I was made aware of the flight of time by seeing the meridian sun
striking on the summit of the Abbey walls. I came down the hill through
the woods bounding from rock to rock, and from tree to tree. My heart
beat as though it would burst. As I approached the little inn, I saw
the stranger in a sloping meadow behind the house. She was seated at
the foot of a sunny wall, against which the inhabitants of the place
had piled a few stones. Her white dress shone out on the verdant
meadow, and the shade of a haystack screened her face from the sun. She
was reading in a little book that lay open on her lap, and every now
and then interrupted her reading to play with the children from the
mountain, who came to offer her flowers, or chestnuts. On seeing me,
she attempted to rise as if to meet me half-way, and her gesture was
quite sufficient to encourage me to approach. She received me with a
blushing look and tremulous lip, which I perceived, and which increased
my own bashfulness. The strangeness of our situation was so
embarrassing, that we remained some time without finding a word to say
to each other. At last, with a timid and scarcely intelligible gesture,
she motioned to me to sit down on the hay, not far from her; it seemed
to me that she has expected me, and had kept a place for me. I sat down
respectfully at some distance. Our silence remained unbroken, and it
was evident that we were both ineffectually seeking to exchange some of
those commonplace phrases which may be called the base coin of
conversation, and serve to conceal thoughts instead of revealing them.
Fearing to say too much or too little, we gave no utterance to what was
in our hearts; we remained mute, and our silence increased our
embarrassment. At length, our downcast eyes were raised at the same
moment and met; I saw such depth of sensibility in hers, and she read
in mine so much suppressed rapture, truth, and deep feeling, that we
could no longer take them off each other's face, and tears rising to
our eyes, at the same instant, from both our hearts we each
instinctively put up our hands as if to veil our thoughts.
I know not how long we remained thus. At last, in a trembling voice,
and with a somewhat constrained and impatient tone, she said: "You have
wept over me; I have called you brother, you have adopted me for your
sister, and yet we dare not look at each other? A tear," she added, "a
disinterested tear from an unknown heart is more than my life is
worth,--more than it has ever yet called forth!" Then with a slightly
reproachful accent she said: "Am I then become once more a stranger to
you, since I no longer require your care? Oh, as to me," she proceeded
in a resolute tone of confidence, "I know nothing of you but your name
and countenance, but I know your heart! A century could not teach me
more!"
"For my part," said I, faltering, "I would wish to learn nothing of all
that makes you a being like unto ourselves, and bound by the same links
as us to this wretched world. I require but to know this,--that you
have traversed it, and that you have allowed me to contemplate you from
afar, and to remember you always."
"Oh, do not deceive yourself thus!" she replied; "do not see in me a
deified delusion of your own heart; I should have to suffer too much
when the chimera vanished. View me as I am; as a poor woman, who is
dying in despondency and solitude, and who will take with her from
earth no feeling more divine than that of pity. You will understand
this, when I tell you who I am," added she; "but first answer me on one
point, which has disquieted me since the day I first saw you in the
garden. Why, young and gentle as you seem to be, are you so lonely and
so sad? Why do you fly from the company and conversation of our host,
to wander alone on the lake, and in the most secluded parts of the
mountains, or to retire into your room? Your light burns far into the
night, I am told. Have you some secret in your heart that you confine
to solitude?" She waited my answer with visible anxiety, and kept her
eyes closed, as if to conceal the impression it might make upon her.
