It may seem perhaps a paradox to say that expectation is enjoyment.
Nevertheless it is so on this earth. Fruition is for heaven. With the
accomplishment of every desire, there is so much of disappointment
mingled, that it cannot be really called enjoyment, for fancy always
exercises itself upon the future; and when we obtain the hard reality
for which we wished, the charms with which imagination decorated it
are gone. Did we but state the case to ourselves as it truly is,
whenever we conceive any of the manifold desires which lead us on from
step to step through life, the proposition would be totally different
from that which man for ever puts before his own mind, and we should
take one step towards undeceiving ourselves. We continually say, "if I
could attain such an object, I should be _quite contented_." But what
man ought to say to himself is, "I believe this or that acquisition
would give me happiness." He would soon find that it did not do so;
and the never ceasing recurrence of the lesson might, in the end,
teach him to ask what was the source of his disappointment?--Was it
that other circumstances in his own fate were so altered, even while
he pursued the path of endeavour, as to render attainment no longer
satisfactory?--was it that the object sought was intrinsically
different when attained from that which he had reasonably believed it
to be while pursuing it?--or was it that his fancy had gilded it with
charms not its own, and that he had voluntarily and blindly persuaded
himself that it was brighter and more excellent than it was? Perhaps
the answer, yes, might be returned to all these questions; but yet I
fear the chief burden of deceit would rest with imagination, and that
man would ever find he had judged of the future without sufficient
grounds, and had suffered desire to stimulate hope, and hope to cheat
expectation. Yet, perhaps, if he would but turn back and look behind,
when disappointment and success had been obtained together, he would
find that the pleasures tasted in the pursuit, especially at the time
when fruition was drawing nearer and nearer, would, in the sum, make
up the amount of enjoyment which he had anticipated in possession. I
will go to a certain town, says man, and there I will spend this sum
in my purse, in buying things which are necessary to my comfort and
satisfaction. He travels on the road. He spends his money here, he
spends his money there; and when he arrives, he finds that he has not
sufficient to purchase one-half of what he proposed to buy. Yet he
enjoyed himself by the way, and has no cause to complain.
If we thus decorate, as I have stated a few sentences ago, the object
of desire with charms not its own, we may well say that we enjoy in
anticipation even while the pursuit continues, and more especially do
so where success seems to us certain, though remote. In the case of
Lord Gowrie it was truly so. He looked to his union with Julia as a
consummation of happiness; and he longed for the passing of the time
till she should be his own for ever; but yet the days were very bright
which he passed beside her in the interval. Hope went on before them
and they followed; but they gathered many a flower by the way. Bound
by his promise, he knew that a certain interval must elapse before
their fate could be inseparably united. There was no use in hastening
their movements. There was no object in hurrying on towards his native
land. He felt inclined to linger amongst fair scenes, and in a climate
where winter comes slowly and departs soon, by the side of her he
loved, with little restraint but what his own feeling of right imposed
upon him, with a sense of deep happiness in the present, and
expectation to brighten the hereafter.
In Piedmont and Savoy, all danger was at an end; for while the
southern and eastern parts of Italy were still under that system of
tyranny and superstition which strove to control the thoughts as well
as the actions of men, the states bordering on France had cast off the
bondage in a considerable degree, and the power of the most cruel and
arbitrary tribunal that ever was founded by man was no longer
recognised.
Still there was something due to opinion, especially to the opinion of
those he reverenced and loved. Doubts might naturally arise if he
halted without any reasonable motive by the way; if he detained her
who was to be his bride before she was his bride, in any lengthened
sojourn, almost alone with him, in distant lands. They went slowly,
therefore; but they still proceeded. They stopped sometimes during a
whole day for rest; and for that purpose they chose the most beautiful
scenes they could find--scenes which harmonised with the feelings of
their own hearts. It would have been too much to expect that two
beings, loving as they loved, should ride post through the most
beautiful parts of Europe. Their journeys, too, were slow and short.
They sought to enjoy everything worth enjoying that presented itself.
