V. O God! and what is life, that I should live?(Hath not the world enow of common clay?)
And she—the Rose—whose life a soul could give
To the void desert, sigh its sweets away?
VI. And I that love thee thus, to whom the air,
Blest by thy breath, makes heaven where’er it be,
Watch thy cheek wane, and smile away despair,
Lest it should dim one hour yet left to Thee.
VII. Still let me conquer self; oh, still conceal
By the smooth brow the snake that coils below;
Break, break my heart! it comforts yet to feel
That she dreams on, unwakened by my woe!
VIII. Hushed, where the Star’s soft angel loves to keep
Watch o’er their tide, the morning waters roll;
So glides my spirit,—darkness in the deep,
But o’er the wave the presence of thy soul!
Gertrude had not as yet the presentiments that filled the soul of Trevylyan. She thought too little of herself to know her danger, and those hours to her were hours of unmingled sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, the exhaustion of her disease tinged her spirits with a vague sadness, an abstraction came over her, and a languor she vainly struggled against. These fits of dejection and gloom touched Trevylyan to the quick; his eye never ceased to watch them, nor his heart to soothe. Often when he marked them, he sought to attract her attention from what he fancied, though erringly, a sympathy with his own forebodings, and to lead her young and romantic imagination through the temporary beguilements of fiction; for Gertrude was yet in the first bloom of youth, and all the dews of beautiful childhood sparkled freshly from the virgin blossoms of her mind. And Trevylyan, who had passed some of his early years among the students of Leipsic, and was deeply versed in the various world of legendary lore, ransacked his memory for such tales as seemed to him most likely to win her interest; and often with false smiles entered into the playful tale, or oftener, with more faithful interest, into the graver legend of trials that warned yet beguiled them from their own. Of such tales I have selected but a few; I know not that they are the least unworthy of repetition,—they are those which many recollections induce me to repeat the most willingly. Gertrude loved these stories, for she had not yet lost, by the coldness of the world, one leaf from that soft and wild romance which belonged to her beautiful mind; and, more than all, she loved the sound of a voice which every day became more and more musical to her ear. “Shall I tell you,” said Trevylyan, one morning, as he observed her gloomier mood stealing over the face of Gertrude,—“shall I tell you, ere yet we pass into the dull land of Holland, a story of Malines, whose spires we shall shortly see?” Gertrude’s face brightened at once, and as she leaned back in the carriage as it whirled rapidly along, and fixed her deep blue eyes on Trevylyan, he began the following tale.
CHAPTER IV. THE MAID OF MALINES
IT was noonday in the town of Malines, or Mechlin, as the English usually term it; the Sabbath bell had summoned the inhabitants to divine worship; and the crowd that had loitered round the Church of St. Rembauld had gradually emptied itself within the spacious aisles of the sacred edifice.
A young man was standing in the street, with his eyes bent on the ground, and apparently listening for some sound; for without raising his looks from the rude pavement, he turned to every corner of it with an intent and anxious expression of countenance. He held in one hand a staff, in the other a long slender cord, the end of which trailed on the ground; every now and then he called, with a plaintive voice, “Fido, Fido, come back! Why hast thou deserted me?” Fido returned not; the dog, wearied of confinement, had slipped from the string, and was at play with his kind in a distant quarter of the town, leaving the blind man to seek his way as he might to his solitary inn.
By and by a light step passed through the street, and the young stranger’s face brightened.
“Pardon me,” said he, turning to the spot where his quick ear had caught the sound, “and direct me, if you are not much pressed for a few moments’ time, to the hotel ‘Mortier d’Or.’”
It was a young woman, whose dress betokened that she belonged to the middling class of life, whom he thus addressed. “It is some distance hence, sir,” said she; “but if you continue your way straight on for about a hundred yards, and then take the second turn to your right hand—”
“Alas!” interrupted the stranger, with a melancholy smile, “your direction will avail me little; my dog has deserted me, and I am blind!”
There was something in these words, and in the stranger’s voice, which went irresistibly to the heart of the young woman. “Pray forgive me,” she said, almost with tears in her eyes, “I did not perceive your—” misfortune, she was about to say, but she checked herself with an instinctive delicacy. “Lean upon me, I will conduct you to the door; nay, sir,” observing that he hesitated, “I have time enough to spare, I assure you.”
The stranger placed his hand on the young woman’s arm; and though Lucille was naturally so bashful that even her mother would laughingly reproach her for the excess of a maiden virtue, she felt not the least pang of shame, as she found herself thus suddenly walking through the streets of Malines along with a young stranger, whose dress and air betokened him of rank superior to her own.
“Your voice is very gentle,” said he, after a pause; “and that,” he added, with a slight sigh, “is the only criterion by which I know the young and the beautiful!” Lucille now blushed, and with a slight mixture of pain in the blush, for she knew well that to beauty she had no pretension. “Are you a native of this town?” continued he.
“Yes, sir; my father holds a small office in the customs, and my mother and I eke out his salary by making lace. We are called poor, but we do not feel it, sir.”
“You are fortunate! there is no wealth like the heart’s wealth,—content,” answered the blind man, mournfully.
“And, monsieur,” said Lucille, feeling angry with herself that she had awakened a natural envy in the stranger’s mind, and anxious to change the subject—“and, monsieur, has he been long at Malines?”
“But yesterday. I am passing through the Low Countries on a tour; perhaps you smile at the tour of a blind man, but it is wearisome even to the blind to rest always in the same place. I thought during church-time, when the streets were empty, that I might, by the help of my dog, enjoy safely at least the air, if not the sight of the town; but there are some persons, methinks, who cannot have even a dog for a friend!”
The blind man spoke bitterly,—the desertion of his dog had touched him to the core. Lucille wiped her eyes. “And does Monsieur travel then alone?” said she; and looking at his face more attentively than she had yet ventured to do, she saw that he was scarcely above two-and-twenty. “His father, and his mother,” she added, with an emphasis on the last word, “are they not with him?”
“I am an orphan!” answered the stranger; “and I have neither brother nor sister.”
The desolate condition of the blind man quite melted Lucille; never had she been so strongly affected. She felt a strange flutter at the heart, a secret and earnest sympathy, that attracted her at once towards him. She wished that Heaven had suffered her to be his sister!
The contrast between the youth and the form of the
