JOY AND DESPAIR.
It was approaching towards the evening as Lucilla paused for a few
seconds at the door which led to Godolphin’s apartments. At length she
summoned courage. The servant who admitted her was Godolphin’s favorite
domestic; and he was amazed, but overjoyed, to see her; for Lucilla was
the idol of all who knew her,--save of him, whose love only she cared
and lived for.
His master, he said, was gone out for a short time, but the next day
they were to have returned home. Lucilla coloured with vivid delight
to hear that her letter had produced an effect she had not hoped so
expeditiously to accomplish. She passed on into Godolphin’s apartment.
The room bore evident signs of approaching departure; the trunks lay
half-packed on the floor; there was all that importance of confusion
around which makes to the amateur traveller a luxury out of discomfort.
Lucilla sat down, and waited, anxious and trembling, for her lover. Her
woman, who had accompanied her, thinking of more terrestrial concerns
than love, left her, at her desire. She could not rest long; she walked,
agitating and expecting, to and fro the long and half-furnished chamber
which characterises the Italian palace. At length, her eye fell on an
open letter on a writing-table at one corner of the room. She glanced
over it mechanically,--certain words suddenly arrested her attention.
Were those words--words of passion--addressed to her? If not, O Heaven!
to whom? She obeyed, as she ever did, the impulse of the moment, and
read what follows:
“Constance--As I write that word how many remembrances rush upon
me!--for how many years has that name been a talisman to my heart,
waking its emotions at will! You are the first woman I ever really
loved: you rejected me, yet I could not disdain you. You became
another’s but my love could not desert you. Your hand wrote the history
of my life after the period when we met,--my habits--my thoughts--you
influenced and coloured them all! And now, Constance, you are free; and
I love you more fervently than ever! And you--yes, you would not reject
me now; you have grown wiser, and learned the value of a heart. And yet
the same Fate that divided us hitherto will divide us now; all obstacles
but one are passed away--of that one you shall hear and judge.
“When we parted, Constance, years ago, I did not submit tamely to the
burning remembrance you bequeathed me; I sought to dissipate your
image, and by wooing others to forget yourself. Need I say, that to know
another was only to remember you the more? But among the other and
far less worthy objects of my pursuit was one whom, had I not seen you
first, I might have loved as ardently as I do you; and in the first
flush of emotion, and the heat of sudden events, I imagined that I did
so love her. She was an orphan, a child in years and in the world; and
I was all to her--I am, all to her. She is not mine by the ties of the
Church; but I have pledged a faith to her equally sacred and as strong.
Shall I break that faith? shall I betray that trust? shall I crush a
heart that has always been mine--mine more tenderly than yours, rich in
a thousand gifts and resources, ever was or ever can be? Shall I,--sworn
to protect her--I, who have already robbed her of fame and friends, rob
her now of father, brother, lover, husband, the world itself,--for I am
all to her? Never--never! I shall be wretched throughout life: I shall
know that you are free that you--oh! Constance! you might be mine!--but
she shall never dream what she has cost me! I have been too cold, too
ungrateful to her already--I will make her amends. My heart may break
in the effort, but it shall reward her. You, Constance, in the pride
of your lofty station, your strengthened mind, your regulated virtue
(fenced in by the hundred barriers of custom), you cannot, perhaps,
conceive how pure and devoted the soul of this poor girl is! She is not
one whom I could heap riches upon and leave:--my love is all the riches
she knows. Earth has not a consolation or a recompense for the loss of
my affection: and even Heaven itself she has never learned to think of,
except as a place in which we shall be united for ever. As I write this
I know that she is sitting afar off and alone, and thinking only of one
whose whole soul, fated and accursed as he is, is maddened by the love
of another. My letters, her only comfort, have been cold and few of
late; I know how they have wrung her heart. I picture to myself her
solitude--her sadness--her unfriended youth--her ardent mind, which, not
enriched by culture, clings, feeds, lives only on one idea. Before you
receive this, I shall be on the road to her. Never again will I risk
the temptation I have under gone. I am not a vain man; I do not deceive
myself; I do not imagine, I do not insult you by believing, that you
will long or bitterly feel my loss. I have loved you far better than you
have loved me, and you have uncounted channels for your bright hopes
and your various ambition. You love the world, and the world is at
your feet! And in remembering me now, you may think you have cause for
indignation. Why, with the knowledge of a tie that forbade me to hope
for you, why did I linger round you? why did I give vent to any word, or
license to any look, that told you I loved you still? Why, above all, on
that fated yesterday, when we stood alone surrounded by the waters,--why
did I dare forget myself--why clasp you to my breast--why utter the
assurance of that love which was a mockery, if I were not about solemnly
to record it?
“This you will ask; and if you are not satisfied with the answer, your
pride will clothe my memory with resentment. Be it so--yet hear me.
