I had now arrived at that age when an ambitious man, satisfied with
his progress in the world without, begins to feel in the cravings of
unsatisfied affection the void of a solitary hearth. I resolved to
marry, and looked out for a wife. I had never hitherto admitted into my
life the passion of love. In fact, I had regarded that passion, even
in my earlier youth, with a certain superb contempt,--as a malady
engendered by an effeminate idleness, and fostered by a sickly
imagination.
I wished to find in a wife a rational companion, an affectionate and
trustworthy friend. No views of matrimony could be less romantic, more
soberly sensible, than those which I conceived. Nor were my requirements
mercenary or presumptuous. I cared not for fortune; I asked nothing
from connections. My ambition was exclusively professional; it could be
served by no titled kindred, accelerated by no wealthy dower. I was
no slave to beauty. I did not seek in a wife the accomplishments of a
finishing-school teacher.
Having decided that the time had come to select my helpmate, I imagined
that I should find no difficulty in a choice that my reason would
approve. But day upon day, week upon week, passed away, and though among
the families I visited there were many young ladies who possessed more
than the qualifications with which I conceived that I should be amply
contented, and by whom I might flatter myself that my proposals would
not be disdained, I saw not one to whose lifelong companionship I should
not infinitely have preferred the solitude I found so irksome.
One evening, in returning home from visiting a poor female patient whom
I attended gratuitously, and whose case demanded more thought than that
of any other in my list,--for though it had been considered hopeless in
the hospital, and she had come home to die, I felt certain that I could
save her, and she seemed recovering under my care,--one evening--it was
the fifteenth of May--I found myself just before the gates of the house
that had been inhabited by Dr. Lloyd. Since his death the house had been
unoccupied; the rent asked for it by the proprietor was considered high;
and from the sacred Hill on which it was situated, shyness or pride
banished the wealthier traders. The garden gates stood wide open, as
they had stood on the winter night on which I had passed through them
to the chamber of death. The remembrance of that deathbed came vividly
before me, and the dying man’s fantastic threat rang again in my
startled ears. An irresistible impulse, which I could not then account
for, and which I cannot account for now,--an impulse the reverse of that
which usually makes us turn away with quickened step from a spot that
recalls associations of pain,--urged me on through the open gates up the
neglected grass-grown road, urged me to look, under the weltering sun of
the joyous spring, at that house which I had never seen but in the gloom
of a winter night, under the melancholy moon. As the building came in
sight, with dark-red bricks, partially overgrown with ivy, I perceived
that it was no longer unoccupied. I saw forms passing athwart the open
windows; a van laden with articles of furniture stood before the door;
a servant in livery was beside it giving directions to the men who were
unloading. Evidently some family was just entering into possession.
I felt somewhat ashamed of my trespass, and turned round quickly to
retrace my steps. I had retreated but a few yards, when I saw before me,
at the entrance gates, Mr. Vigors, walking beside a lady apparently of
middle age; while, just at hand, a path cut through the shrubs gave view
of a small wicketgate at the end of the grounds. I felt unwilling not
only to meet the lady, whom I guessed to be the new occupier, and to
whom I should have to make a somewhat awkward apology for intrusion, but
still more to encounter the scornful look of Mr. Vigors in what appeared
to my pride a false or undignified position. Involuntarily, therefore, I
turned down the path which would favour my escape unobserved. When about
half way between the house and the wicket-gate, the shrubs that had
clothed the path on either side suddenly opened to the left, bringing
into view a circle of sward, surrounded by irregular fragments of old
brickwork partially covered with ferns, creepers, or rockplants, weeds,
or wild flowers; and, in the centre of the circle, a fountain, or rather
well, over which was built a Gothic monastic dome, or canopy, resting
on small Norman columns, time-worn, dilapidated. A large willow overhung
this unmistakable relic of the ancient abbey. There was an air of
antiquity, romance, legend about this spot, so abruptly disclosed amidst
the delicate green of the young shrubberies. But it was not the ruined
wall nor the Gothic well that chained my footstep and charmed my eye.
It was a solitary human form, seated amidst the mournful ruins.
The form was so slight, the face so young, that at the first glance I
murmured to myself, “What a lovely child!” But as my eye lingered
it recognized in the upturned thoughtful brow, in the sweet, serious
aspect, in the rounded outlines of that slender shape, the inexpressible
dignity of virgin woman.
A book was on her lap, at her feet a little basket, half-filled with
violets and blossoms culled from the rock-plants that nestled amidst the
ruins. Behind her, the willow, like an emerald waterfall, showered down
its arching abundant green, bough after bough, from the tree-top to the
sward, descending in wavy verdure, bright towards the summit, in the
smile of the setting sun, and darkening into shadow as it neared the
earth.
She did not notice, she did not see me; her eyes were fixed upon the
horizon, where it sloped farthest into space, above the treetops and
the ruins,--fixed so intently that mechanically I turned my own gaze to
follow the flight of hers. It was as if she watched for some expected,
familiar sign to grow out from the depths of heaven; perhaps to greet,
before other eyes beheld it, the ray of the earliest star.
The birds dropped from the boughs on the turf around her so fearlessly
that one alighted amidst the flowers in the little basket at her feet.
There is a famous German poem, which I had read in my youth, called the
Maiden from Abroad, variously supposed to be an allegory of Spring, or
of Poetry, according to the choice of commentators: it seemed to me
as if the poem had been made for her. Verily, indeed, in her, poet
or painter might have seen an image equally true to either of those
adornments of the earth; both outwardly a delight to sense, yet both
wakening up thoughts within us, not sad, but akin to sadness.
I heard now a step behind me, and a voice which I recognized to be that
of Mr. Vigors. I broke from the charm by which I had been so lingeringly
spell-bound, hurried on confusedly, gained the wicket-gate, from which a
short flight of stairs descended into the common thoroughfare. And there
the every-day life lay again before me. On the opposite side, houses,
shops, church-spires; a few steps more, and the bustling streets! How
immeasurably far from, yet how familiarly near to, the world in which we
move and have being is that fairy-land of romance which opens out from
the hard earth before us, when Love steals at first to our side, fading
back into the hard earth again as Love smiles or sighs its farewell!