully realize what that covenant means
that disposes finally of the life of a woman, and that, too, at a
time before the meaning of her nature consciously asserts itself. The
novelty of the change, the new interests arising, the necessity to be
a wife—all these feelings and emotions shut out myself from myself.
And so it went on, month after month, in which I cannot recall
anything that awakened me fully to the reality of my position.

But, E * * *, it was ordered in my life that it should come, and it
came. A simple incident defined to me the meaning of my vow.

Among our visits to Earlham was one we made on the first day of the
following autumn. I remember the date and the appearance of the
country well. I shall never forget either. The fields were undulating
with their golden grain. Costessy Park was in its fullest verdure.
Everything seemed rejoicing in the coming harvest—the happy maternity
of earth. And so we reached Earlham.

The first object I saw was Anna’s child. It impressed me profoundly.
I took him in my arms, and as I looked at him everything grew
dark about me. I had been before the toy of a ceremony; I was now
a conscious wife. Beautiful lawn and woodland, summer breezes,
kindness, marriage rites even, what can they avail against the first
awakening consciousness of a crime against nature?

I was wholly without sympathy; there were none around me to
understand me. If I had spoken my thought the very air would have
been filled with condemnation. I, a wife, had I a right to entertain
for an instant such an idea? Could I dare to experience an instinct
of aversion? Had I a right to say I had been violated—that I was what
all women loathe?

I could not understand it; yet there it remained, a fact of my
nature, asserting itself against the condition in which I was placed,
and from which apparently no earthly power existed to release me.

I returned to Easton an altered being; but this feeling wore off
somewhat in the routine, and in the necessities of married life—for
his father’s death, occurring shortly after, you remember, involved
many changes and responsibilities, which turned, in a measure, for a
time, the current of my thoughts.

Afterwards succeeded, at constantly recurring intervals of a year or
two, many other deaths in our families which tended to check my free
indulgence of thought, till at last my feelings settled simply into
a sense of a vague but awful responsibility of a violation of the
social law.

You must recall the constant distress and trouble into which we were
all plunged by the successive deaths of his sister Anna, his aunt
Catharine, my father and the children. The family at I—— Hall, too,
was a weight which never ceased to press upon my heart, and, indeed,
upon my whole existence.

And so I lived, but not among the living. I had my inner life and
my outward life—what, I doubt not, other women have had as well as
this poor one at Catton. I drummed, in the old school-girl way, into
my husband’s ears the set tunes for the piano, utterly unobservant
of the music. I dressed in the same mechanical way to receive his
relations, and thanked God when they were gone—and so underwent,
beneath a conjugal yoke of continued kindness, a slow death. I
entered into the life around me as an actress, real herself only
when away from the stage of her action. I became the same that other
women become, who turn from human faces to brute things for comfort.
My early passion for horses and dogs proved then my consolation. I
had to the full that mental nervousness which craves allayment in
action. It would be impossible to admire a horse more than I had
always done. It was an instinct of my nature, just as of Landseer’s,
or of old Mary Breeze’s, of glorious memory; but I loved them now,
for they were so much to me!

But when alone, immured, away from every one, I lived my fullest
life. My imagination went away boldly, admiringly, lovingly, to other
men. They were not objects of jealousy, dear E * * *, for they were
dead.

I lived with the memories of the founders of our family—men who
never sat upon the clerk’s stool, and could never have claimed the
benefit of clergy—men with strong arms and stalwart frames, making
their deeds of knightly prowess known in a hundred battles—with the
memories of Hugh, and Walter, and Anselm, and Girard, and Reginald,
and Matthew and John, who in the Holy Land fought at Prince Edward’s
side, and rendered their red cross a terror to the Paynim. And my
memory, only too tenacious, as you know, kept each noble form before
me, with all the vividness of a present reality.

