Yes, we may reveal to the faithful lover’s tear-wet eye the distant
object of his adoration. But alas! the moments of expectation, the
farewells, the thoughts, the sweet and bitter memories, the
enchanting dreams of two beings that love! Who can restore
these?--MATURIN: _Bertram_.
Meantime the venturesome Ordener, after a score or more of narrow
escapes from a fall during his perilous ascent, reached the top of the
thick, round tower wall. At his unexpected visit, dusky old owls
abruptly aroused from their nests, flew up, staring at him as they
sailed away, and loose stones, displaced by his tread, rolled into the
abyss, rebounding from projections in the masonry with a remote, hollow
roar.
At any other time, Ordener’s gaze would have roamed far and wide, and
his mind would have dwelt upon the depth of the gulf yawning beneath
him, which seemed even greater from the thick darkness of the night.
His eye, taking in all the great masses of shadow on the horizon, their
sombre outlines but half revealed by a nebulous moon, would have striven
to distinguish between mist and rocks, between mountains and clouds; his
imagination would have lent life to all the gigantic forms, the
fantastic shapes with which moonlight clothes hills and vapors. He would
have listened to the indistinct murmur of lake and woods blended with
the shrill sough of the wind through the crevices in the stones and
through the dried grass at his feet, and his fancy would have lent words
to all those low voices through which material Nature speaks while man
sleeps, in the silence of the night. But although the scene
unconsciously acted upon his whole being, other thoughts filled his
mind. Hardly had his foot touched the top of the wall, when his eye
turned to the southern sky, and he thrilled with unspeakable rapture as
he saw beyond and between two small mountains a point of light gleaming
upon the horizon like a red star. It was Munkholm beacon.
None but those who have tasted the truest joys which life can give can
understand the young man’s happiness. His soul was filled with delight;
his heart beat violently. Motionless, his eye fixed, he gazed at the
star of hope and consolation. It seemed as if that beam of light
traversing the darkness, and coming from the spot which held all that
made life worth living, bore with it something of his Ethel. Ah! do not
doubt it; one soul may sometimes hold mysterious communion with another,
though widely parted by time and space. In vain the world of reality
rears its barriers between two beings who love; inhabitants of an ideal
world, they are present to each other in absence, they are united in
death. What can mere bodily separation or physical distance avail if two
hearts be indissolubly bound by a single thought and a common desire?
True love may suffer, but it cannot die.
Who has not repeatedly lingered on a rainy night beneath some dimly
lighted window? Who has not passed and repassed a certain door,
rapturously wandered up and down before a certain house? Who has not
abruptly retraced his steps, to follow, at evening, along some deserted,
winding street, a floating skirt or a white veil suddenly recognized in
the twilight? He who has never experienced these feelings may safely say
that he has never loved.
As he gazed at the distant lighthouse, Ordener pondered. A sad and
ironical contentment took the place of his first transports; a thousand
varying thoughts and ideas crowded upon his agitated spirit. “Yes,” said
he, “a man must labor long and painfully to win at last a ray of
happiness in the vast night of existence. So she is there! She sleeps,
she dreams, perhaps she thinks of me! But who will tell her that her
Ordener even now hangs above an abyss, sad and lonely, surrounded by
darkness,--her Ordener, who retains nothing of her but a single ringlet
pressed to his heart and a faint light upon the horizon!” Then, looking
at the ruddy glow of the huge fire burning in the tower beneath, and
escaping through the crevices in the wall, he murmured: “Perhaps from
one of her prison windows she casts an indifferent glance at the far-off
flame upon this hearth.”
All at once, a loud shriek and a prolonged burst of laughter rose from
the brink of the precipice below; he turned abruptly, and saw that the
interior of the tower was vacant. Alarmed for the safety of the old man,
he hurriedly descended; but he had taken but a few steps when he heard a
dull splash, as if a heavy body had been thrown into the deep waters of
the lake.