BOOK II.
"The hour arrived--years having rolled away
When his return the Gods no more delay.
Lo! Ithaca the Fates award; and there
New trials meet the Wanderer."
HOMER: _Od._ lib. i, 16.
CHAPTER I.
THERE is continual spring and harvest here--
Continual, both meeting at one time;
For both the boughs do laughing blossoms bear,
And with fresh colours deck the wanton prime;
And eke at once the heavy trees they climb,
Which seem to labour under their fruit's load.
SPENSER: _The Garden of Adonis_.
Vis boni
In ipsa inesset forma.*--TERENCE.
* "Even in beauty there exists the power of virtue."
BEAUTY, thou art twice blessed; thou blessest the gazer and the
possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet
disposition, a lovely soul, an affectionate nature, will speak in the
eyes, the lips, the brow, and become the cause of beauty. On the other
hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all
hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the
world,--to be cheerful and serene, to hope and to confide. There is more
wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face.
Evelyn Cameron was beautiful,--a beauty that came from the heart, and
went to the heart; a beauty, the very spirit of which was love! Love
smiled on her dimpled lips, it reposed on her open brow, it played in the
profuse and careless ringlets of darkest yet sunniest auburn, which a
breeze could lift from her delicate and virgin cheek; Love, in all its
tenderness, in all its kindness, its unsuspecting truth,--Love coloured
every thought, murmured in her low melodious voice, in all its symmetry
and glorious womanhood. Love swelled the swan-like neck, and moulded the
rounded limb.
She was just the kind of person that takes the judgment by storm: whether
gay or grave, there was so charming and irresistible a grace about her.
She seemed born, not only to captivate the giddy, but to turn the heads
of the sage. Roxalana was nothing to her. How, in the obscure hamlet of
Brook-Green, she had learned all the arts of pleasing it is impossible to
say. In her arch smile, the pretty toss of her head, the half shyness,
half freedom, of her winning ways, it was as if Nature had made her to
delight one heart, and torment all others.
Without being learned, the mind of Evelyn was cultivated and well
informed. Her heart, perhaps, helped to instruct her understanding; for
by a kind of intuition she could appreciate all that was beautiful and
elevated. Her unvitiated and guileless taste had a logic of its own: no
schoolman had ever a quicker penetration into truth, no critic ever more
readily detected the meretricious and the false. The book that Evelyn
could admire was sure to be stamped with the impress of the noble, the
lovely, or the true!
But Evelyn had faults,--the faults of her age; or, rather, she had
tendencies that might conduce to error. She was of so generous a nature
that the very thought of sacrificing her self for another had a charm.
She ever acted from impulse,--impulses pure and good, but often rash and
imprudent. She was yielding to weakness, persuaded into anything, so
sensitive, that even a cold look from one moderately liked cut her to the
heart; and by the sympathy that accompanies sensitiveness, no pain to her
was so great as the thought of giving pain to another. Hence it was that
Vargrave might form reasonable hopes of his ultimate success. It was a
dangerous constitution for happiness! How many chances must combine to
preserve to the mid-day of characters like this the sunshine of their
dawn! The butterfly that seems the child of the summer and the
flowers--what wind will not chill its mirth, what touch will not brush
away its hues?
