“Yes.” Then she uncovered her head, and letting her cloak and hood fall where they might, stood looking at him; so colourless, so dishevelled, so defiant and despairing, that he was afraid of her.
“What is it? I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what is the matter.”
She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.
“Father, you have trained me from my cradle?”
“Yes, Louisa.”
“I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny.”
He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating, “Curse the hour? Curse the hour?”
“How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death? Where are the graces of my soul? Where are the sentiments of my heart? What have you done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!”
She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.
“If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void in which my whole life sinks. I did not mean to say this; but, father, you remember the last time we conversed in this room?”
He had been so wholly unprepared for what he heard now, that it was with difficulty he answered, “Yes, Louise.”
“What has risen to my lips now, would have risen to my lips then, if you had given me a moment’s help. I don’t reproach you, father. What you have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but O! if you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!”
On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and groaned aloud.
“Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even I feared while I strove against it – as it has been my task from infancy to strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if you had known that there lingered in my breast, sensibilities, affections, weaknesses capable of being cherished into strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than his Creator is, – would you have given me to the husband whom I am now sure that I hate?”
He said, “No. No, my poor child.”
“Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have hardened and spoiled me? Would you have robbed me – for one’s enrichment – only for the greater desolation of this world – of the immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in which I should have learned to be more humble and more trusting with them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?”
“O no, no. No, Louisa.”
“Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them; I should have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contended, more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I have. Now, hear what I have come to say.”
He moved, to support her with his arm. She rising as he did so, they stood close together: she, with a hand upon his shoulder, looking fixedly in his face.
“With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a moment appeased; with an ardent impulse towards some region where rules, and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute; I have grown up, battling every inch of my way.”
“I never knew you were unhappy, my child.”
“Father, I always knew it. In this strife I have almost repulsed and crushed my better angel into a demon. What I have learned has left me doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned; and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.”