In less than a week Lilian was convalescent; in less than a fortnight she
regained her usual health,--nay, Mrs. Ashleigh declared that she had never
known her daughter appear so cheerful and look so well. I had established
a familiar intimacy at Abbots' House; most of my evenings were spent
there. As horse exercise formed an important part of my advice, Mrs.
Ashleigh had purchased a pretty and quiet horse for her daughter; and,
except the weather was very unfavourable, Lilian now rode daily with
Colonel Poyntz, who was a notable equestrian, and often accompanied by
Miss Jane Poyntz, and other young ladies of the Hill. I was generally
relieved from my duties in time to join her as she returned homewards.
Thus we made innocent appointments, openly, frankly, in her mother's
presence, she telling me beforehand in what direction excursions had been
planned with Colonel Poyntz, and I promising to fall in with the party--if
my avocations would permit. At my suggestion, Mrs. Ashleigh now opened
her house almost every evening to some of the neighbouring families;
Lilian was thus habituated to the intercourse of young persons of her own
age. Music and dancing and childlike games made the old house gay. And
the Hill gratefully acknowledged to Mrs. Poyntz, "that the Ashleighs were
indeed a great acquisition."
But my happiness was not uncheckered. In thus unselfishly surrounding
Lilian with others, I felt the anguish of that jealousy which is
inseparable from those earlier stages of love, when the lover as yet has
won no right to that self-confidence which can only spring from the
assurance that he is loved.
In these social reunions I remained aloof from Lilian. I saw her courted
by the gay young admirers whom her beauty and her fortune drew around
her,--her soft face brightening in the exercise of the dance, which the
gravity of my profession rather than my years forbade to join; and her
laugh, so musically subdued, ravishing my ear and fretting my heart as if
the laugh were a mockery on my sombre self and my presumptuous dreams.
But no, suddenly, shyly, her eyes would steal away from those about her,
steal to the corner in which I sat, as if they missed me, and, meeting my
own gaze, their light softened before they turned away; and the colour on
her cheek would deepen, and to her lip there came a smile different from
the smile that it shed on others. And then--and then--all jealousy, all
sadness vanished, and I felt the glory which blends with the growing
belief that we are loved.
In that diviner epoch of man's mysterious passion, when ideas of
perfection and purity, vague and fugitive before, start forth and
concentre themselves round one virgin shape,--that rises out from the sea
of creation, welcomed by the Hours and adorned by the Graces,--how the
thought that this archetype of sweetness and beauty singles himself from
the millions, singles himself for her choice, ennobles and lifts up his
being! Though after-experience may rebuke the mortal's illusion, that
mistook for a daughter of Heaven a creature of clay like himself, yet for
a while the illusion has grandeur. Though it comes from the senses which
shall later oppress and profane it, the senses at first shrink into shade,
awed and hushed by the presence that charms them. All that is brightest
and best in the man has soared up like long-dormant instincts of Heaven,
to greet and to hallow what to him seems life's fairest dream of the
heavenly! Take the wings from the image of Love, and the god disappears
from the form!
Thus, if at moments jealous doubt made my torture, so the moment's relief
from it sufficed for my rapture. But I had a cause for disquiet less
acute but less varying than jealousy.
Despite Lilian's recovery from the special illness which had more
immediately absorbed my care, I remained perplexed as to its cause and
true nature. To her mother I gave it the convenient epithet of "nervous;"
but the epithet did not explain to myself all the symptoms I classified by
it. There was still, at times, when no cause was apparent or
conjecturable, a sudden change in the expression of her countenance, in
the beat of her pulse; the eye would become fixed, the bloom would vanish,
the pulse would sink feebler and feebler till it could be scarcely felt;
yet there was no indication of heart disease, of which such sudden
lowering of life is in itself sometimes a warning indication. The change
would pass away after a few minutes, during which she seemed unconscious,
or, at least, never spoke--never appeared to heed what was said to her.
But in the expression of her countenance there was no character of
suffering or distress; on the contrary, a wondrous serenity, that made her
beauty more beauteous, her very youthfulness younger; and when this
spurious or partial kind of syncope passed, she recovered at once without
effort, without acknowledging that she had felt faint or unwell, but
rather with a sense of recruited vitality, as the weary obtain from a
sleep. For the rest her spirits were more generally light and joyous than
I should have premised from her mother's previous description. She would
enter mirthfully into the mirth of young companions round her: she had
evidently quick perception of the sunny sides of life; an infantine
gratitude for kindness; an infantine joy in the trifles that amuse only
those who delight in tastes pure and simple. But when talk rose into
graver and more contemplative topics, her attention became earnest and
absorbed; and sometimes a rich eloquence, such as I have never before nor
since heard from lips so young, would startle me first into a wondering
silence, and soon into a disapproving alarm: for the thoughts she then
uttered seemed to me too fantastic, too visionary, too much akin to the
vagaries of a wild though beautiful imagination. And then I would seek to
check, to sober, to distract fancies with which my reason had no sympathy,
and the indulgence of which I regarded as injurious to the normal
functions of the brain.
When thus, sometimes with a chilling sentence, sometimes with a
half-sarcastic laugh, I would repress outpourings frank and musical as the
songs of a forest-bird, she would look at me with a kind of plaintive
sorrow,--often sigh and shiver as she turned away. Only in those modes
did she show displeasure; otherwise ever sweet and docile, and ever, if,
seeing that I had pained her, I asked forgiveness, humbling herself rather
to ask mine, and brightening our reconciliation with her angel smile. As
yet I had not dared to speak of love; as yet I gazed on her as the captive
gazes on the flowers and the stars through the gratings of his cell,
murmuring to himself, "When shall the doors unclose?"