Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 274
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
The position upon which I was thus cast, had a singular effect on my temper and frame of mind. I had for fifteen years been a widower. During that time the train of feelings which belong to the intercourse between two persons of opposite sexes vowed to each other, had fallen into disuse with me. I might be said to have grown old in habits of concentration and uncommunicativeness. But I found, when the trial came, that I had not grown old. The spirit of the affections was as much alive in me as ever. The longer the stream had been interrupted, the more impetuously did it seem to flow, when every obstruction to its course was removed, or rather when a new channel had been opened in which it might freely spread itself. My observance was probably more fervent and intense towards Margaret, than it had ever been to Emilia. Even the period of life I had reached, appeared to have the effect of rendering my devotion more steady and unalterable. I had lost much of the levity and mercurialness of youth, and the train of my purposes and actions became more profound. And, along with this, came the singularity of my situation with my present wife: ever devoted, ever watchful, never satisfied. My anxiety over her grew, even from this cause, that that consummation, that entire union of feelings and desires, that complete pouring out of the soul towards each other, which marriage in its most perfect form proposes to itself, never arrived between us.
CHAPTER III
IN THIS SITUATION, this state of acute and morbid anxiety, the astounding intelligence reached me, that William lived. Six months from my marriage had scarcely elapsed, when I received the information.
As I have already related, he had by a mere accident been flung into the sea, at the very moment that he purposed to leap from the Roebuck into the long-boat, by whose means all those on board were saved, that were supposed to have escaped alive. He had however recovered the shock; he had been seen swimming towards the boat; he was on the point of being taken in, and delivered from a watery grave; when an immense wave intervened, carried him many yards from the point he had reached; and he was seen no more. Almost at the same instant, from the force of a new sea, the ship made a violent plunge, and went to the bottom. No one doubted that, in this melancholy crisis, the life of the lover of Margaret had been added to the wide destruction that had then been accomplished.
Several years had now elapsed, during which nothing had been heard of this unfortunate youth. He had been seen to be carried away by the roaring and remorseless element; he had failed of his chance of being taken into the boat; the ship itself, before the very eyes of those who had lately been its inmates, was finally and suddenly submerged in the ocean. What chance was there that in so desperate a circumstance he should survive? If he had, would he not speedily have been heard of? If by some providential interposition he had been picked up at sea, would he not have been landed on his native shore by those who saved him? He came to be married – recalled from a painful exile, by those who had occasioned his banishment, with the purpose to have his most sanguine wishes crowned with success, to be united to the excelling and constant she in whom his very heart was centred, – was it possible that any thing but death could have detained him from her longing arms? Margaret had never a single thought that could obscure that of her William. She saw him perpetually in her dreams: but she saw him as a ghost. She had been in a manner an eye-witness of his tragic fate: it was too real to be doubted: hope itself could not conjure up the conception that he lived. For a time however she remained a faithful widow to her true lord; she would have ‘served seven years, and they would have seemed to her but a few days for the love that she bare him’; she knew she could never be in a pure and genuine sense the wife of another. But she thought she had duties that survived; and she submitted accordingly. When she had waited for years; when fancy had during that period been her meat and her drink, and she took in a manner no other nourishment; when, if she met the eyes of her parents, she saw what they expected of her, though they would not utter their thoughts, – she recollected what she owed them, how much her father had sacrificed of his darling passion, and she resolved that she would once more force her way into the scene of human things, and do what she could to recompense him for his self-denial.
It was under these circumstances that a letter was put into my hands by my valet. It was directed to Margaret by her maiden name. She was from home at the time, on a visit to her parents. It had travelled to different places, and at length reached the scene of my abode. It was marked on the outside, ‘Ship-Letter’.
The sight of this letter struck me like a thunderbolt. It filled me with all wild and appalling impressions. What was I to believe? I had a presentiment, that in some way or other it related to William. Yet what could there be to be communicated? He was dead. The dead indeed in many cases left relatives, left property behind them, and there was information to be given, and questions to be resolved respecting these. But, after so long an interval, this was not a likely solution. It was besides a ‘ship-letter’. When the remorseless waves have closed over a man, and taken away the principle of thought and action from his visible frame, it might almost as soon be expected that they would restore to life that which they had destroyed, as that they would render back to us any precise intelligence how he had died; the tomb is silent; and the caverns of the ocean yield us no account of the hidden things they contain.
The more I dwelt on these circumstances, the more my uneasiness increased. I felt as if my fate, for all the remaining period of my existence, was folded up in the cover of this little letter: – and I felt truly!
On what was I to resolve? Propriety seemed to require that, as the letter was addressed to Margaret, it should be delivered into her hand with the seal unbroken. But what had propriety to do with a case like this? Ordinary rules are made for ordinary occasions. There is doubtless a decorum that ought to be observed in the common intercourses of human beings. But this was not an affair of usual occurrence. This letter might shut up in it more evils and distempers than are said to have been inclosed in the box of Pandora.
