will you be wiser or more fortunate? or are you, too, helpless in the toils?’

I had followed his words with changing emotion, but now I believed I understood.

‘I see,’ I cried; ‘you judge me rightly. I must follow where my parents led; and oh! I am not only willing, I am eager!’

‘No,’ replied the doctor, ‘not death for you. The flawed vessel we may break, but not the perfect. No, your mother cherished a different hope, and so do I. I see,’ he cried, ‘the girl develop to the completed woman, the plan reach fulfilment, the promise—ay, outdone! I could not bear to arrest so lively, so comely a process. It was your mother’s thought,’ he added, with a change of tone, ‘that I should marry you myself.’ I fear I must have shown a perfect horror of aversion from this fate, for he made haste to quiet me. ‘Reassure yourself, Asenath,’ he resumed. ‘Old as I am, I have not forgotten the tumultuous fancies of youth. I have passed my days, indeed, in laboratories; but in all my vigils I have not forgotten the tune of a young pulse. Age asks with timidity to be spared intolerable pain; youth, taking fortune by the beard, demands joy like a right. These things I have not forgotten; none, rather, has more keenly felt, none more jealously considered them; I have but postponed them to their day. See, then: you stand without support; the only friend left to you, this old investigator, old in cunning, young in sympathy. Answer me but one question: Are you free from the entanglement of what the world calls love? Do you still command your heart and purposes? or are you fallen in some bond-slavery of the eye and ear?’

I answered him in broken words; my heart, I think I must have told him, lay with my dead parents.

‘It is enough,’ he said. ‘It has been my fate to be called on often, too often, for those services of which we spoke to-night; none in Utah could carry them so well to a conclusion; hence there has fallen into my hands a certain share of influence which I now lay at your service, partly for the sake of my dead friends, your parents; partly for the interest I bear you in your own right. I shall send you to England, to the great city of London, there to await the bridegroom I have selected. He shall be a son of mine, a young man suitable in age and not grossly deficient in that quality of beauty that your years demand. Since your heart is free, you may well pledge me the sole promise that I ask in return for much expense and still more danger: to await the arrival of that bridegroom with the delicacy of a wife.’

 Prev. P 36/173 next