As Mrs. Wilson concluded, her niece, who had recovered the command of
her feelings pressed her hand in silence to her lips, and showed a
disposition to retire from a spot which she found recalled too many
recollections of a man whose image it was her imperious duty to banish,
on every consideration of propriety and religion.
Their walk into the house was silent, and their thoughts were drawn from
the unpleasant topic by finding a letter from Julia, announcing her
intended departure from this country, and her wish to take leave of them
in London before she sailed. As she had mentioned the probable day for
that event, both the ladies were delighted to find it was posterior to
the time fixed by Sir Edward for their own visit to the capital.
Had Jane, instead of Emily, been the one that suffered through the
agency of Mrs. Fitzgerald, however innocently on the part of the lady,
her violent and uncontrolled passions would have either blindly united
the innocent with the guilty in her resentments; or, if a sense of
justice had vindicated the lady in her judgment, yet her pride and ill-
guided delicacy would have felt her name a reproach, that would have
forbidden any intercourse with her or any belonging to her.
Not so with her sister. The sufferings of Mrs. Fitzgerald had taken a
strong hold on her youthful feelings, and a similarity of opinions and
practices on the great object of their lives, had brought them together
in a manner no misconduct in a third person could weaken. It is true,
the recollection of Denbigh was intimately blended with the fate of Mrs.
Fitzgerald. But Emily sought support against her feeling from a quarter
that rather required an investigation of them than a desire to drown
care with thought.
She never indulged in romantic reflections in which the image of Denbigh
was associated. This she had hardly done in her happiest moments; and
his marriage, if nothing else had interfered, now absolutely put it out
of the question. But, although a Christian, and an humble and devout
one, Emily Moseley was a woman, and had loved ardently, confidingly, and
gratefully. Marriage is the business of life with her sex,--with all,
next to a preparation for a better world,--and it cannot be supposed
that a first passion in a bosom like that of our heroine was to be
suddenly erased and to leave no vestiges of its existence.
Her partiality for the society of Derwent, her meditations in which she
sometimes detected herself drawing a picture of what Denbigh might have
been, if early care had been taken to impress him with his situation in
this world, and from which she generally retired to her closet and her
knees, were the remains of feelings too strong and too pure to be torn
from her in a moment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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