I lived with them, too, in their pastimes, in which—side by side with
the Black Prince, in the eyes of their sovereign, and their gracious
mistress, his Queen Phillippa, at the tournaments, held on the very
spots where I daily rode—they mimicked their glorious achievements
upon the veritable fields of blood which they had won.

I admired their splendid force, their brains not emasculate with such
education as I saw around me, nor hampered with narrow trade tricks.
I wondered what work they would be about if they were living to-day.
I tried to imagine how any of the family could have got down, step
by step, generation after generation, to studying Greek verbs, or
calculating per cents.

Hugo alive, I knew well, would not be a praying banker, but abroad in
the free air, adventuring crusades, simply and naturally, in whatever
way the time demanded, just as the man I love, simply and naturally,
and yet so irresistibly, rescued the sepulchre of my buried hopes
and desires, against the law and the power, the ignorance and the
infidelity to human nature, of all around me. All things great are
simple. In the crusades my ancestors adventured, they went a long way
across the world. It was as far as the distance between groom and
lady, but not further. They conquered what was their own by right of
their nature and their belief, and with such a struggle as every one
must undergo who undertakes the assertion of his right against social
law.

They conquered theirs as he did also his own; and does not his seem
an act like, or nobler, than theirs? Is the rescue of a dead body a
worthier act than the rescue of a living soul?

It was not so hard a conquest. My requirements were simple and
natural. I was surrounded by everything unreal and artificial. I
demanded the society of a living man, free from the education and
influences of a family holding all these foolish theories that
deprive us of the real enjoyments of life—one who could look upon
water as water, and drink it without a homily—look upon food, not
as a subject of prayer, but of mastication—enjoy the sunshine and
air as sunshine and air, and talk with men and women as such without
shrinking from them as heterodox, or loving them as orthodox too
well—one who could listen to music and find it pleasant to the ear,
and not be exercised whether God intended it should be agreeable—who
could contemplate a picture not as an engine of the devil, but a work
of art—one who could enjoy all delights as requirements of nature,
and not as subjects of a deep concern. In Mr. Taylor I found such a
man. He looked upon all these things as, indeed, I also saw them; but
with him it was not a matter which cost him questioning. He knew it
all without thought, and without education, as they call it. He lived
in the intuitive knowledge of it.

In the interchange of kindred thoughts about these things we lived
day by day, until, unconsciously, I found myself craving every word
he spoke. I found his presence, which took me back to the men of my
ancestral pride, a necessity of my life, and, at last, I felt myself
for the first time beneath an influence of love.

The night that followed this discovery, when I knelt down by my
bedside, his image stood between me and the far-off height on which
my subjected brain had placed God.

And when I saw him there, I struggled, as I had been led to believe
was duty, to dash down the image that stood at once in the way of my
human vows and in the very presence of the stern methodical God of
their education.

Yet there it stood, and there it must stand forever. Yes, dear E *
* *, I loved him almost before I knew it; and he I felt, moreover,
loved me, though not a word was spoken between us. It was not his to
speak, and I would have concealed from my very inmost self the fact
of this love.

But it could not be so forever. To maintain the form of a
superiority, where none existed, became at last an impossibility.
We loved, and the expression of it I foresaw could no longer be
controlled by either, and so it came first from my lips. He was
riding beside me, and did not reply to me. He said, out into the air,
into the heavens: God has given me too great a joy. Then he turned to
me and said: I have loved you from the first day I saw you. I loved
you because I felt it was my destiny; other than this I know not why;
I only know I loved you.

Dear E * * *, he was so beautiful, so noble then, in the expression
of that love so long concealed. The earth whirled around me, and his
arm caught me falling unconsciously. When I came to myself I was
resting on his bosom, confident of its strength as of a breastplate
of iron, though I saw his eyes dim with tears.

