I am flying over the track, of what was to me a torrent--outlining its
course by alighting upon, here and there, a point where it turned or
lingered.
The reader has been to Vallambrosa--if not once as a pilgrim, at least
often with writers of travels in Italy. The usages of the convent are
familiar to all memories--their lodging of the gentlemen of a party in
cells of their own monastic privilege, and giving to the ladies less
sacred hospitalities, in a secular building of meaner and
unconsecrated architecture. (So, oh, mortifying brotherhood, you shut
off your only chance of entertaining angels unaware!)
Not permitted to eat with the ladies while on the holy mountain, Mr.
Wangrave and his secretary, and Palgray and I, fed at the table with
the aristocratic monks--(for they are the aristocrats of European
holiness, these monks of Vallambrosa.) It was somewhat a relief to me,
to be separated with my rival from the party in the feminine
refectory, even for the short space of a meal-time; for the all-day
suffering of presence with an unconscious trampler on my
heart-strings; and in circumstances where all the triumphs were his
own, were more than my intangible hold upon hope could well enable me
to bear. I was happiest, therefore, when I was out of the presence of
her to be near whom was all for which my life was worth having; and
when we sat down at the long and bare table, with the thoughtful and
ashen-cowled company, sad as I was, it was an opiate sadness--a
suspension from self-mastery, under torture which others took to be
pleasure.
The temperature of the mountain-air was just such as to invite us to
never enter doors except to eat and sleep; and breakfasting at
convent-hours, we passed the long day in rambling up the ravines and
through the sombre forests, drawing, botanizing, and conversing in
group around some spot of exquisite natural beauty; and all of the
party, myself excepted, supposing it to be the un-dissenting, common
desire to contrive opportunity for the love-making of Palgray and
Stephania. And, bitter though it was, in each particular instance, to
accept a hint from one and another, and stroll off, leaving the
confessed lovers alone by some musical water-fall, or in the secluded
and twilight dimness of some curve in an overhanging ravine--places
where only to breathe is to love--I still felt an instinctive
prompting to rather anticipate than wait for these reminders, she
alone knowing what it cost me to be without her in that delicious
wilderness; and Palgray, as well as I could judge, having a mind out
of harmony with both the wilderness and her.
He loved her--loved her as well as most women need to be, or know that
they can be loved. But he was too happy, too prosperous, too
universally beloved, to love well. He was a man, with all his beauty,
more likely to be fascinating to his own sex than to hers, for the
women who love best, do not love in the character they live in; and
his out-of-doors heart, whose joyfulness was so contagious, and whose
bold impulses were so manly and open, contented itself with gay
homage, and left unplummeted the sweetest as well as deepest wells of
the thoughtful tenderness of woman.
To most observers, Stephania Wangrave would have seemed only born to
be gay--the mere habit of being happy having made its life-long
imprint upon her expression of countenance, and all of her nature,
that would be legible to a superficial reader, being brought out by
the warm translucence of her smiles. But while I had seen this, in the
first hour of my study of her, I was too advanced in my knowledge (of
such works of nature as encroach on the models of Heaven) not to know
this to be a light veil over a picture of melancholy meaning. Sadness
was the tone of her mind's inner coloring. Tears were the
subterranean river upon which her soul's bark floated with the most
loved freight of her thought's accumulation--the sunny waters of joy,
where alone she was thought to voyage, being the tide on which her
heart embarked no venture, and which seemed to her triflingly garish
and even profaning to the hallowed delicacy of the inner nature.
It was so strange to me that Palgray did not see this through every
lineament of her marvelous beauty. There was a glow under her skin,
but no color--an effect of paleness--fair as the lotus-leaf, but
warmer and brighter, and which came through the alabaster fineness of
the grain, like something the eye cannot define, but which we know by
some spirit-perception to be the effluence of purer existence, the
breathing through, as it were, of the luminous tenanting of an angel.
To this glowing paleness, with golden hair, I never had seen united
any but a disposition of predominant melancholy; and it seemed to me
dull indeed otherwise to read it. But there were other betrayals of
the same inner nature of Stephania. Her lips, cut with the fine
tracery of the penciling upon a tulip-cup, were of a slender and
delicate fullness, expressive of a mind which took--(of the
senses)--only so much life as would hold down the spirit during its
probation; and when this spiritual mouth was at rest, no painter has
ever drawn lips on which lay more of the unutterable pensiveness of
beauty which we dream to have been Mary's, in the childhood of Jesus.
A tear in the heart was the instinctive answer to Stephania's every
look when she did not smile; and her large, soft, slowly-lifting eyes,
were to any elevated perception, it seemed to me, most eloquent of
tenderness as tearful as it was unfathomable and angelic.
I shall have failed, however, in portraying truly the being of whom I
am thus privileged to hold the likeness in my memory, if the reader
fancies her to have nurtured her pensive disposition at the expense of
a just value for real life, or a full development of womanly feelings.
It was a peculiarity of her beauty, to my eye, that, with all her
earnest leaning toward a thoughtful existence, there did not seem to
be one vein beneath her pearly skin, not one wavy line in her
faultless person, that did not lend its proportionate consciousness to
her breathing sense of life. Her bust was of the slightest fullness
which the sculptor would choose for the embodying of his ideal of the
best blending of modesty with complete beauty; and her throat and
arms--oh, with what an inexpressible pathos of loveliness, so to
speak, was moulded, under an infantine dewiness of surface, their
delicate undulations. No one could be in her presence without
acknowledging the perfection of her form as a woman, and rendering the
passionate yet subdued homage which the purest beauty fulfills its
human errand by inspiring; but, while Palgray made the halo which
surrounded her outward beauty the whole orbit of his appreciation, and
made of it, too, the measure of the circle of topics he chose to talk
upon, there was still another and far wider ring of light about her,
which he lived in too dazzling a gayety of his own to see--a halo of
a mind more beautiful than the body which shut it in; and in this
intellectual orbit of guidance to interchange of mind, with manifold
deeper and higher reach than Palgray's, upon whatever topic chanced to
occur, revolved I, around her who was the loveliest and most gifted of
all the human beings I had been privileged to meet.