They loved to see, and to comment, and to delight--to pour into each
other's bosoms every thought as it arose, and to blend, as it were,
their minds together as their hearts were already blended. For the
deeds that were enacted round them--and there were many at that time
of surpassing interest--they cared very little. What was to them what
princes or potentates said or did? What was to them the shifting
scenes of policy or war? They had a world apart within themselves, in
which every feeling and every thought was centred. As they approached
the mountains of Savoy, however, they heard some rumours of military
movements, which caused alarm in the mind of Mr. Rhind. He was a very
peaceable man, and somewhat timid; but Lord Gowrie treated the matter
lightly, and Julia seemed hardly to comprehend that there was any
danger to unwarlike persons in the strife of monarchs. Their progress,
however, was rendered even slower than before, by other circumstances.
Mountains to climb presented themselves at every step; roads were bad
and dangerous, towns became few, and accommodation difficult to be
procured. The art of the engineer had not at that time triumphed over
the barriers which nature had placed between land and land, and the
first fall of snow, though scanty, had added to the difficulties of
the way.
The modern reader would derive little amusement or instruction from a
detailed account of the passage of the Alps, in the reign of
Elizabeth. Suffice it, that after a long and fatiguing day's journey,
the party of Lord Gowrie arrived, towards sunset, at the small town of
Barraux. Julia was weary and exhausted, Mr. Rhind was hungry and
low-spirited, and nothing was to be obtained at the inn, in the way of
food, but some brown bread and some small fish out of the Isere.
Nevertheless, youth and hope and love made a great difference between
the two younger and the elder of the travellers. The tendency, I fear,
of all the experience of age, is selfish; and it is strange that the
nearer we approach towards the period of quitting earth, the more we
prize its comforts. True, indeed, there are some who preserve the
finer things of the unworn fresh heart even unto the end; but, of all
the many trials to which man's soul is subject in this state of
probation, I cannot but think that a tendency to that apathy for what
is great and fine, and to that concentration of the mind upon the body
which are incident to old age and long experience of life, is amongst
the greatest. Mr. Rhind could not enjoy at all, though the scene
around him, as the reader who may have wandered that way will know,
was full of objects both to soothe and to elevate. He consoled himself
with the wine, which was very good, while Julia and Gowrie wandered up
to the base of the old castle on the hill, to get one last look of the
beautiful soft valley through which the Isere wanders on, with gentle
cultivated hills hemming it round, and blue gigantic mountains
towering up beyond, while the sun, set to them, still tipped the peaks
with purple and with gold.
They returned slowly to their light supper, which was preparing during
their absence, and shortly after, Julia retired to rest. Mr. Rhind was
not long ere he left the room also; but it was a large old rambling
house, which had formerly been a priory of the suppressed order of the
Temple, standing near the centre of the little bourg--I think the
reader can see it still--and Mr. Rhind could not find his room. He
came back, and disturbed the earl in a reverie, to ask which it was;
and the landlord had to be summoned to show him. If Gowrie was sleepy
before, the inclination to slumber had now passed away; and he sat for
some time longer in meditation. The landlord looked in at length; and
remembering that he was keeping up a race of people devoted to early
hours, he rose, got a taper, and retired to his own chamber. Then
setting down the light, he looked around, and again fell into a fit of
thought.
There are times when--we know not why--the spirit of the mind, if I
may use a strange term, seems completely to triumph over the mere
corporal part of our nature, to conquer its sensations, to make light
of its necessities, to overcome its habitual resistance almost without
an effort--times when soul seems to possess the whole, when every
faculty is subdued to thought. Vain is it to struggle against it--vain
to say I will read, I will sport, I will sleep. Thought replies, no;
and for the time we are her slave. Such was the case with Gowrie that
night; and though he gazed round the chamber as I have said, what it
contained made merely an impression upon the eye, which reached not
the mind within.