We rode homewards in silence. There was a beauty in the very stones
beneath our feet. The wayside flowers had an odor too exquisite
to the sense. The air and sky were filled with an influence too
beautiful for earth. I was very, very happy. Could this feeling have
rested in me, I had been content—faithful to my duty, as I had been
taught—to have lived ever so. But my heart was now craving constantly
the repetition of that moment. It could not be satisfied but in his
presence. Hitherto patient only under a sense of wrong, I now began
to be agitated by a passion in which every feeling of my life had
centred.

It is not necessary to recount all the conflicts which it brought to
me, nor to trace the way in which my nobler nature sunk gradually
before the threatened penalty of social destruction; it is enough to
say that I was borne by it to the decision which involved my destiny,
and I yielded to the social law for the last time, because I had not
yet come to that point at which a woman, driven to the very presence
of death by the pressure of a false relation, thinks at last for
herself, and hesitates no longer how to shape her course, should even
the remaining wreck of her life be dashed to destruction.

Last autumn I began to feel myself breaking down. I could live thus
no longer. When the time came we usually went to London, a while
before the opening of Parliament, I felt that the crisis had come.
If I went down with my husband in any hope of escaping the feelings
that were mastering me, I knew well that on my return this life of
passion would only recommence at sight of its object. If I remained
alone, I believed I had strength to put it from me—I believed I could
part with him, if for the days or weeks that would follow, after
I had left him, I might meet no other gaze than God’s—if I might
exhaust the despair that I well knew would follow in silence.

I remained, therefore, at home.

I was not deceived in myself. The artificial being they had created
of me was strong enough to assert itself and to sacrifice the love
that lay in my heart’s depths—but not till the last moment. It was
only upon the very brink of my husband’s return, that, arousing
myself from the brief dream of happiness into which, secure in his
absence, I had weakly fallen, I could summon the energy to take the
draught of agony which, I believed, the hand of duty had prepared for
me.

But further delay was now impossible.

I had him come to me. My heart was like a cup overrunning; my
grief knew no expression. He was before me, at my feet. I cannot
describe—no one dares acknowledge what passes between lovers,
sundered by a social law; it is not possible to express that life
within life, the innermost, the last.

I have brought you to me, I said, because I can see you no longer—I
am dying.

My God, it seemed to me then as if my heart would break—as if I
should go mad!

A moan of agony came to his lips.

He looked up at me; the intelligence of his face was gone; his eyes
were dim; the despair that was in me changed his face to stone.

I looked on him immovably; I could say to him: We must part forever.
I could repeat again the phrases of social life: There can be no
honorable recognition of our love—its open avowal will bring disgrace
to my husband and odium upon my children.

And how did he reply to me? Shall I confess, even there, in that
hour of my strength, my utter weakness! I longed for a pleading word.
One look of tenderness, and I should have fallen at his feet a ruined
being, but ruined in the acknowledgment and utter abandon of my love.

Well he knew all this; but in that crisis he was true to himself, and
to me; and when he ceased speaking, I was again strong. My head, my
heart, every instinct of my being, approved his words, his looks, his
actions.

He had saved me. He, as I knew him in that hour, was my strength;
through him I conquered myself. I was strong in that final trial, as
a woman only can be strong—through the soul and heart of the man who
stands steadfast to himself and to her to the bitter end.

He said: Even in this hour, when every hope and joy of life have
sunk away into eternal despair beneath your words, I can be true to
my sense of right; I believe life requires no sacrifice; I believe
self-sacrifice wrongs not only her who, blindly, in its belief as
right, accepts it, but those the more for whom it is accepted. If,
with your sense of duty, you were to sever the relation which binds
you to them, it could bring you no happiness; its severance, as you
feel, would bring at last misery to both, for your happiness is mine.
There is no rule, no duty in life, but the pursuit of happiness. Mine
can alone be purchased now at the cost of your own, and that is mine.
We must part, then, forever!

The utter despair of these words can never leave my heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

There were many things he said in this last interview which I recall,
but it matters not now should be repeated. Our lives express them
more clearly than words. He spoke of the false relation which he had
gradually been led to assume, and into the continuance of which our
passion had held him day by day.

