LUCILLA’S LETTER.--THE EFFECT IT PRODUCES ON GODOLPHIN.
The short conversation recorded in the last chapter could not but show
to Godolphin the dangerous ground on which his fidelity to Lucilla
rested. Never before,--no, not in the young time of their first passion,
had Constance seemed to him so lovely or so worthy of love. Her manners
now were so much more soft and unreserved than they had necessarily been
at a period when Constance had resolved not to listen to his addresses
or her own heart, that the only part of her character that had ever
repulsed his pride or offended his tastes seemed vanished for ever. A
more subdued and gentle spirit had descended on her surpassing beauty,
and the change was of an order that Percy Godolphin could especially
appreciate. And the world, for which he owned reluctantly that she yet
lived too much, had, nevertheless, seemed rather to enlarge and animate
the natural nobleness of her mind, than to fritter it down to the
standard of its common votaries. When she spoke he delighted in, even
while he dissented from, the high and bold views which she conceived. He
loved her indignation of all that was mean and low--her passion for all
that was daring and exalted. Never was he cast down from the height
of the imaginative part of his love by hearing from her lips one petty
passion or one sordid desire; much about her was erroneous, but all was
lofty and generous--even in error. And the years that had divided them
had only taught him to feel more deeply how rare was the order of her
character, and how impossible it was ever to behold her like. All the
sentiments, faculties, emotions, which in his affection for Lucilla had
remained dormant, were excited into full play the moment he was in the
presence of Constance. She engrossed no petty portion--she demanded and
obtained the whole empire--of his soul. And against this empire he had
now to contend! Torn as he was by a thousand conflicting emotions, a
letter from Lucilla was suddenly put into his hands; its contents were
as follows:--
LUCILLA’S LETTER.
“Thy last letter, my love, was so short and hurried, that it has not
cost me my usual pains to learn it by heart; nor (shall I tell the
truth?) have I been so eager as I once was to commit all thy words to my
memory. Why, I know not, and will guess not,--but there is something ill
thy letters since we parted that chills me;--they throw back my heart
upon itself. I tear open the seal with so much eagerness--thou wouldst
smile if thou couldst see me, and when I discover how few are the words
upon which I am to live for many days, I feel sick and disappointed, and
lay down the letter. Then I chide myself and say, ‘At least these few
words will be kind!’--and I spell them one by one, not to hurry over my
only solace. Alas! before I arrive at the end, I am blinded by my
tears; my love for thee, so bounding and full of life, seems frozen and
arrested at every line. And then I lie down for very weariness, and wish
to die. O God, if the time has come which I have always dreaded--if thou
shouldst no longer love me!--And how reasonable this fear is! For what
am I to thee? How often dost thou complain that I can understand thee
not--how often dost thou imply that there is much of thy nature which I
am incapable-- unworthy--to learn! If this be so, how natural is it to
dread that thou wilt find others whom thou wilt fancy more congenial to
thee, and that absence will only remind thee more of my imperfections!
“And yet I think that I have read thee to the letter; I think that
my love, which is always following thee, always watching thee, always
conjecturing thy wishes, must have penetrated into every secret of thy
heart: only I want words to express what I feel, and thou layest the
blame upon the want of feeling! I know how untutored, how ignorant,
I must seem to thee; and sometimes--and lately very often--I reproach
myself that I have not more diligently sought to make myself a worthier
companion to thee. I think if I had the same means as others; I should
acquire the same facility of expressing my thoughts; and my thoughts
thou couldst never blame, for I know that they are full of a love to
thee which--no--not the wisest--the most brilliant--whom thou mayest
see could equal even in imagination. But I have sought to mend this
deficiency since we parted; and I have looked into all the books thou
hast loved to read, and I fancy that I have imbibed now the same ideas
which pleased thee, and in which once thou imaginedst I could not
sympathise. Yet how mistaken thou hast been! I see, by marks thou hast
placed on the page, the sentiments that more especially charm thee; and
I know that I have felt them much, oh! how much more deeply and
vividly than they are there expressed--only they seem to me to have
no language--methinks that I have learned the language now. And I have
taught myself songs that thou wilt love to hear when thou returnest home
to me; and I have practised music, and I think--nay, I am sure, that
time will not pass so heavily with thee as when thou wast last here.
“And when shall I see thee again?--forgive me if I press thee to return.
