CHAPTER XIX.
Ah, fleeter far than fleetest storm or steed,
Or the death they bear,
The heart which tender thought clothes like a dove
With the wings of care!
In the battle, in the darkness, in the need,
Shall mine cling to thee!
Nor claim one smile for all the comfort, love,
It may bring to thee!--SHELLEY.
LETTER FROM ALGERNON MORDAUNT TO ISABEL ST. LEGER.
You told me not to write to you. You know how long, but not how
uselessly I have obeyed you. Did you think, Isabel, that my love was
of that worldly and common order which requires a perpetual aliment to
support it? Did you think that, if you forbade the stream to flow
visibly, its sources would be exhausted, and its channel dried up?
This may be the passion of others; it is not mine. Months have passed
since we parted, and since then you have not seen me; this letter is
the first token you have received from a remembrance which cannot die.
But do you think that I have not watched and tended upon you, and
gladdened my eyes with gazing on your beauty when you have not dreamed
that I was by? Ah, Isabel, your heart should have told you of it;
mine would, had you been so near me!
You receive no letters from me, it is true: think you that my hand and
heart are therefore idle? No. I write to you a thousand burning
lines: I pour out my soul to you; I tell you of all I suffer; my
thoughts, my actions, my very dreams, are all traced upon the paper.
I send them not to you, but I read them over and over, and when I come
to your name, I pause and shut my eyes, and then "Fancy has her
power," and lo! "you are by my side!"
Isabel, our love has not been a holiday and joyous sentiment; but I
feel a solemn and unalterable conviction that our union is ordained.
Others have many objects to distract and occupy the thoughts which are
once forbidden a single direction, but we have none. At least, to me
you are everything. Pleasure, splendour, ambition, all are merged
into one great and eternal thought, and that is you!
Others have told me, and I believed them, that I was hard and cold and
stern: so perhaps I was before I knew you, but now I am weaker and
softer than a child. There is a stone which is of all the hardest and
the chillest, but when once set on fire it is unquenchable. You smile
at my image, perhaps, and I should smile if I saw it in the writing of
another; for all that I have ridiculed in romance as exaggerated seems
now to me too cool and too commonplace for reality.
But this is not what I meant to write to you; you are ill, dearest and
noblest Isabel, you are ill! I am the cause, and you conceal it from
me; and you would rather pine away and die than suffer me to lose one
of those worldly advantages which are in my eyes but as dust in the
balance,--it is in vain to deny it. I heard from others of your
impaired health; I have witnessed it myself. Do you remember last
night, when you were in the room with your relations, and they made
you sing,--a song too which you used to sing to me, and when you came
to the second stanza your voice failed you, and you burst into tears,
and they, instead of soothing, reproached and chid you, and you
answered not, but wept on? Isabel, do you remember that a sound was
heard at the window and a groan? Even they were startled, but they
thought it was the wind, for the night was dark and stormy, and they
saw not that it was I: yes, my devoted, my generous love, it was I who
gazed upon you, and from whose heart that voice of anguish was wrung;
and I saw your cheek was pale and thin, and that the canker at the
core had preyed upon the blossom.
Think you, after this, that I could keep silence or obey your request?
No, dearest, no! Is not my happiness your object? I have the vanity
to believe so; and am I not the best judge how that happiness is to be
secured? I tell you, I say it calmly, coldly, dispassionately,--not
from the imagination, not even from the heart, but solely from the
reason,--that I can bear everything rather than the loss of you; and
that if the evil of my love scathe and destroy you, I shall consider
and curse myself as your murderer! Save me from this extreme of
misery, my--yes, my Isabel! I shall be at the copse where we have so
often met before, to-morrow, at noon. You will meet me; and if I
cannot convince you, I will not ask you to be persuaded. A. M.
And Isabel read this letter, and placed it at her heart, and felt less
miserable than she had done for months; for, though she wept, there
was sweetness in the tears which the assurance of his love and the
tenderness of his remonstrance had called forth. She met him: how
could she refuse? and the struggle was past. Though not "convinced"
she was "persuaded;" for her heart, which refused his reasonings,
melted at his reproaches and his grief. But she would not consent to
unite her fate with him at once, for the evils of that step to his
interests were immediate and near; she was only persuaded to permit
their correspondence and occasional meetings, in which, however
imprudent they might be for herself, the disadvantages to her lover
were distant and remote. It was of him only that she thought; for him
she trembled; for him she was the coward and the woman; for herself
she had no fears, and no forethought.
And Algernon was worthy of this devoted love, and returned it as it
was given. Man's love, in general, is a selfish and exacting
sentiment: it demands every sacrifice and refuses all. But the nature
of Mordaunt was essentially high and disinterested, and his honour,
like his love, was not that of the world: it was the ethereal and
spotless honour of a lofty and generous mind, the honour which custom
can neither give nor take away; and, however impatiently he bore the
deferring of a union, in which he deemed that he was the only
sufferer, he would not have uttered a sigh or urged a prayer for that
union, could it, in the minutest or remotest degree, have injured or
degraded her.
These are the hearts and natures which make life beautiful; these are
the shrines which sanctify love; these are the diviner spirits for
whom there is kindred and commune with everything exalted and holy in
heaven and earth. For them Nature unfolds her hoarded poetry and her
hidden spells; for their steps are the lonely mountains, and the still
woods have a murmur for their ears; for them there is strange music in
the wave, and in the whispers of the light leaves, and rapture in the
voices of the birds: their souls drink, and are saturated with the
mysteries of the Universal Spirit, which the philosophy of old times
believed to be God Himself. They look upon the sky with a gifted
vision, and its dove-like quiet descends and overshadows their hearts;
the Moon and the Night are to them wells of Castalian inspiration and
golden dreams; and it was one of them who, gazing upon the Evening
Star, felt in the inmost sanctuary of his soul its mysterious
harmonies with his most worshipped hope, his most passionate desire,
and dedicated it to--LOVE.
