“I never saw a vessel of like Sorrow, So filled and so becoming.”
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“Give Sorrow words: the Grief that does not speak
Whispers the overfraught heart and bids it break.”
Shakespeare.
No woman of true sensibility rejects a lover without feeling herself a sympathy in the pang she inflicts. It often happens that in her artless attempts to mitigate the disappointment, her motives are mistaken, and she subjects herself again to a siege so much more pressing than the former, that she yields against her conviction, a captive to a stronger will, but not to love. It was not so with a woman of Beatriz’s mould. She knew that in no way could she be so true to others as in being true to herself. When Kiana turned from her, although she was sadder than before he spoke, she felt that her sincerity had been her safety.
As she prolonged her walk farther from her house to where the trees thickened into a forest, she thought she saw a pair of piercing eyes, not unfamiliar, watching her at times, through the thick vines and ferns that clustered about her path. She was, however, too abstracted by her own reflections[111] to be curious about them, and so she slowly wandered on.
“Holy Mother, has it come to this,” said she to herself, stopping occasionally, and pressing her hands over her heart as if to still its throbs, “do I love this man? Whence this fever here, if it be not love? Why was it that when I found him lying, as I thought, dead on the sand, my pulses ceased to beat, and for the instant I was dead myself? Could he have seen my emotion when he came to? The Chaste Virgin forbid! Yet when our eyes met on that holy evening in which we gazed so long upon the sea, I read my soul in his. But can he know what I do not know myself? I would say I do not love him, yet something within chokes me when I would utter the words. What I, a Catholic maiden, love a priest? ’tis not so! it would be sacrilege. May the Mother of God forgive the thought,” and she paused with eyes uplifted and hands clasped in silent prayer.
For an instant she became quieter, but it was only the gathering of the coming storm. Every instinct of her warm nature cried, “you love him.” Each accepted doctrine of her faith as firmly forbade it. She felt she was on the brink of a gulf. Destruction of soul and body or their martyrdom, seemed the only choice.
“Yet,” thought she, “if it be a crime, why is it that his voice ever soothes me,—that his words ever make me stronger and truer to my better self,—that he upholds me in all that is good? When with him, nature has a more loving aspect; the[112] very stones look kindly on me. It has ever been thus. Before I suspected myself,—yes, now I see it all,—years, years ago, my heart flowed out the same to Olmedo,—his presence was my want. Away from him I was contented, it is true, but I was sad. With him, my sadness became a quiet joy. I was doubly myself. Has the good God given me all this for a torment? To ruin my soul through the source of its virtue and its highest happiness?”
She shuddered. Her whole frame was convulsed with agony. She did not fear that Olmedo did not love her, because she thought that feelings so deep and long tried as hers had been in relation to him, could not exist without the answering sympathy of his.
It was not then the fear that she was not loved that troubled her. It was rather the fear that Olmedo might be tempted even as she was. He, a priest, vowed to chastity: his wife was the Holy Church; if it were sacrilege in her to love, it were blasphemy in him. Again all the terrors of a stricken conscience smote her, and she was overwhelmed at the thought that he might be equally guilty with herself.
Thus it often is. God gives man his instincts and desires. Having made him after his own image, that image must be vital with the eternal principles of God-nature. If the author of all has inseparably connected cause and effect in the physical world, He has carried the law no less positively into the moral world. There can be, therefore, no[113] instinct without its proper function, and no aspiration that may not be realized progressively towards Him. Duty is the password to heaven, which, in the rightly balanced mind begins on earth. Finding all things good according to their kind, it is not afraid to honor God by the right use of his gifts. Man begins his hell here also, by the bars to his progress, which his misunderstood organization, selfish passions, and the foolish learning or spiritual tyranny of his merely human theology fabricate for him. He fears, and seeks to compromise or deceive. If the spirit of God be upon him, then he enjoys all things of God, each in its due degree, with a peace that passeth understanding.
Beatriz, therefore, was right in feeling that the Being who had made the human heart and given it the capacity of lo............