It was an ugly story of
low passion, delusion, and waking from delusion, which needs not to be
dragged from the privacy of Godfrey's bitter memory. He had long known
that the delusion was partly due to a trap laid for him by Dunstan,
who saw in his brother's degrading marriage the means of gratifying at
once his jealous hate and his cupidity. And if Godfrey could have felt
himself simply a victim, the iron bit that destiny had put into his
mouth would have chafed him less intolerably. If the curses he
muttered half aloud when he was alone had had no other object than
Dunstan's diabolical cunning, he might have shrunk less from the
consequences of avowal. But he had something else to curse- his own
vicious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as
almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long
passed away. For four years he had thought of Nancy Lammeter, and
wooed her with tacit patient worship, as the woman who made him
think of the future with joy: she would be his wife, and would make
home lovely to him, as his father's home had never been; and it
would be easy, when she was always near, to shake off those foolish
habits that were no pleasures, but only a feverish way of annulling
vacancy. Godfrey's was an essentially domestic nature, bred up in a
home where the hearth had no smiles, and where the daily habits were
not chastised by the presence of household order; his easy disposition
made him fall in unresistingly with the family courses, but the need
of some tender permanent affection, the longing for some influence
that would make the good he preferred easy to pursue, caused the
neatness, purity, and liberal orderliness of the Lammeter household,
sunned by the smile of Nancy, to seem like those fresh bright hours of
the morning, when temptations go to sleep, and leave the ear open to
the voice of the good angel, inviting to industry, sobriety, and
peace.
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