In a word I broke open the letter. Its contents came up to my worst apprehensions.
William was an excellent swimmer. By the strength of the waves he had been carried far out to sea; and he soon found that it would be in vain for him to think of making the shore by his single exertion. He turned towards the ship. He had been enabled to reach it on the side that stooped lowest towards the waves; and for a moment he felt once more that he had somewhat solid on which the sole of his foot was planted. It was but for an instant. But that instant was every thing to him. The thought darted into his mind, that his only remaining chance for life consisted in his fastening himself to a piece of the wreck. A loose plank lay near him; a piece of rope offered itself to his hand. This he coiled round the plank and his own body in a manner so secure, that they could scarcely by any shock be separated again. The ship sunk; but himself and the spar were unconnected with the ship. He floated; and in a short time was able by his exertions to give an impulse to the plank and himself, that carried him away from the gulph in which the vessel was absorbed. He thus remained on the surface for hours even after all sense had deserted him. In this state he had been taken up, and placed on the deck of an English frigate. By the assiduous efforts of those about him he was in no long time restored to life; but his powers were so much exhausted, that, for a considerable space, he possessed no distinct recollection. He neither knew where he was, nor what were the events that had immediately preceded. All seemed to him like a dream. He looked with wonder upon the persons around him; every one was a stranger. Before he was able to tell a coherent tale, or signify his wishes and desires, the frigate was already far out upon its voyage. From the effects of what he had suffered while floating alone between life and death, or from some other cause, he was seized with a dangerous illness; and his health long remained in a precarious state. The frigate was already not far from St Helena, when she fell in with two Spanish vessels, and, after an obstinate resistance, was obliged to submit to the enemy. By her captors she was carried into Carthagena, where it was some time before William recovered his strength; nor was it till after multiplied misfortunes, and having passed through a vast variety of adventures, that he had finally landed on the shores of his native country.
The interval of his absence appeared to him as nothing. It was like the story of the sultan, who in apprehension had passed through a period of twenty years, a state of unrivalled good-fortune, and a state of abject slavery, and found in the result that all this had only occupied the time in which he plunged his head in a tub of water, and drew it out again, and saw all his courtiers standing round him just as before. So William had done and suffered much during his expatriation: but, the moment he came in sight of the land in which resided the fair one he loved, these realities faded into the painting of a dream. He fancied that he should find every thing, just as it had been announced to him in his letters of recal written more than four years ago. He imaged to himself Margaret still standing on the cliffs at Plymouth looking out for his arrival. He knew her too well to apprehend that her heart could be changed. He would as soon have believed that the island of Great Britain had been swallowed up by an earthquake, as that Margaret would not wait for his return however long, or, even in case of his death, would not have remained faithful to his memory as long as she existed. He had therefore written to her from on board the ship that brought him to England. He had been prevented from entering the first boat that came alongside, and had delivered his letter to the officer that carried the dispatches, with directions that he should put it in the post the instant he was able to do so.
The letter overflowed with all the earnest impatience of a lover. The writer alluded to the multiplied disasters that had overtaken him, and spoke most feelingly of the grief the person to whom it was addressed must have suffered on his account. He had been a prisoner of war; he had undergone every kind of privation and indignity; he had wandered among ‘deserts and mountains, and in caves and dens of the earth’. But, through all these vicissitudes, the image of Margaret had followed and sustained him; he had seen her angelic and benign countenance, and heard the affectionate tones of her voice, constantly amid the darkness of the night; and this had given him courage to persevere and to live through his bitterest reverses. And now he was returned to reap the reward of all his sufferings, while she would pour the balm of sympathy and love into his wounded breast.
CHAPTER IV
WHAT A LETTER was this for me to peruse! It stripped in a moment the rainbow colours in which the world had been clad in my eyes, and exhibited in their stead.
… all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, unutterable, and worse
Than fable yet had feigned, or fear conceived.
Of late I had been dissatisfied with my condition, and had complained that I had a wife and no wife, a woman who was mine in all external duty, but whose heart was buried with another in his watery grave. But this was a refinement of the imagination, the uneasiness of a man surrounded with indulgencies, but who pined for something more. I had attention, observance and tenderness. I had a companion, the ornament of her sex, who devoted all her powers to the making me happy, and to the providing me with every species of gratification. Of living creatures I was the one in whom her thoughts were centred. Her eye followed me in all my movements; she regarded it as her sacred duty to watch my thoughts and anticipate my wishes; and what she did for me was done with such tenderness, so single a heart, and so ingenuous a disposition, that I must have been a brute indeed not to have felt the most ardent gratitude and the sincerest transport.
Yes, I had been happy! I felt myself so; I have acknowledged that I was happy. The corner in my heart that I reserved for discontent, was one of its remotest recesses, into which my thoughts retired, when they had been already saturated with sweets, when they overflowed with serenity, and when in mere wantonness they sought for a proof that I was mortal, that I had not every thing, and that I could find a flaw, a sensible imperfection, in the otherwise round and polished surface of my joys.
