Read Online Desert Queen by Janet Wallach - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Janet Wallach
Ads: Link
September her father’s letter came. With a quickened pulse, she opened the envelope, but her deepest fears turned out to be true. Hugh Bell refused to give his consent. He hoped that a separation would make Gertrude change her mind. She was heartbroken. She wrote to her stepmother for solace: “I care more than I can say and I’m not afraid of being poor or even of having to wait, though waiting is harder than I thought it would be at first. For one doesn’t realize at first how one will long for the constant companionship and the blessed security of being married, but now that I am going away I realise it wildly … our position is very difficult and we are very unhappy.”
In spite of their passion, they respected the social rules. They saw less of each other, feeling they no longer had the right to meet. Still she begged her mother to understand Henry Cadogan as she did. She could not bear that her parents think of him as anything less than “noble and gentle and good.” This was the loving side he had shown her. “Everything I think and write brings us back to things we have spoken of together, sentences of his that come flashing like sharp swords; you see for the last three months nothing I have done or thought has not had him in it, the essence of it all.”
She would choose to do it all over again, she assured them, despite the current pain and the awful separation that was coming. It was worth it all, she told them, “more than worth it. Some people live all their lives and never have this wonderful thing; at least I have known it and have seen life’s possibilities suddenly open in front of me—only one may cry just a little when one has to turn away and take up the old narrow life again.… Oh Mother, Mother,” she wailed.
O n the boat journey home she wrote to her trustworthy friend Domnul Chirol, revealing her pain and confusion. “I think you know vaguely about my affairs— vaguely is all I know about them myself at present, but I fear they look very bad. It’s a threatening, stormy vagueness, not a hopeful one. Mr. Cadogan is very poor, his father I believe to be practically bankrupt and mine, though he is an angel and would do anything in the world for me, is absolutely unable to run another household besides his own, which is, it seems to me, what we are asking him to do.” She and her father had not yet had a chance to discuss the situation, but she hoped he would see Henry Cadogan’s father and arrive at some sort of decision. In the meanwhile, she and Cadogan were not allowed to consider themselves engaged and the possibility of their marriage remained in the distant future. “I write sensibly about it, don’t I, but I’m not sensible at all in my heart, only it’s all too desperate to cry over—there comes a moment in very evil days when they are too evil for anything but silence.”
She arrived in London in late October and, after the long absence, embraced her waiting mother. To her father, who was in Yorskshire, she wrote that, as unimaginable as it once had seemed, this experience had brought her even closer to him. Perhaps it was because she had known real love, she explained, that she could appreciate her father’s love even more. When finally Hugh appeared in London a few days later, she poured out her hopes and fears, her doubts and desires, while he listened quietly. As she had allowed to Domnul, somewhere deep inside her she knew her father was right; for the time being, at least, Cadogan was not an acceptable husband. Yet she yearned to be his wife, and she would wait; she would wait as long as she had to.
Then, for eight months, she endured, existing from day to day, and with Florence’s encouragement she worked on Persian Pictures , a book about her experiences in the East. In August 1893 she and her mother visited Kirby Thore in Yorkshire. It was there that she was reading aloud to Florence about the cholera epidemic, from the chapter she had called “Shadow of
In spite of their passion, they respected the social rules. They saw less of each other, feeling they no longer had the right to meet. Still she begged her mother to understand Henry Cadogan as she did. She could not bear that her parents think of him as anything less than “noble and gentle and good.” This was the loving side he had shown her. “Everything I think and write brings us back to things we have spoken of together, sentences of his that come flashing like sharp swords; you see for the last three months nothing I have done or thought has not had him in it, the essence of it all.”
She would choose to do it all over again, she assured them, despite the current pain and the awful separation that was coming. It was worth it all, she told them, “more than worth it. Some people live all their lives and never have this wonderful thing; at least I have known it and have seen life’s possibilities suddenly open in front of me—only one may cry just a little when one has to turn away and take up the old narrow life again.… Oh Mother, Mother,” she wailed.
O n the boat journey home she wrote to her trustworthy friend Domnul Chirol, revealing her pain and confusion. “I think you know vaguely about my affairs— vaguely is all I know about them myself at present, but I fear they look very bad. It’s a threatening, stormy vagueness, not a hopeful one. Mr. Cadogan is very poor, his father I believe to be practically bankrupt and mine, though he is an angel and would do anything in the world for me, is absolutely unable to run another household besides his own, which is, it seems to me, what we are asking him to do.” She and her father had not yet had a chance to discuss the situation, but she hoped he would see Henry Cadogan’s father and arrive at some sort of decision. In the meanwhile, she and Cadogan were not allowed to consider themselves engaged and the possibility of their marriage remained in the distant future. “I write sensibly about it, don’t I, but I’m not sensible at all in my heart, only it’s all too desperate to cry over—there comes a moment in very evil days when they are too evil for anything but silence.”
She arrived in London in late October and, after the long absence, embraced her waiting mother. To her father, who was in Yorskshire, she wrote that, as unimaginable as it once had seemed, this experience had brought her even closer to him. Perhaps it was because she had known real love, she explained, that she could appreciate her father’s love even more. When finally Hugh appeared in London a few days later, she poured out her hopes and fears, her doubts and desires, while he listened quietly. As she had allowed to Domnul, somewhere deep inside her she knew her father was right; for the time being, at least, Cadogan was not an acceptable husband. Yet she yearned to be his wife, and she would wait; she would wait as long as she had to.
Then, for eight months, she endured, existing from day to day, and with Florence’s encouragement she worked on Persian Pictures , a book about her experiences in the East. In August 1893 she and her mother visited Kirby Thore in Yorkshire. It was there that she was reading aloud to Florence about the cholera epidemic, from the chapter she had called “Shadow of
Similar Books