I knew well, he said, it should long ago have been terminated; but
I knew not then, as now, the controlling power that has kept me by
you until this hour. I believed, first, that I might love you, and
that you might remain forever unconscious of my love. And so I lived
till this was impossible. And then my life became one eternal delay
of hope, enduring all to this last measure of despair. It could not
be otherwise. I believed from day to day that you would see clearly,
as I saw, the right, and so it might at last end. It is over now! My
life is over. My lot is hopeless, endless misery. I accept it for
your sake—for the memory of our love.

Then my life, my very soul, met his in one long kiss of agony, and we
parted, as I believed, forever.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had conquered my life; this social law had achieved its triumph.

       *       *       *       *       *

When my husband reached home I was strong to do the last duty which
my position imposed upon me. I knew well that, cost what it would,
this must also be done. I must live the life, to which I was bound,
openly. I went to him and told him of my love, of my resolution, and
of our separation. Much passed between us at this horrible time; but
all that was in my heart to say was just these words: I love William.
Of the rest, and of what followed, I have no clear remembrance.

I only knew now that he must be gone—that life, hope, all were gone,
though I remained there still that honorable thing, a wife! For me,
it was determined that I should leave England for a time. I was to
travel. A change of scene they prescribed for the invalid of the
heart. It was always the same, the same ignorance of a woman’s nature
and its necessities. They would have me enjoy Paris, Rome. They would
substitute the splendor of the Vatican for some little flower that
might perchance come from his hand should I remain at home. It seemed
so much more to them.

Absorbed in the contemplation of the ruins of my life, I took no
heed of these arrangements for my departure, but abandoned myself a
willing prey to despair.

When the full measure of my grief had exhausted itself, I arose a new
being.

From that moment I was myself. I had driven every hope, every feeling
from my heart. I had received from his lips the last sacrifice a man
can offer to the woman he loves—the abnegation of himself for her
happiness; and I declare before Heaven that it was my resolve to do
what I thought right, though it cost me my life; for I had nothing
now to live for.

I had long followed blindly a passion that brought me to the verge of
social destruction. I had renounced it.

I had blindly followed for years a path of duty which had degraded
every instinct of my nature to its last measure of degradation.

I could feel no more—I reasoned.

The meaning of the life I was about to enter upon was now distinctly
before me. What it appeared to me, I well knew it was, in very
reality, for I was now freed from my love. I had sacrificed all for
duty. I could see now to what the blind obedience of that duty had
led me. What I was I now knew.

My soul was clear from hypocrisy—there was not any lie upon it now. I
had confessed all. My very life was laid open to my heart’s core. My
love was gone, as well by his will as my own, forever.

What had I accomplished? I had preserved the chaste name of wife.
I had preserved the honor of my husband and the reputation of his
children. And to do it, I was beneath his roof, and was about to
submit myself to his embraces without love.

For these considerations of honor and reputation, I was about to
lead voluntarily a life of prostitution, distinguished from it only
by the social fiction of a name, and I felt myself more degraded for
all this honorable hire than she who accepts her paltry dole in the
streets.

I was, moreover, about to fulfil functions from which every fibre
of my body shrunk with abhorrence. I was there to give life to
offspring created in my own degradation, in violation of my will
and nature, the effete offspring of blood kin, children to die
feebly before their time, or perhaps to come into the world, they,
or their children, deformed, or dumb, or blind, or imbecile. I, who
was perfect myself, and formed to receive and transmit the sacred
treasure of a new life, was to become voluntarily the matricide of
the more perfect conceptions which should be mine.

Better, in the agony of that thought, I said, better death than
this—better self-immolation of body and soul; it were far less a
crime.

And then, shuddering with horror upon the brink to which duty had led
me, I supplicated my soul imploringly for light, as I asked myself
the great question: Does any law of God sanction, shall any law of
man have the power to continue, the bond of marriage where no love
exists?

