ABSTRACT
…I fell in love—suddenly, at a particular time and place, within the space of half-an-hour, with a girl whom I had known all my life… Till now I had never cared for any woman outside my own family. My sister Maria had been for me the ideal of womanhood. I felt that, up to a certain point, I owed myself to her. I did not even fully appreciate the angelic simplicity of my mother's character, the best woman, haplos9 , that I have ever known, not even excepting my dear wife. Outside my own family, the only woman that had at all attracted me was Mme. André of Tours, essentially good, and notwithstanding her stoutness graceful and charming, but I was as far from being in love with her as with one of my own canaries. I had known my cousin from childhood. As mites of two years old or so (she is only by a few months my junior) we had been fond of each other, and there is a tradition of my having fought her elder brother Gordon on her behalf. Some years later when we met as children on the occasional visits to England which my mother used to make with me, I played with her elder sister Margaret (now Mrs. Unwin) and herself, and rather preferred the former. Nay, as a confession of stupid conceit, I may say that I have a distinct recollection of both sisters being brought in to see me when supposed to be asleep, and of a sense of offended dignity that a little girl my junior should be up later than myself. Moreover, when on the same occasion (which my wife has wholly forgotten) my mother told me laughingly that Maria Forbes had announced her intention of marrying cousin John, my whole manly pride of, I suppose, 8 years old had been aroused, and I had resolved that this should never be. When we came over to England to reside, there was no real intimacy between the families. My mother had never liked her much younger sister (who was now dead) marrying so old a man comparatively as Mr. Forbes (though he long outlived his wife). We differed on almost all points; he was a high Tory, we were Liberals; he was a narrow churchman, we instinctively broad, besides other sources of friction. Maria had met with a severe accident at Malta, from the effects of which she has suffered all her life; she had moreover had a love affair, or something very near it, with a man who had played with her. I found her at first narrow and conventional—the only thing which wore upon me, during a two or three days' visit she paid us in Cadogan's Place, being her evident gift for music. We seldom called upon the Forbeses at Ham Common; I found no pleasure in such visits, and on this particular occasion, 29th Dec., 1843, I was very loth to go. My mother comforted me by saying that we need not call again till the spring. In those days, I used never to eat lunch; Maria did not do so either, and the consequence was that we two remained in the drawing-room alone for half-an-hour. It was a fairly low room opening into the garden, but blocked up along nearly the whole of the garden front by a conservatory. To my mother and myself—to all of mine, and I think I may say generally to all but dwellers at Ham—the air of this room in particular, and more or less that of the whole house, felt heavy and vaulty. I have never been able to believe but that Maria's long years of invalidism before her marriage were protracted by her stay in this house. But it is treason to say so to a Forbes. That half hour changed the whole course of my inner life—she was looking dreadfully ill, with almost black marks under her eyes. I cannot now remember of what we spoke, but scales seemed to fall from my eyes. I looked into a soul so pure and humble that I felt the deepest shame of myself. The feeling suddenly came over me that this woman or none must be my wife. I loved her then and there with my whole heart at two and twenty, as I love her at the date of writing this, in my 76th year. [I write this in my 80th year, and find cause to love her, if possible, better than ever.] The house which I had been so reluctant to enter had become the very centre of my life. Singular to say—notwithstanding my foreboding of evil for my cousin, and the crushing sense of being as it were bound hand and foot from helping her in any way—the joy of loving was at first greater than the pain. I loved dearly my mother, my sister Maria, her husband and children, but as it were only as continuations of myself. But now I was taken out of myself. I emptied myself, so to speak, into my cousin. I felt that God had as it were struck me down before her. She was, I might say, the last person whom I could have deliberately wished to love. Poor as a rat, indeed, I had no business to fall in love at all. But I had no sense of any sympathy in her with me, nor indeed was there any, for years to come. And yet there was a strange joy in thus giving myself away without return—I might almost say without hope of return.