"My secret," said I, "is to have none; to feel the weight of a heart
that no enthusiasm upheld until this hour; of a heart which I have
endeavored to engage in unsatisfactory attachments, and which I have
ever been obliged to resume with such bitterness and loathing, as
forever to discourage me, young and feeling as I am, from loving." I
then told her, without concealment, as I would have spoken before
Heaven, of all that could interest her in my life. I related my birth,
my humble and poor condition; I spoke of my father, a soldier of former
days; my mother, a woman of exquisite sensibility, whose youth had been
passed in all the refinement and elegance of letters; my young sisters,
their pious and angelic simplicity; I mentioned my education among the
children of my native mountains; my ready enthusiasm for study; my
involuntary inaction; my travels; my first thrill of the heart beside
the youthful daughter of the Neapolitan fisherman; the unprofitable
acquaintances I formed in Paris,--the levity, misconduct, and
self-abasement which had been the result; my desire for a soldier's
life, which peace had counteracted at the very time I entered the army;
my leaving my regiment; my wanderings without an object; my hopeless
return to the paternal roof; my wasting melancholy; my wish to die; my
weariness of everything; and lastly, I spoke of my physical languor, A
proceeding from heaviness of the soul, and of that premature
decrepitude of the heart, and distaste of life, which was concealed
beneath the appearance and features of a man of four-and-twenty. I
dwelt with inward satisfaction on the disappointments, weariness, and
bitterness of my life, for I no longer felt them! A single look had
regenerated me. I spoke of myself as of one that was dead; a new man
was born within me. When I had ended, I raised my eyes to her, as
towards my judge. She was trembling and pale with emotion. "Heavens,"
she exclaimed, "how you alarmed me!" "And why?" said I. "Because," she
rejoined, "if you had not been unhappy and lonely here below, there
would have been one link the less between us. You would have felt no
desire to pity another; and I should have quitted life without having
seen a shadow of myself, save in the heartless mirror where my own cold
image is reflected."
"The history of your life," she continued, "is the history of mine,
with the change of a few particulars. Only yours commences, and mine--"
I would not let her conclude. "No, no!" said I hoarsely pressing my
lips to her feet, which I embraced convulsively as if to hold her down
to earth; "no, no! you will not, must not die; or, if you do, I feel
two lives will end at once!"
I was alarmed at my own gesture and at the exclamation which had
involuntarily escaped me; and I durst not raise my face off the ground,
from which she had withdrawn her feet. "Rise," she said, in a grave
voice, but without anger; "do not worship dust--dust as lowly as that
in which you are soiling your fine hair, and which will be scattered as
light and as impalpable by the first autumnal wind. Do not deceive
yourself as to the poor creature you see before you. I am but the
shadow of youth, of beauty, and of love,--of the love you will one day
feel and inspire, when this shadow shall long have passed away. Keep
your heart for those who are to live, and only give to the dying what
the dying ask, a gentle hand to support their last steps, and tears to
mourn their loss."
The grave and serious tone-with which she said these words struck to my
heart. Yet as I looked on her, and saw the glowing tints of the setting
sun illumining her face, which shone with hourly increasing youth and
serenity of expression, as though a new sun had risen in her heart, I
could not believe in death concealed under these glorious signs of
life. Besides, what cared I? If that heavenly vision was death, well,
it was death I loved. It might be that the vast and perfect love for
which I thirsted was only to be found in death. It might be that God
had only showed me its nearly extinguished light on earth, to urge me
to follow the trace of its ray into the grave, and from thence to
heaven.
"Do not stay dreaming thus," she said, "but listen to me!" This was not
said with the accent of one who loves, and affects a sportive
seriousness, but with the tone of a still youthful mother, or an elder
sister counselling a brother or a son. "I do not wish you to attach
yourself to a false appearance, a delusion, a dream; I wish you to know
her to whom you so rashly pledge a heart which she could only retain by
deceiving you. Falsehood has always been so odious and so impossible to
me, that I could not desire the supreme felicity of heaven, if I must
enter heaven by deceit. Stolen happiness would not be happiness for me,
it would be remorse."
As she spoke, there was so much candor on her lips, so much sincerity
in her tone, and limpid purity in her eyes, that I fancied as I looked
at her that under her pure and lovely form I saw immortal Truth, in the
broad light of day, pouring her voice into the ear, her look into the
eye, and her soul into the heart. I stretched myself on the hay at her
feet and, with my elbow leaning on the ground, I rested my head upon my
hand; my eyes were riveted upon her lips, of which I strove not to lose
a single motion, a single modulation, or a single sigh.