They entered the stately measures of the Spanish dance But the

grace of movement which won the murmuring applause of all around

me, only increased the agony of my afflictions. I saw their linked

arms--the compliant, willing movements of their mutual forms--and

dark were the images of guilt and hateful suspicion which entered

my brain and grew to vivid forms, in action before me. I fancied the

fierce, passionate yearnings in the heart of Edgerton; I trembled

when I conjectured what fancies filled the heart of Julia. I can

not linger over the torturing influence of those moments--moments

which seemed ages! Enough that I was maddened with the delirium,

now almost as its height, which had been for months preying upon

my brain like some corroding serpent.

The dance closed. Edgerton conducted her to a seat and placed

himself beside her. I kept aloof. I watched them from a distance;

and in sustaining this watch, I was compelled to recall my senses

with a stern degree of resolution which should save my feelings

from the detection of those inquisitive glances which I fancied

were all around me. If I was weakest among men, in the disease which

destroyed my peace, Heaven knows I was among the strongest of men

in concealing its expression at the very moment when every pulsation

of my heart was an especial agony. I affected indifference, threw

myself into the midst of a group of such people as talk of their

neighbor's bonnets or breeches, the rise of stocks, or the fall of

rain; and how Mrs. Jenkins has set up her carriage, and Mr. Higgins

has been compelled to set down, and to sell out his. Interesting

details, perhaps, without which the nine in ten might as well be

tongueless or tongue-tied for ever. This stuff I had to hear, and

requite in like currency, while my brain was boiling, and dim,

but terrible images of strife, and storm, and agony, were rushing

through it with howling and hisses. There I sat, thus seemingly

engaged, but with an eye ever glancing covertly to the two, who,

at that moment, absorbed every thought of my mind, every feeling

of my heart, and filled them both with the bitterest commotion.

The glances of their mutual eyes, the expression of lip and check,

I watched with the keenest analysis of suspicion. In Julia, I saw

sweetness mixed with a delicate reserve. She seemed to speak but

little. Her eyes wandered from her companion--frequently to where

I sat---but I gave myself due credit, at such moments, for the

ability with which I conducted my own espionage. My inference--equally

unjust and unnatural--that her timid glances to my-self denoted in

her bosom a consciousness of wrong--seemed to me the most natural

and inevitable inference. And when I noted the ardency of Edgerton's

gaze, his close, unrelaxing attentions, the seeming forgetfulness

of all around which he manifested, I hurried to the conclusion

that his words were of a character to suit his looks, and betray

in more emphatic utterance, the passion which they also betrayed.




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