Bangladeshi-Bengali.Com: Online Story. Who Was She?

Come, now, there may as well be an end of this! Every time I meet your

eyes squarely, I detect the question just slipping out of them. If you

had spoken it, or even boldly looked it; if you had shown in your

motions the least sign of a fussy or fidgety concern on my account; if

this were not the evening of my birthday, and you the only friend who

remembered it; if confession were not good for the soul, though harder

than sin to some people, of whom I am one--well, if all reasons were

not at this instant converged into a focus, and burning me rather

violently, in that region where the seat of emotion is supposed to lie,

I should keep my trouble to myself. Yes, I have fifty times had it on

my mind to tell you the whole story. But who can be certain that his

best friend will not smile--or, what is worse, cherish a kind of

charitable pity ever afterward--when the external forms of a very

serious kind of passion seem trivial, fantastic, foolish? And the worst

of all is that the heroic part which I imagined I was playing proves to

have been almost the reverse. The only comfort which I can find in my

humiliation is that I am capable of feeling it. There isn't a bit of a

paradox in this, as you will see; but I only mention it, now, to

prepare you for, maybe, a little morbid sensitiveness of my moral

nerves.

The documents are all in this portfolio under my elbow. I had just read

them again completely through when you were announced. You may examine

them as you like afterward: for the present, fill your glass, take

another Cabana, and keep silent until my "ghastly tale" has reached its

most lamentable conclusion.

The beginning of it was at Wampsocket Springs, three years ago last

summer. I suppose most unmarried men who have reached, or passed, the

age of thirty--and I was then thirty-three--experience a milder return

of their adolescent warmth, a kind of fainter second spring, since the

first has not fulfilled its promise. Of course, I wasn't clearly

conscious of this at the time: who is? But I had had my youthful

passion and my tragic disappointment, as you know: I had looked far

enough into what Thackeray used to call the cryptic mysteries to save

me from the Scylla of dissipation, and yet preserved enough of natural

nature to keep me out of the Pharisaic Charyb-dis. My devotion to my

legal studies had already brought me a mild distinction; the paternal

legacy was a good nest-egg for the incubation of wealth--in short, I

was a fair, respectable "party," desirable to the humbler mammas, and

not to be despised by the haughty exclusives.

The fashionable hotel at the Springs holds three hundred, and it was

packed. I had meant to lounge there for a fortnight and then finish my

holidays at Long Branch; but eighty, at least, out of the three hundred

were young and moved lightly in muslin. With my years and experience I

felt so safe that to walk, talk, or dance with them became simply a

luxury, such as I had never--at least so freely--possessed before. My

name and standing, known to some families, were agreeably exaggerated

to the others, and I enjoyed that supreme satisfaction which a man

always feels when he discovers, or imagines, that he is popular in

society. There is a kind of premonitory apology implied in my saying

this, I am aware. You must remember that I am culprit, and culprit's

counsel, at the same time.

You have never been at Wampsocket? Well, the hills sweep around in a

crescent, on the northern side, and four or five radiating glens,

descending from them, unite just above the village. The central one,

leading to a waterfall (called "Minne-hehe" by the irreverent young

people, because there is so little of it), is the fashionable drive and

promenade; but the second ravine on the left, steep, crooked, and

cumbered with bowlders which have tumbled from somewhere and lodged in

the most extraordinary groupings, became my favorite walk of a morning.

There was a footpath in it, well-trodden at first, but gradually fading

out as it became more like a ladder than a path, and I soon discovered

that no other city feet than mine were likely to scale a certain rough

slope which seemed the end of the ravine. With the aid of the tough

laurel-stems I climbed to the top, passed through a cleft as narrow as

a doorway, and presently found myself in a little upper dell, as wild

and sweet and strange as one of the pictures that haunts us on the

brink of sleep.

There was a pond--no, rather a bowl--of water in the centre; hardly

twenty yards across, yet the sky in it was so pure and far down that

the circle of rocks and summer foliage inclosing it seemed like a

little planetary ring, floating off alone through space. I can't

explain the charm of the spot, nor the selfishness which instantly

suggested that I should keep the discovery to myself. Ten years earlier

I should have looked around for some fair spirit to be my "minister,"

but now--

One forenoon--I think it was the third or fourth time I had visited the

place--I was startled to find the dent of a heel in the earth, half-way

up the slope. There had been rain during the night and the earth was

still moist and soft. It was the mark of a woman's boot, only to be

distinguished from that of a walking-stick by its semicircular form. A

little higher, I found the outline of a foot, not so small as to awake

an ecstasy, but with a suggestion of lightness, elasticity, and grace.

If hands were thrust through holes in a board-fence, and nothing of the

attached bodies seen, I can easily imagine that some would attract and

others repel us: with footprints the impression is weaker, of course,

but we can not escape it. I am not sure whether I wanted to find the

unknown wearer of the boot within my precious personal solitude: I was

afraid I should see her, while passing through the rocky crevice, and

yet was disappointed when I found no one.

But on the flat, warm rock overhanging the tarn--my special throne--lay

some withering wild-flowers and a book! I looked up and down, right and

left: there was not the slightest sign of another human life than mine.

Then I lay down for a quarter of an hour, and listened: there were only

the noises of bird and squirrel, as before. At last, I took up the

book, the flat breadth of which suggested only sketches. There were,

indeed, some tolerable studies of rocks and trees on the first pages; a

few not very striking caricatures, which seemed to have been commenced

as portraits, but recalled no faces I knew; then a number of

fragmentary notes, written in pencil. I found no name, from first to

last; only, under the sketches, a monogram so complicated and laborious

that the initials could hardly be discovered unless one already knew

them.