Constance, when, in my first youth, at the time when the wax was yet
soft, and the tree might yet be bent--when I laid my heart and my
future lot at your feet--when you, at the dictates of a worldly and cold
ambition (disguise the name as you will, the reality is the same),
threw me back on the solitary desert of life; when you rejected--forsook
me;--do you think that, although I loved you still, there was no
anger mingled with the love! We met again: but what years of wasted
existence--of dimmed hope--of deadened emotion--had passed over me
since then! And who had thus marked them? You! Do you wonder, then, that
something of human pride asked for human vengeance? Yes! I pined
for some triumph in my turn: I longed to try whether I was yet
forgotten--whether the heart which stung me had been stung also in the
wound that it inflicted. Was not this natural? Ask yourself, and blame
me if you can. But by degrees, as I gazed upon a beauty, and listened
to a voice, softer in their character than of old,--as I felt that you
would not deny me retribution, this selfish desire for revenge died
away, and, by degrees, all emotions were merged in one--unconquered,
unconquerable love. And can you blame me, if then--traitor to myself
as to you--I lingered on the spot?--if I had many struggles to endure
before I could resolve on the sacrifice I now make? Alas! it has cost me
much to be just. Can you blame me if at all times I could not control my
words and looks? Nay, even in our last meeting, when I was maddened
by the thought that we were about to part for ever--when we stood
alone--when no eye was near--when you clung to me in a delicious
timidity--when your breath was on my cheek--when the heaving of your
heart was heard by mine--when my hand touched that which could give me
all the world in itself--when my arm encircled that glorious and divine
shape--0 Heaven! can you blame me--can you wonder if I was transported
beyond myself;--if conscience, reason, all were forgotten, and I
thought--felt--lived--but for the moment and for you? No, you will feel
for the weakness of nature; you will not judge me harshly.
“And why should you rob me of the remembrance of that brief moment--that
wild embrace? How often shall I recall it!--How often when the light
step of her to whom I return glides around me, shall I cheat myself, and
think it yours; when I feel her breath at night, shall I not start--and
dream it comes from your lips? and in returning her unconscious caress,
let me fancy it is you whispers me the assurances of unutterable love!
Forgive me, Constance, my yet adored Constance, whom I shall never see
more, for these wild words--this momentary weakness. Farewell! Whatever
becomes of me, may God give you all His blessings!
“One word more--no, I will not close this letter yet! You remember that
you once gave me a flower--years ago. I have preserved its leaves to
this day; but I will give no indulgence to a folly that will now wrong
you, and be unworthy of myself. I will send you back those leaves: let
them plead for me, as the memories of former days. I must break off
now, for I can literally write no more. I must go forth and recover my
self-command. And oh! may she whom I seek to-morrow--whose unsuspecting
heart admonished by temptation, I will watch over, guide, and shield
far, far more zealously than I have yet done--never know what it has
cost me, not to abandon and betray her.”
And Lucilla read over every word of this letter! How wholly impossible
it is for language to express the agony, the hopeless, irremediable
despair that deepened within her as she proceeded to the end! Everything
that life had, or could ever have had for her, of common peace or joy,
was blasted for ever! As she came to the last word, she bowed her head
in silence over the writing, and felt as if some mighty rock had fallen
upon her heart, and crushed it to dust. Had the letter breathed but
one unkind--one slighting expression of her, it would have been some
comfort--some rallying point, however forlorn and wretched; but this
cruel tenderness--this bitter generosity!
And before she had read that letter, how joyously, how breathlessly she
had anticipated rushing to her lover’s breast! It seems incredible
that the space of a few minutes should suffice to blight a whole
existence--blacken without a ray of hope an entire future!
She was aroused by the sound of steps, though in another apartment; she
would not now have met Godolphin for worlds; the thought of his return
alone gave her the power of motion. She thrust the fatal letter into
her bosom; and then, in characters surprisingly distinct and clear, she
wrote her name, and placed that writing in the stead of the epistle she
took away. She judged rightly, that that single name would suffice to
say all she could not then say. Having done this, she rose, left the
room, and stole softly and unperceived into the open street.
Unconscious and careless whither she went, she hurried on, her eyes bent
on the ground, and concealing her form and face with her long mantle.
The streets at Rome are not thronged as with us; nor does there exist,
in a city consecrated by so many sublime objects, that restless and
vulgar curiosity which torments the English public. Each lives in
himself, not in his neighbour. The moral air of Rome is Indifference.
Lucilla, therefore, hurried along unmolested and unobserved, until
at length her feet failed her, and she sank exhausted, but still
unconscious of her movements and of all around, upon one of the
scattered fragments of ancient pride that at every turn are visible in
the streets of Rome. The place was quiet and solitary, and darkened by
the shadows of a palace that reared itself close beside. She sat down;
and shrouding her face as it drooped over her breast, endeavoured to
collect her thoughts. Presently the sound of a guitar was heard; and
along the street came a little group of the itinerant musicians who
invest modern Italy with its yet living air of poetry: the reality is
gone, but the spirit lingers. They stopped opposite a small house; and
Lucilla, looking up, saw the figure of a young girl placing a light at
the window as a signal well known, and then she glided away. Meanwhile,
the lover (who had accompanied the musicians, and seemed in no very
elevated rank of life) stood bare-headed beneath; and in his upward
look there was a devotion, a fondness, a respect, that brought back to
Lucilla all the unsparing bitterness of contrast and recollection. And
now the serenade began. The air was inexpressibly soft and touching,
and the words were steeped in that vague melancholy which is inseparable
from the tenderness, if not from the passion, of love. Lucilla listened
involuntarily, and the charm slowly wrought its effect. The hardness and
confusion of her mind melted gradually away, and as the song ended she
turned aside and burst into tears. “Happy, happy girl!” she murmured;
“she is loved!”
Here let us drop the curtain upon Lucilla. Often, O Reader! shalt thou
recall this picture; often shalt thou see her before thee--alone and
broken-hearted--weeping in the twilight streets of Rome!