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 bad 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!