And I answered it, as my children, if they inherit aught of my
nature, shall at last approve, as the world shall at last come to
understand.

Thus was I at once and forever severed from all former relations and
left alone in the world.

I write these last words quietly, here at my writing desk; but that
inquisition of my brain, it was terrible—more terrible even than the
death I had accepted in parting from him.

But my decision was made, and I was calm then.

I knew in that moment the rest of a fearful struggle of the brain—the
poor weak brain of a woman—that swept the world, though, beneath her
feet.

There was grief in that family, when I became in that decision
myself, and stood a stranger among them; when the social fabric, his
children, their father, false pride, conventional position—all had
overthrow; when my mother’s wrongs had revenge, and my father’s love
had justification, in the child of his life-wronged wife!

But their grief was joy to the agony of calm in which I made that
decision.

Not a tear came to my eye when I told it them; not a pulse stirred
in my breast. How inconceivable to them all this agony.

My husband was even still solicitous to preserve the form of a union,
now no longer possible in reality. One of those formality doctors
of the soul was sent for—his uncle Francis. O! after all the agony
I had passed through, I might have been spared the sight of one of
those whose words had sanctioned and stamped upon me, as if by the
authority of God, all this misery.

But how weak and idle to me were his words about theological sin
and social infamy. They fell on my ear, in constant repetition,
meaningless as the dropping of the beads of a rosary.

He told me I was imperiling my soul, and he left me with some formal
expression of pious horror, when I told him I would willingly incur
that risk.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now I was alone in the world—my life still before me—severed from
every living relation—to be lived or ended. What new connections must
I assume? Unsupported, helpless, alone, where should I go? What must
I do?

In those past ages the convent doors would have been open to me; but
my intelligence, the intelligence of the very age in which I lived,
forbade me the immolation of my living body and my free soul.

And then came to me again the idea of suicide.

I did not shrink from this thought superstitiously, as fearing to
rush unbidden into the presence of the offended deities. I had no
such thought. It meant to me only rest from this great burden and
weariness of life—to lie down and sleep while it was yet day—to sleep
forever.

But I was too calm for the rashness of this act—too strong. If they,
who retired to the cloister from a sense of a superstitious duty,
willingly endured its burden, I, with larger intelligence, could not
sink beneath their lower thought, and weakly die. No, I had committed
no crime that I should die; nor were my past misfortunes a reason why
I should voluntarily impose new ones upon my life to come. I knew I
was in the world to live. Vigor of body, of mind, passions, desires,
reason, all that goes to make up a human soul, were in the full tide
of existence; and I was here surely not to contemplate death, but to
fulfil the functions of life—of a new life.

For I had absolutely died in that decision to live free from my
bond. I was dead to all past relations and connections. I was dead
to the social world around me, as if I had never lived before. The
consciousness of my identity was gone. Every eye rested strangely
upon me. I was as a child new born. I would have put out my hands
simply as a child, for I was in the living world, again, a stranger;
new born, with a life in perfect maturity.

And so came the final question:—

Shall the right I have asserted to live apart from my husband be
followed by cutting off every desire, by marring or concealing every
beauty, by devoting the remainder of a life, already cursed by an
involuntary indiscretion of youth, to asceticism, and so continue in
another form the struggle against nature to the end?—or accept the
creed of the man I love, and seek also my highest happiness in the
gratification of that love, which every instinct of my being approves?

And my answer to this final question is before you and all the world.

As I said at first, dear, I have no misgivings about the sincerity of
your affection for me, under any changes of life; and I feel just as
sure that you will never doubt the constant, undying friendship of

  Your

  LITTLE MARY.

  TO MRS. ——,
  LONDON.




  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 15 Changed: moment makes all vears
             to: moment makes all years

  pg 39 Changed: the dispair that was in me
             to: the despair that was in me



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