"My bride's mother I had never seen: I understood she was dead.

The honeymoon over, I learned my mistake; she was only mad, and shut

up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too--a

complete dumb idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen (and whom I

cannot hate, whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some

grains of affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued

interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a dog-like

attachment he once bore me), will probably be in the same state one

day. My father and my brother Rowland knew all this; but they

thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot

against me."

"These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of

concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my

wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes

obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and

singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to

anything larger--when I found that I could not pass a single

evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that

kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because

whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at

once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile--when I perceived that

I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant

would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable

temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting

orders--even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I

curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust

in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.

"Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details: some strong

words shall express what I have to say. I lived with that woman

upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed:

her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity; her

vices sprang up fast and rank: they were so strong, only cruelty

could check them, and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy

intellect she had, and what giant propensities! How fearful were

the curses those propensities entailed on me! Bertha Mason, the

true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the

hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a

wife at once intemperate and unchaste.

"My brother in the interval was dead, and at the end of the four

years my father died too. I was rich enough now--yet poor to

hideous indigence: a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever

saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society

a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal

proceedings: for the doctors now discovered that MY WIFE was mad--

her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity. Jane,

you don't like my narrative; you look almost sick--shall I defer the

rest to another day?"




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