Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
“What right have you to judge me?” he began; “what do you know of what
I have suffered, and endured, and overcome? How can you know what I have
had to give up and put away from me? It's easy enough for you to draw
your skirts around you, but what can a woman bred as you have been bred
know of what I've had to fight against and keep under and cut away? It
was an easy, beautiful idyl to you; your love came to you only when it
should have come, and for a man who was good and worthy, and distinctly
eligible--I don't mean that; forgive me, Ellen, but you drive me beside
myself. But he is good and he believes himself worthy, and I say that
myself before you both. But I am only worthy and only good because of
that other love that I put away when it became a crime, when it became
impossible. Do you know what it cost me? Do you know what it meant to
me, and what I went through, and how I suffered? Do you know who this
other woman is whom you are insulting with your doubts and guesses in
the dark? Can't you spare her? Am I not enough? Perhaps it was easy
for her, too; perhaps her silence cost her nothing; perhaps she did not
suffer and has nothing but happiness and content to look forward to for
the rest of her life; and I tell you that it is because we did put
it away, and kill it, and not give way to it that I am whatever I am
to-day; whatever good there is in me is due to that temptation and
to the fact that I beat it and overcame it and kept myself honest and
clean. And when I met you and learned to know you I believed in my heart
that God had sent you to me that I might know what it was to love a
woman whom I could marry and who could be my wife; that you were the
reward for my having overcome temptation and the sign that I had done
well. And now you throw me over and put me aside as though I were
something low and unworthy, because of this temptation, because of this
very thing that has made me know myself and my own strength and that has
kept me up for you.”
As the young man had been speaking, the bishop's eyes had never left
his face, and as he finished, the face of the priest grew clearer and
decided, and calmly exultant. And as Latimer ceased he bent his head
above his daughter's, and said in a voice that seemed to speak with more
than human inspiration. “My child,” he said, “if God had given me a son
I should have been proud if he could have spoken as this young man has
done.”
But the woman only said, “Let him go to her.”
“Ellen, oh, Ellen!” cried the father.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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