Oct. 8.—­She is still mending.  I am glad to have saved her—­my only sister—­if I have done so; though I shall now never become Charles’s wife.

CHAPTER VII.—­A SURPRISE AWAITS HER

Feb. 5.—­Writing has been absolutely impossible for a long while; but I now reach a stage at which it seems possible to jot down a line.  Caroline’s recovery, extending over four months, has been very engrossing; at first slow, latterly rapid.  But a fearful complication of affairs attends it!

   O what a tangled web we weave
   When first we practise to deceive!

Charles has written reproachfully to me from Venice, where he is.  He says how can he fulfil in the real what he has enacted in the counterfeit, while he still loves me?  Yet how, on the other hand, can he leave it unfulfilled?  All this time I have not told her, and up to this minute she believes that he has indeed taken her for better, for worse, till death them do part.  It is a harassing position for me, and all three.  In the awful approach of death, one’s judgment loses its balance, and we do anything to meet the exigencies of the moment, with a single eye to the one who excites our sympathy, and from whom we seem on the brink of being separated for ever.

Had he really married her at that time all would be settled now.  But he took too much thought; she might have died, and then he had his reason.  If indeed it had turned out so, I should now be perhaps a sad woman; but not a tempest-tossed one . . .  The possibility of his claiming me after all is what lies at the root of my agitation.  Everything hangs by a thread.  Suppose I tell her the marriage was a mockery; suppose she is indignant with me and with him for the deception—­and then?  Otherwise, suppose she is not indignant but forgives all; he is bound to marry her; and honour constrains me to urge him thereto, in spite of what he protests, and to smooth the way to this issue by my method of informing her.  I have meant to tell her the last month—­ever since she has been strong enough to bear such tidings; but I have been without the power—­the moral force.  Surely I must write, and get him to come and assist me.

March 14.—­She continually wonders why he does not come, the five months of his enforced absence having expired; and still more she wonders why he does not write oftener.  His last letter was cold, she says, and she fears he regrets his marriage, which he may only have celebrated with her for pity’s sake, thinking she was sure to die.  It makes one’s heart bleed to hear her hovering thus so near the truth, and yet never discerning its actual shape.

A minor trouble besets me, too, in the person of the young Scripture reader, whose conscience pricks him for the part he played.  Surely I am punished, if ever woman were, for a too ingenious perversion of her better judgment!