_ CHAPTER XLII. 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! _