What was I now? There was a being to whom the heart of Margaret was devoted more emphatically than to me. But every one was satisfied that that being had long ago been numbered with the dead. Successive seasons, as we believed, had whitened his bones upon some distant shore. I might as well be jealous of the devotion that exalted religion pays to the virgin Mary, or to the almighty Author of the universe, as of Margaret’s love for William. She devoted herself to me above any other inhabitant of the earth; and I ought to be satisfied. I had no rival. The chastest spirit may love ideal beauty and excellence without censure; no one would be so irrational as to be jealous of the creations of Apelles or Raphael, of the radiance of Helen, or the conjugal affection of Andromache; and he who has quitted the busy scene of living things, is ‘but as a picture’.
Henceforth my condition was altogether different. There was a man that she preferred to me and to all the world. In the eye of heaven he was her husband. Nothing but death had divorced them. Love had never been proved by such a variety of tests, as the love of Margaret for William. In its first trial she had resolved to sacrifice all the yearnings of her soul in obedience to her father. She persisted; and her life was on the point of becoming the victim of her duty. She could command external things, her actions and her words. But she could not root the image of him she loved from her heart. There it lay, sapping and wasting away the elements of her existence. When she learned with every evidence of authenticity that William was dead, her situation was different. She became comparatively resigned: she did not struggle against the decrees of heaven and the laws of nature. But what a picture did her resignation exhibit? She sat bloodless and patient, the image of despair. It was in vain that with her corporal presence she joined in the song and the dance; it was palpable to all, that her spirit was absent, and that she no longer participated in the concerns, the gaieties, or the more serious affairs, of the world.
But then she knew, or she believed that she knew, he was dead. She bowed herself to the visitations of heaven, and acted accordingly. It was impossible to guess what would be the convulsions and throes of her soul, when she received the fatal tidings which this letter imparted. No imagination could picture the sufferings that were reserved for her. In the case of young Borradale she had bended, not merely to the wishes, but to the imperious commands of her father. She had signified by letter to her lover what was determined on, before it took place; and this was much. She had sought his consent, and received it. But now –
Her father, after severe efforts, and the thorough conviction of his mind, had given his sanction to her union with William. He had resolved never again to interfere with her own election on the sacred subject of marriage. The youth had been summoned from a distant hemisphere; and nothing but what appeared to be the inexorable decree of fate had separated them.
He had not however perished, as had been supposed. He had gone through a multitude of sufferings, which would naturally give him new merit in the eyes of his mistress. He had risen above a thousand obstacles, and was returned to claim the reward of unmingled happiness.
Her attachment had been entire, never to be rivaled, never to be extinguished. To hear then that he still lived, would be to her the bitterest reproach. False, fickle, inconstant woman! Why had she not waited for him? Who called on her to give up the man, to whose claims her father had affixed his sanction?
To hear that he was living, what a shock would it inflict on her! I could scarcely conceive her surviving it. It would totally change her situation in the world, and even her identity. She would be compelled to regard herself with detestation. What, when she had been free to act at her discretion, when all compulsion had been carefully withheld, that she should then have deserted this God of her idolatry!
He had been reported to be dead. But it is the first dictate of true love, to cling with unalterable tenacity to the object of its adoration, against hope to believe in hope, and scarcely to yield to despair, even though the evidence of our senses should be called in to induce us to relax our hold. But to yield to rumour! Even in a vulgar trial for murder, when the individual removed is worthless, and perhaps more than worthless, when no interest is involved but that of general justice and the security of the abstract existence of society in its members, the law has wisely provided, that no one shall be condemned and executed for murder, till it has been shewn that the individual supposed to be murdered is actually dead – no absence, no lapse of years, is admitted as satisfactory – the body must actually be produced – the seizure effected by the great conqueror of the world must be fully ascertained. And was not William entitled to the precaution and scruple, that would be exercised in the case of such an individual? These infallibly would be the reflections of Margaret.
And was she was then a wife? Would she count herself for such? No, she was a being for whom society has coined no appellation. She was the despised and rejected of the human race. She must fly to the most frightful solitudes, and call upon the mountains and hills to cover her.
William was the youth whom only she had ever loved. As a high point of filial duty, as a refinement upon the obligations of a moral being, she had given her hand to me. But she never loved me, in the sense in which she had loved the companion of her youth. She discharged the bonds into which she had entered towards me in the most exemplary manner. She watched for my interests; she watched for my gratifications. But this was an affair of the head, and not of the heart. She did what she did, because it became her, and because she could not hold herself excusable for the smallest omissions. And the steadiness with which she adhered to all this was inexpressibly lovely and admirable. But there was certainly nothing approaching to romantic in her attachment to me.
