Anne Bronte: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

45. CHAPTER XLV (continued)

'We can hear of each other through my brother.'

'Your brother!' A pang of remorse and shame shot through me. She had not heard of the injury he had sustained at my hands; and I had not the courage to tell her. 'Your brother will not help us,' I said: 'he would have all communion between us to be entirely at an end.'

'And he would be right, I suppose. As a friend of both, he would wish us both well; and every friend would tell us it was our interest, as well as our duty, to forget each other, though we might not see it ourselves. But don't be afraid, Gilbert,' she added, smiling sadly at my manifest discomposure; 'there is little chance of my forgetting you. But I did not mean that Frederick should be the means of transmitting messages between us - only that each might know, through him, of the other's welfare; - and more than this ought not to be: for you are young, Gilbert, and you ought to marry - and will some time, though you may think it impossible now: and though I hardly can say I wish you to forget me, I know it is right that you should, both for your own happiness, and that of your future wife; - and therefore I must and will wish it,' she added resolutely.

'And you are young too, Helen,' I boldly replied; 'and when that profligate scoundrel has run through his career, you will give your hand to me - I'll wait till then.'

But she would not leave me this support. Independently of the moral evil of basing our hopes upon the death of another, who, if unfit for this world, was at least no less so for the next, and whose amelioration would thus become our bane and his greatest transgression our greatest benefit, - she maintained it to be madness: many men of Mr. Huntingdon's habits had lived to a ripe though miserable old age. 'And if I,' said she, 'am young in years, I am old in sorrow; but even if trouble should fail to kill me before vice destroys him, think, if he reached but fifty years or so, would you wait twenty or fifteen - in vague uncertainty and suspense - through all the prime of youth and manhood - and marry at last a woman faded and worn as I shall be - without ever having seen me from this day to that? - You would not,' she continued, interrupting my earnest protestations of unfailing constancy, - 'or if you would, you should not. Trust me, Gilbert; in this matter I know better than you. You think me cold and stony-hearted, and you may, but - '