Hyacinth Vaughan repeated one sentence over and over again to
herself--they were always the same words--"Thank Heaven, Adrian does not
know what I have done."
For, as the days passed on, she learned to care for him with a love that
was wonderful in its intensity. It was not his personal beauty that
impressed her. By many people Claude Lennox would have been considered
the handsomer man of the two. It was the grandeur of Adrian Darcy's
character, the loyalty and nobility of his most loyal soul; the beauty
of his mind, the stretch and clearness of his intellect, that charmed
her.
She had never met any one like him--never met so perfect a mixture of
chivalry and strength. She learned to have the utmost reliance upon him.
His most lightly spoken word was to her as the oath of another. She saw
that every thought, every word, every action of his was so perfectly
correct that his least judgment was invaluable. If he said a thing was
right, the whole world could not have made her think it wrong; if he
disapproved of anything, so entire was her reliance upon him, that she
could not be brought to consider it right.
It seemed so strange that she should have been so ready to run away, so
as to escape this Adrian Darcy; and now the brightest heaven of which
she could dream was his friendship--for his love, after she understood
him, she could hardly hope.
"How can he care for a child like me," she was accustomed to ask
herself, "uninformed, inexperienced, ignorant? He is so great and so
noble, how can he care for me?"
She did not know that her sweet humility, her graceful shyness, her
_naïveté_, her entire freedom from all taint of worldliness, was more
precious to him, more charming, than all the accomplishments she could
have displayed.
"How can I ever have thought that I loved Claude?" she said to herself.
"How can I have been so blind? My heart never used to beat more quickly
for his coming. If I had had the same liberty, the same amusements and
pleasures which other girls have, I should never have cared for him. It
was only because he broke the monotony of my life, and gave me something
to think of."
Then in her own mind she contrasted the two men--Adrian, so calm, so
dignified, so noble in thought, word, and deed, and so loyal, so
upright; Claude, all impetuosity, fire, recklessness and passion--not to
be trusted, not to be relied upon. There was never a greater difference
of character surely than between these two men.
She learned to look with Adrian's eyes, to think with his mind; and she
became a noble woman.
Life at Bergheim was very pleasant; there was no monotony, no dreariness
now. Her first thought when she woke in the morning, was that she should
see Adrian, hear him speak, perhaps go out with him. Quite unconsciously
to herself, he became the centre of her thoughts and ideas--the soul of
her soul, the life of her life. She did not know that she loved him;
what she called her "love" for Claude had been something so
different--all made up of gratified vanity and love of change. The
beautiful affection rapidly mastering her was so great and reverent, it
filled her soul with light, her heart with music, her mind with beauty.
She did not know that it was love that kept her awake throughout the
night thinking of him, bringing back to her mind every word he had
spoken--that made her always anxious to look well.
"I always thought," she said to him one day, "that grave and thoughtful
people always despised romance."
"They despise all affectation and caricature of it," he replied.
"Since I have been out in the world and have listened to people
talking, I have heard them say, 'Oh, she is romantic!' as though romance
were wrong or foolish."
"There is romance and romance," he said; "romance that is noble,
beautiful and exalting; and romance that is the overheated sentiment of
foolish girls. What so romantic as Shakespeare? What love he paints for
us--what passion, what sadness! Who more romantic than Fouque? What wild
stories, what graceful, improbable legends he gives us! Yet, who sneers
at Shakespeare and Fouque?"
"Then why do people apply the word 'romantic' almost as a term of
reproach to others?"
"Because they misapply the word, and do not understand it. I plead
guilty myself to a most passionate love of romance--that is, romance
which teaches, elevates, and ennobles--the soul of poetry, the high and
noble faculty that teaches one to appreciate the beautiful and true. You
know, Hyacinth, there are true romance and false romance, just as there
are true poetry and false poetry."
"I can understand what you call true romance, but not what you mean by
false," she said.
"No; you are too much like the flower you are named after to know much
of false romance," he rejoined. "Everything that lowers one's standard,
that tends to lower one's thoughts, that puts mere sentiment in the
place of duty, that makes wrong seem right, that leads to underhand
actions, to deceit, to folly--all that is false romance. Pardon my
alluding to such things. The lover who would persuade a girl to deceive
her friends for his sake, who would persuade her to give him private
meetings, to receive secret letters--such a lover starts from a base of
the very falsest romance; yet many people think it true."
He did not notice that her beautiful face had suddenly grown pale, and
that an expression of fear had crept into her blue eyes.
"You are always luring me into argument, Hyacinth," he said, with a
smile.
"Because I like to hear you talk," she explained. She did not see how
full of love was the look he bent on her as he plucked a spray of azalea
flowers and passed it to her. Through the tears that filled her downcast
eyes she saw the flower, and almost mechanically took it from his hand,
not daring to look up. But in the silence of her own room she pressed
the flowers passionately to her lips and rained tears upon them, as she
moaned, "Oh, if he knew, what would he think of me? what would he
think?"