THE SOLITARY SAGE AND THE SOLITARY MAID.
While such the entrance of Marmaduke Nevile into a court, that if far
less intellectual and refined than those of later days, was yet more
calculated to dazzle the fancy, to sharpen the wit, and to charm the
senses,--for round the throne of Edward IV. chivalry was magnificent,
intrigue restless, and pleasure ever on the wing,--Sibyll had ample
leisure in her solitary home to muse over the incidents that had
preceded the departure of the young guest. Though she had rejected
Marmaduke's proffered love, his tone, so suddenly altered, his abrupt,
broken words and confusion, his farewell, so soon succeeding his
passionate declaration, could not fail to wound that pride of woman
which never sleeps till modesty is gone. But this made the least
cause of the profound humiliation which bowed down her spirit. The
meaning taunt conveyed in the rhyme of the tymbesteres pierced her to
the quick; the calm, indifferent smile of the stranger, as he regarded
her, the beauty of the dame he attended, woke mingled and contrary
feelings, but those of jealousy were perhaps the keenest: and in the
midst of all she started to ask herself if indeed she had suffered her
vain thoughts to dwell too tenderly upon one from whom the vast
inequalities of human life must divide her evermore. What to her was
his indifference? Nothing,--yet had she given worlds to banish that
careless smile from her remembrance.
Shrinking at last from the tyranny of thoughts till of late unknown,
her eye rested upon the gipsire which Alwyn had sent her by the old
servant. The sight restored to her the holy recollection of her
father, the sweet joy of having ministered to his wants. She put up
the little treasure, intending to devote it all to Warner; and after
bathing her heavy eyes, that no sorrow of hers might afflict the
student, she passed with a listless step into her father's chamber.
There is, to the quick and mercurial spirits of the young, something
of marvellous and preternatural in that life within life, which the
strong passion of science and genius forms and feeds,--that passion so
much stronger than love, and so much more self-dependent; which asks
no sympathy, leans on no kindred heart; which lives alone in its works
and fancies, like a god amidst his creations.
The philosopher, too, had experienced a great affliction since they
met last. In the pride of his heart he had designed to show Marmaduke
the mystic operations of his model, which had seemed that morning to
open into life; and when the young man was gone, and he made the
experiment alone, alas! he found that new progress but involved him in
new difficulties. He had gained the first steps in the gigantic
creation of modern days, and he was met by the obstacle that baffled
so long the great modern sage. There was the cylinder, there the
boiler; yet, work as he would, the steam failed to keep the cylinder
at work. And now, patiently as the spider re-weaves the broken web,
his untiring ardour was bent upon constructing a new cylinder of other
materials. "Strange," he said to himself, "that the heat of the mover
aids not the movement;" and so, blundering near the truth, he laboured
on.
Sibyll, meanwhile, seated herself abstractedly on a heap of fagots
piled in the corner, and seemed busy in framing characters on the
dusty floor with the point of her tiny slipper. So fresh and fair and
young she seemed, in that murky atmosphere, that strange scene, and
beside that worn man, that it might have seemed to a poet as if the
youngest of the Graces were come to visit Mulciber at his forge.
The man pursued his work, the girl renewed her dreams, the dark
evening hour gradually stealing over both. The silence was unbroken,
for the forge and the model were now at rest, save by the grating of
Adam's file upon the metal, or by some ejaculation of complacency now
and then vented by the enthusiast. So, apart from the many-noised,
gaudy, babbling world without, even in the midst of that bloody,
turbulent, and semi-barbarous time, went on (the one neglected and
unknown, the other loathed and hated) the two movers of the ALL that
continues the airy life of the Beautiful from age to age,--the Woman's
dreaming Fancy and the Man's active Genius.