It was a large, wide, old-fashioned chamber, the walls of which had no
hangings, although two wide pieces of a tapestry, with which the whole
room had probably formerly been decorated, were drawn across the
windows. On one side of the room was a large bed, almost lost in the
extent of the floor, and having curtains of a dingy green hue, and of
a silk stuff, the manufacture of which had even then long passed away,
formerly called cendal. There was a small round table in the middle of
the room, a mirror in a black oak frame standing forth from the wall,
supported by two iron bars, a washing-table in the corner, and two or
three chairs. That was all that it contained; and, as I have said, it
was very large and very gloomy. Nevertheless, although the year was
approaching winter, there was something close and oppressive in the
atmosphere. It felt as if the windows had not been opened for many a
year. Gowrie did not remark it, but sat down at the table and fell
into thought again. He remained thus for more than an hour. I have
called it thought, but yet it was of that trance-like character
wherein all things seem more like impressions than ideas, when dead
affections rise up from the tomb of memory in the shape of living
existences, and from the future the shadows of unborn events, clad in
the forms of actual realities, present themselves for warning or
encouragement. There is no continuity, there is no arrangement, there
is no operation of the intellect. Mind sits as a spectator while
the pageant passes, called up before our eyes by some unnamed
power.--What?
Who can say? There are things within us and without us that we know
not of--that the hardest handed metaphysician has never been able to
grasp.
In the midst of such fits the body will sometimes renew the struggle,
and strive to regain its power, especially if anything affects it
strongly. The earl seemed to feel the oppressive closeness of the
room. He rose, went to the window near the bed, pulled down the
tapestry, and threw open the rattling small-paned casement. It looked
to the east; and the bright moon, within a few days of the full,
peeped in from above the Alps, pouring a long line of splendour over
the floor. He knew not, indeed, that he had moved. The external eye
might see the casement and the moon, and the faint line of mountains
flooded with silver light; but the mind saw not. It had other visions;
and leaning his arms upon the bar on which played the part of the
casement that opened, he remained buried in the same reverie. Its tone
was melancholy--not exactly sad, but of that high grave stern cast
which seems to rob the things of earth of all their unreal brightness,
stripping off the gilding and the gauds, and leaving the hard leaden
forms alone, while another light than that of the world's day spreads
around, as if streaming from a higher sphere, and showing all the
emptiness and the nakedness of the illusions of the earth.
How long he had remained thus I know not, and he himself did not know,
but something--what he could never tell--made him suddenly turn round.
How shall I tell what followed? Was it an illusion of the fancy? Was
it a dream? Was it a reality?--Who shall say? But there before him was
a face and form well known, though never seen in life. It was that of
a tall dark pale man, with traces of sickness on his face, a bloody
dagger in his hand, and marks of gore upon his arm. His portrait hung
in the earl's palace at Perth, though with a more glowing cheek, and
in unspotted robes. But there he stood before him now, as if the grave
had given up its dead, his father's father, the slayer of the hapless
Rizzio. There was the same haggard look, the same ashy cheek, the same
rolling eye with which he had sunk into a seat in the presence of his
queen when the dreadful deed was done, and the full horror of the act
was poured upon his conscience. There the same gasping movement of the
lips with which he called for water to allay the burning thirst which
was never to be quenched but by the cold cup of death. A pale hazy
light spread around him, and he seemed to raise his hand with a
menacing gesture. He spoke, or Gowrie thought he spoke, in tones low
and stern, "Shall the blood of Douglas and of Ruthven mingle once
more?" he said. "Shall the child of him who denied all participation
in the act he prompted, and left his betrayed friend to perish in a
distant land, unite her fate to the heir of him who was destroyed!
Beware, boy, beware! Upon the children's children the blood of the
slain shall call for vengeance; and the unborn of the dark hour shall
seek a fatal retribution!"
As he spoke, the earl's head seemed to become giddy with awe and
surprise, the figure vanished, all that the room contained became
indistinct; and when Lord Gowrie again opened his eyes, he found
himself lying across the bed with his clothes on, and with the morning
light streaming brightly through the casement.