Write to me, Monkton--exhort me, admonish me, or forsake me for ever.
I am happy yet wretched: I wander in the delirium of a fatal fever, in
which I see dreams of a brighter life, but every one of them only brings
me nearer to death. Day after day I have lingered here, until weeks have
flown--and for what? Emily is not like the women of the world--virtue,
honour, faith, are not to her the mere _convenances_ of society. "There
is no crime," said Lady A., "where there is concealment." Such can never
be the creed of Emily Mandeville. She will not disguise guilt either in
the levity of the world, or in the affectations of sentiment. She will
be wretched, and for ever. I hold the destinies of her future life, and
yet I am base enough to hesitate whether to save or destroy her. Oh, how
fearful, how selfish, how degrading, is unlawful love!
You know my theoretical benevolence for everything that lives; you have
often smiled at its vanity. I see now that you were right; for it seems
to me almost superhuman virtue not to destroy the person who is dearest
to me on earth.
I remember writing to you some weeks since that I would come to London
Little did I know of the weakness of my own mind. I told her that I
intended to depart. She turned pale--she trembled--but she did not
speak. Those signs which should have hastened my departure have taken
away the strength even to think of it.
I am here still! I go to E------ every day. Sometimes we sit in
silence; I dare not trust myself to speak. How dangerous are such
moments! _Ammutiscon lingue parlen l'alme_.
Yesterday they left us alone. We had been conversing with Lady Margaret
on indifferent subjects. There was a pause for some minutes. I looked
up; Lady Margaret had left the room. The blood rushed into my cheek--my
eyes met Emily's; I would have given worlds to have repeated with my lips
what those eyes expressed. I could not even speak--I felt choked with
contending emotions. There was not a breath stirring; I heard my very
heart beat. A thunderbolt would have been a relief. Oh God! if there
be a curse, it is to burn, swell, madden with feelings which you are
doomed to conceal! This is, indeed, to be "a cannibal of one's own
heart." [Bacon]
It was sunset. Emily was alone upon the lawn which sloped towards the
lake, and the blue still waters beneath broke, at bright intervals,
through the scattered and illuminated trees. She stood watching the sun
sink with wistful and tearful eyes. Her soul was sad within her. The
ivy which love first wreathes around his work had already faded away, and
she now only saw the desolation of the ruin it concealed. Never more for
her was that freshness of unwakened feeling which invests all things with
a perpetual daybreak of sunshine, and incense, and dew. The heart may
survive the decay or rupture of an innocent and lawful affection--
"la marque reste, mais la blessure guerit"--but the love of darkness and
guilt is branded in a character ineffaceable--eternal! The one is, like
lightning, more likely to dazzle than to destroy, and, divine even in its
danger, it makes holy what it sears; but the other is like that sure and
deadly fire which fell upon the cities of old, graving in the barrenness
of the desert it had wrought the record and perpetuation of a curse. A
low and thrilling voice stole upon Emily's ear. She turned--Falkland
stood beside her. "I felt restless and unhappy," he said, "and I came to
seek you. If (writes one of the fathers) a guilty and wretched man could
behold, though only for a few minutes, the countenance of an angel, the
calm and glory which it wears would so sink into his heart, that he would
pass at once over the gulf of gone years into his first unsullied state
of purity and hope; perhaps I thought of that sentence when I came to
you." "I know not," said Emily, with a deep blush at this address, which
formed her only answer to the compliment it conveyed; "I know not why it
is, but to me there is always something melancholy in this hour--
something mournful in seeing the beautiful day die with all its pomp and
music, its sunshine, and songs of birds."
"And yet," replied Falkland, "if I remember the time when my feelings
were more in unison with yours (for at present external objects have lost
for me much of their influence and attraction), the melancholy you
perceive has in it a vague and ineffable sweetness not to be exchanged
for more exhilarated spirits. The melancholy which arises from no cause
within ourselves is like music--it enchants us in proportion to its
effect upon our feelings. Perhaps its chief charm (though this it
requires the contamination of after years before we can fathom and
define) is in the purity of the sources it springs from. Our feelings
can be but little sullied and worn while they can yet respond to the
passionless and primal sympathies of Nature; and the sadness you speak
of is so void of bitterness, so allied to the best and most delicious
sensations we enjoy, that I should imagine the very happiness of Heaven
partook rather of melancholy than mirth."
There was a pause of some moments. It was rarely that Falkland alluded
even so slightly to the futurity of another world; and when he did, it
was never in a careless and commonplace manner, but in a tone which sank
deep into Emily's heart. "Look," she said, at length, "at that beautiful
star! the first and brightest! I have often thought it was like the
promise of life beyond the tomb--a pledge to us that, even in the depths
of midnight, the earth shall have a light, unquenched and unquenchable,
from Heaven!"
Emily turned to Falkland as she said this, and her countenance sparkled
with the enthusiasm she felt. But his face was deadly pale. There went
over it, like a cloud, an expression of changeful and unutterable
thought; and then, passing suddenly away, it left his features calm and
bright in all their noble and intellectual beauty. Her soul yearned to
him, as she looked, with the tenderness of a sister.
