he fled along the passage; and Linden, satisfied with the vengeance he had taken upon his comrade, did not harass him with an unavailing pursuit.
Clarence turned to assist Talbot. The old man was stretched upon the floor insensible, but his hand grasped the miniature which the plunderer had dropped in his flight and terror, and his white and ashen lip was pressed convulsively upon the recovered treasure.
Linden raised and placed him on his bed, and while employed in attempting to revive him, the ancient domestic, alarmed by the report of the pistol, came, poker in hand, to his assistance. By little and little they recovered the object of their attention. His eyes rolled wildly round the room, and he muttered,—“Off, off! ye shall not rob me of my only relic of her,—where is it?—have you got it?—the picture, the picture!”
“It is here, sir, it is here,” said the old servant; “it is in your own hand.”
Talbot’s eye fell upon it; he gazed at it for some moments, pressed it to his lips, and then, sitting erect and looking wildly round, he seemed to awaken to the sense of his late danger and his present deliverance.
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!
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