Thou hast stayed away longer than thou hast been wont; but that I would
not heed; it is not the number of days, but the sensations with which
I have counted them, that make me pine for thy beloved voice, and long
once more to behold thee. Never before did I so feel thy absence, never
before was I so utterly wretched. A secret voice whispers me that we are
parted for ever. I cannot withstand the omens of my own heart. When
my poor father lived, I did not, child as I was, partake of those
sentiments with which he was wont to say the stars inspired us. I could
not see in them the boders of fear and the preachers of sad tidings;
they seemed to me only full of serenity and tenderness, and the promise
of enduring love! And ever when I looked on them, I thought of thee; and
thy image to me then, as thou knowest it was from childhood, was bright
with unimaginable but never melancholy spells. But now, although I love
thee so far more powerfully, I cannot divest the thoughts of thee from
a certain sadness; and so the stars, which are like thee, which are full
of thee, have a sadness also! And this, the bed, where every morning
I stretch my arms for thee, and find thee not, and have yet to live
through the day, and on which I now write this letter to thee--for, I
who used to rise with the sun, am now too dispirited not to endeavour to
cheat the weary day--I have made them place nearer to the window; and
I look out upon the still skies every night, and have made a friend
of every star I see. I question it of thyself, and wonder, when thou
lookest at it, if thou hast any thought of me. I love to look upon the
heavens much more than upon the earth; for the trees, and the waters
and the hills around, thou canst not behold; but the same heaven which I
survey is above thee also; and this, our common companion, seems in some
measure to unite us. And I have thought over my father’s lore, and have
tried to learn it; nay, thou mayest smile, but it is thy absence that
has taught me superstition.
“But tell me, dearest, kindest, tell me when--oh, when wilt then return?
Return only this once--if but for a day, and I will never persecute thee
again. Truant as thou art, thou shalt have full liberty for life. But I
cannot tell thee how sad and heavy I am grown, and every hour knocks
at my heart like a knell! Come back to thy poor Lucilla--if only to
see what joy is! Come--I know thou wilt! But should anything I do
not foresee detain thee, fix at least the day--nay, if possible, the
hour--when we shall meet, and let the letter which conveys such happy
tidings be long, and kind, and full of thee, as thy letters once were.
I know I weary thee, but I cannot help it. I am weak, and dejected, and
cast down, and have only heart enough to pray for thy return.”
“You have conquered--you have conquered, Lucilla!” said Godolphin, as he
kissed this wild and reproachful letter, and thrust it into his bosom;
“and I--I will be wretched rather than you shall be so!”
His heart rebuked him even for that last sentence. This pure and devoted
attachment, was it indeed an unhappiness to obtain, and a sacrifice to
return! Stung by his thoughts, and impatient of rest, he hurried into
the air;--he traversed the city; he passed St. Sebastian’s Gate, gained
the Appia Via, and saw, lone and sombre, as of old--the house of the
departed Volktman. He had half unconsciously sought that direction, in
order to strengthen his purpose, and sustain his conscience in its right
path. He now hurried onwards, and stopped not till he stood in that
lovely and haunted spot--the valley of Egeria--in which he had met
Lucilla on the day that he first learned her love. There was a gloom
over the scene now, for the day was dark and clouded: the birds were
silent; a heavy oppression seemed to brood upon the air. He entered that
grotto which is the witness of the most beautiful love-story chronicled
even in the soft south. He recalled the passionate and burning emotions
which, the last time he had been within that cell, he had felt for
Lucilla, and had construed erroneously into real love. As he looked
around, how different an aspect the spot wore! Then, those walls, that
spring, even that mutilated statue, had seemed to him the encouragers of
the soft sensations he had indulged. Now, they appeared to reprove the
very weakness which hallowed themselves--the associations spoke to him
in another tone. The broken statue of the river god--the desert
silence in which the water of the sweet fountain keeps its melancholy
course--the profound and chilling Solitude of the spot--all seemed
eloquent, not of love, but the broken hope and the dreary loneliness
that succeed it! The gentle plant (the capillaire) that overhangs the
sides of the grotto, and nourishes itself on the dews of the fountain,
seemed an emblem of love itself after disappointment--the love that
might henceforth be Lucilla’s--drooping in silence on the spot once
consecrated to rapture, and feeding itself with tears. There was
something mocking to human passion in the very antiquity of the spot;
four-and-twenty centuries had passed away since the origin of the tale
that made it holy--and that tale, too, was fable! What, in this vast
accumulation of the sands of time, was a solitary atom! What, among the
millions, the myriads, that around that desolate spot had loved, and
forgotten love, was the brief passion of one mortal, withering as it
sprung! Thus differently moralises the heart, according to the passion
which bestows on it the text.
Before he regained his home, Godolphin’s resolve was taken. The next day
he had promised Constance to attend her to Tivoli; he resolved then to
take leave of her, and on the following day to return to Lucilla. He
remembered, with bitter reproach, that he had not written to her for a
length of time, treble the accustomed interval between his letters;
and felt that, while at the moment she had written the lines he had now
pressed to his bosom, she was expecting, with unutterable fondness
and anxiety, to receive his lukewarm assurances of continued love, the
letter he was about to write in answer to hers was the first one that
would greet her eyes. But he resolved, that in that letter, at least,
she should not be disappointed. He wrote at length, and with all the
outpourings of a tenderness reawakened by remorse. He informed her of
his immediate return, and even forced himself to dwell upon it with
kindly hypocrisy of transport. For the first time for several weeks,
he felt satisfied with himself as he sealed his letter. It is doubtful
whether that letter Lucilla ever received.