They walked slowly towards the house. "I have frequently," said Emily,
with some hesitation, "been surprised at the little enthusiasm you appear
to possess even upon subjects where your conviction must be strong." "_I
have thought enthusiasm away!_" replied Falkland; "it was the loss of
hope which brought me reflection, and in reflection I forgot to feel.
Would that I had not found it so easy to recall what I thought I had lost
for ever!" Falkland's cheek changed as he said this, and Emily sighed
faintly, for she felt his meaning. In him that allusion to his love had
aroused a whole train of dangerous recollections; for Passion is the
avalanche of the human heart--a single breath can dissolve it from its
repose.
They remained silent; for Falkland would not trust himself to speak,
till, when they reached the house, he faltered out his excuses for not
entering, and departed. He turned towards his solitary home. The
grounds at E------ had been laid out in a classical and costly manner
which contrasted forcibly with the wild and simple nature of the
surrounding scenery. Even the short distance between Mr. Mandeville's
house and L------ wrought as distinct a change in the character of the
country as any length of space could have effected. Falkland's ancient
and ruinous abode, with its shattered arches and moss-grown parapets, was
situated on a gentle declivity, and surrounded by dark elm and larch
trees. It still retained some traces both of its former consequence, and
of the perils to which that consequence had exposed it. A broad ditch,
overgrown with weeds, indicated the remains of what once had been a moat;
and huge rough stones, scattered around it, spoke of the outworks the
fortification had anciently possessed, and the stout resistance they had
made in "the Parliament Wars" to the sturdy followers of Ireton and
Fairfax. The moon, that flatterer of decay, shed its rich and softening
beauty over a spot which else had, indeed, been desolate and cheerless,
and kissed into light the long and unwaving herbage which rose at
intervals from the ruins, like the false parasites of fallen greatness.
But for Falkland the scene had no interest or charm, and he turned with a
careless and unheeding eye to his customary apartment. It was the only
one in the house furnished with luxury, or even comfort. Large
bookcases, inlaid with curious carvings in ivory; busts of the few public
characters the world had ever produced worthy, in Falkland's estimation,
of the homage of posterity; elaborately-wrought hangings from Flemish
looms; and French fauteuils and sofas of rich damask, and massy gilding
(relics of the magnificent days of Louis Quatorze), bespoke a costliness
of design suited rather to Falkland's wealth than to the ordinary
simplicity of his tastes.
A large writing-table was overspread with books in various languages, and
upon the most opposite subjects. Letters and papers were scattered
amongst them; Falkland turned carelessly over the latter. One of the
epistolary communications was from Lord ------, the --. He smiled
bitterly, as he read the exaggerated compliments it contained, and saw to
the bottom of the shallow artifice they were meant to conceal. He tossed
the letter from him, and opened the scattered volumes, one after another,
with that languid and sated feeling common to all men who have read
deeply enough to feel how much they have learned, and how little they
know. "We pass our lives," thought he, "in sowing what we are never to
reap! We endeavour to erect a tower, which shall reach the heavens, in
order to escape one curse, and lo! we are smitten by another! We would
soar from a common evil, and from that moment we are divided by a
separate language from our race! Learning, science, philosophy, the
world of men and of imagination, I ransacked--and for what? I centred my
happiness in wisdom. I looked upon the aims of others with a scornful
and loathing eye. I held commune with those who have gone before me; I
dwelt among the monuments of their minds, and made their records familiar
to me as friends: I penetrated the womb of nature, and went with the
secret elements to their home: I arraigned the stars before me, and
learned the method and the mystery of their courses: I asked the tempest
its bourn, and questioned the winds of their path. This was not
sufficient to satisfy my thirst for knowledge, and I searched in this
lower world of new sources to content it. Unseen and unsuspected, I saw
and agitated the springs of the automaton that we call 'the Mind.' I
found a clue for the labyrinth of human motives, and I surveyed the
hearts of those around me as through a glass. Vanity of vanities! What
have I acquired? I have separated myself from my kind, but not from
those worst enemies, my passions! I have made a solitude of my soul, but
I have not mocked it with the appellation of Peace.
"Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."--TACITUS.
"They make a solitude, and call it peace."--BYRON.
"In flying the herd, I have not escaped from myself; like the wounded
deer, the barb was within me, and that I could not fly!" With these
thoughts he turned from his reverie, and once more endeavoured to charm
his own reflections by those which ought to speak to us of quiet, for
they are graven on the pages of the dead; but his attempts were as idle
as before. His thoughts were still wandering and confused, and could
neither be quieted nor collected: he read, but he scarcely distinguished
one page from another: he wrote--the ideas refused to flow at his call;
and the only effort at connecting his feelings which even partially
succeeded, was in the verses which I am about to place before the reader.
It is a common property of poetry, however imperfectly the gift be
possessed, to speak to the hearts of others in proportion as the
sentiments it would express are felt in our own; and I subjoin the lines
which bear the date of that evening, in the hope that, more than many
pages, they will show the morbid yet original character of the writer,
and the particular sources of feeling from which they took the bitterness
that pervades them.