THEY DO NOT DIE. 279.
“I have a story to tell,” said the writer, “which must be told, although it may not avail me now. I love you, sweet Susan, and have loved you from the first moment I saw you.
“Do not turn from this in scorn. I was at your father’s house, you will remember, but one evening, on that first visit; and by some stupid mistake on my part, I thought they called you ‘Rosalie.’ Your face and your words haunted me when I returned to my quiet parsonage—I felt that you were just the wife I wanted. I could not leave my duties again to renew our acquaintance, and so penned that letter—directed to your sister, but intended for you. Your reply, as I thought it, did not quite answer my expectations, as coming from you; but the next letter I liked better; and, finally, I asked you to become my wife, and was accepted by your sister.
‘Never, as long as I live, can I forget the night that opened to me the dreadful truth. I sat listening for your footstep, picturing to myself your elegant face, and scarcely able to wait for your coming to clasp you to my bosom, and call you mine.
‘In the midst of these thoughts the door opened, and Rosalie appeared, blushing, expectant, with a face and manner that told the whole dreadful mistake. For a moment the room seemed to reel around me, and I had to struggle hard to retain possession of my senses; but a stern feeling of honor nerved me to endurance, as I glanced at the pretty, timid- looking girl, who had confided herself to my love and tenderness.
“I do not know what I said; but when I met you, my senses nearly forsook me again. Oh, beloved! it is a hard and bitter thing for a man to see before him the woman he loves, and the woman to whom his honor is pledged, and to find that they are not one, but two! No one knows what I suffered in those first hours. You asked me if I had been sick, and I felt like replying, ‘I am sick, sick unto death.’ I saw that you looked upon me with distrust, and I hardened myself into frigidness, for fear of betraying my feelings.
“I know that you thought me cold, and even rude, perhaps, in my own house; but my teeth were hard set in endurance, and I dared not assume toward you a brother’s manner, lest I should unguardedly betray the lover. Innocent words were often spoken by you and Rosalie that sent a sharp pain to my heart; and, at times, the very sight of you was almost maddening. In those occasional moments, when we have been alone together, I have been on the point of saying, ‘Go! leave my sight, or I shall tell you all!”
“I believe that Rosalie was a happy wife; I think no suspicion of the truth ever crossed her mind; and it is now more than a year since we laid her in the grave. Will you, my first, my only love, not take the place offered to you before, and be to me what no other woman ever could be, my wife in the best and holiest sense of the word?”
I read this letter with many tears; and I felt then that I had loved Howard Nilmore, not as a brother, but even as he loved me.
My love, however, was not allowed to run riot over every other feeling. I asked myself seriously if I could go to that home where my sister had reigned so short a time before, and where gossips were waiting for this very confirmation of their surmises. I did not think I could face it; for although the circumstances entirely changed my sentiments with respect to marrying a sister’s husband, yet I had uttered those sentiments there most decidedly; and I could not make our story public.
So I wrote to Howard as gently as I could, telling him of all these things, and begging him to think more of his usefulness as a Christian minister than of a few short years of happiness for us on earth.
I have made a great sacrifice, but I fully mean it; he has set me a noble example.
January 1st.—Another letter from that persevering man! Howard had long thought it best, for many reasons, to change his parish; and in the course of the coming year, he will remove to L , a place only ten miles from my own home.
There came also a letter for father, who seems ready to give Howard Nilmore all the daughters he possesses. A few weeks hence I shall stand in the very parlor which poor Rosalie entered with such different feelings, waiting for the lover who has always been mine.
THEY DO NOT DIE.
BY CATHARINE ALLAN.
WAY should we, for the dying, weep?
They do not die, they only sleep.
'Tis not the soul, ' tis but the shell
We bury with the funeral knell.
This sorrowing life, thank God, is brief;
But that's eternal-why this grief?
