Romance and Reality (Landon)/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
Duties with wants, and facts with feelings jar,
Deceiving and deceived—what fools we are!
The hope is granted, and the wish content,
Alas! but only for our punishment.
Had Lady Lauriston been aware of Mr. Lorraine's certainty of succeeding to the Etheringhame estates and honours, her plans would have assumed a more appropriating form. Invalid in body, still more so in mind, the present earl was sinking to the grave, not less surely because the disease was more mental than physical—not less surely because he was young, for youth gave its own mortal keenness to the inward wound. It was curious that, while father and mother were cut out in the most common-place shapes of social automata, both sons possessed a romance of feeling which would greatly have alarmed their rational parents. But no moral perceptions are so blunt as those of the selfish; theirs is the worst of near-sightedness—that of the heart.
Lord and Lady Etheringhame were blind to the faults, even as they were to the good qualities of their children, simply because to neither had they an answering key in themselves; we cannot calculate on the motions of a world, of whose very existence we dream not. They had a certain standard, not so much of right and wrong as of propriety, and took it for granted from this standard no child of theirs could depart.
Algernon[1] the elder brother's character was one peculiarly likely to be mistaken by people of this sort: his melancholy passed for gravity, his timidity for pride, and were therefore held right proper qualities; while his fondness for reading, his habits of abstraction, passed for close study, which made his mother call him such a steady young man; while his father, who had some vague notions of the necessity of great men studying, looked forward to the triumphs of the future statesman. He had been educated, from his delicate health, entirely at home; and his tutor,—who had only in his life moved from his college to the castle, and who had lived entirely among books—books which teach us at once so much and so little of men,—could see nothing but good in the pupil, whose eagerness to learn exceeded even his eagerness to teach, and who rarely went out without a book in his pocket.
The gloomy seclusion in which they lived—his health, which rendered those field sports that must have thrown him among young companions unattractive—all fostered the dreaming habits of his mind. He would pass hours under the shade of one old favourite cedar, whose vast boughs required a storm to move them, and through whose thick foliage the sunbeams never pierced; or whole evenings would pass away while he paced the chestnut avenue, ancient as those days when the earls of Etheringhame wore belt and spur, and rode beneath those trees with five hundred armed vassals in their train. There he dreamed of life—those dreams which so unfit the visionary for action, which make the real world so distasteful when measured by that within.
Algernon[2] was a poet in all but expression: that deep love of beauty—that susceptibility to external impressions—that fancy which, like the face we love, invests all things it looks on with a grace not their own—that intense feeling which makes so much its own pain and pleasure—all these were his: it were well had expression been added also—if he had been a poet? Feelings which now fed upon his own heart, would then have found a channel, and in their flow have made a bond between him and his fellow-men; the sorrow that parts in music from the lip often dies to its own singing, and the ill-starred love of its song goes on its way, soothed by the comrades it has called up, vanity and sympathy. The poet dies not of the broken heart he sings; it is the passionate enthusiast, the lonely visionary, who makes of his own hopes, feelings, and thoughts the pyre on which himself will be consumed. The old proverb, applied to fire and water, may, with equal truth, be applied to the imagination—it is a good servant, but a bad master.
Algernon[3] was just nineteen when a warmer climate was imperatively ordered; and a few weeks saw Algernon[4] and his tutor settled in a villa near Naples—the one happy in the novelty, loveliness, and associations of Italy—the other delighted with their vicinity to a convent rich in curious old manuscripts, and to which he had obtained free access.
It was one of those glorious evenings which crowded the whole wealth of summer into one single sun-set, when Algernon[5] was loitering through the aisles of a vast church, which seemed, like the faith it served, imperishable. The west was shut out, but the whole building was filled with a rich purple haze—the marble figures on the monuments stood out with a distinctness like real existence, but apart from our own. To me statues never bear aught of human resemblance—I cannot think of them as the likeness of man or woman—colourless, shadowy, they seem the creation of a spell; their spiritual beauty is of another world—and well did the Grecian of old, whose faith was one of power and necessity, not of affection, make his statues deities: the cold, the severely beautiful, we can offer them worship, but never love. It was, however, neither statue nor picture that so rivetted Algernon's attention, but a female kneeling at the shrine of the Virgin in most absorbing and earnest prayer.
Perhaps the most striking, as well as the most picturesque change in costume, is the veil universally worn in Italy; and but that the present day does not pique itself on its romance, it were matter of marvel how a woman could ever be induced to abandon an article of dress so full of poetical and graceful association. A veiled lady either is, or ought to be, enough to turn the head of any cavalier under five-and-twenty.
It was, however, admiration, not curiosity, the kneeling female excited; for her veil had fallen back, and her face only shadowed by a profusion of loose black ringlets, was fully seen. It was perfect: the high noble forehead—the large melancholy eyes—the delicately chiselled oval of the cheek—the small red mouth, belonged to the highest and most superb order of beauty; a sadness stole over its expression of devotional fervour—she suddenly buried her face in her hands: when she raised her head again, the long dark eye lashes were glittering with tears. She rose, and Algernon[6] followed her, more from an impulse than an intention; she stopped and unlocked a small door—it belonged to the convent garden adjoining—and there entering, disappeared.
But Algernon[7] had had ample time to fall desperately in love. He was now at an age when the heart asks for some more real object than the fairy phantoms of its dreams: passions chase fancies; and the time was now come when the imagination would exert its faculty rather to exaggerate than to create. He thought over the sadness of that angel face, as if he were predestined to soothe it—a thousand scenes in which they were to meet glanced over him—till he found himself leaning back in the darkest recess of a box at the Opera, feeling rather than listening to the delicious music, which floated through the dim atmosphere, so well suited to the reverie of the lover.
How much more is that vague tone of poetry, to be found in almost all, awakened by the obscurity of the foreign theatres!—in ours, the lights, the dresses, &c. are too familiar things, and prevent the audience from being carried away by their feelings,—as they are when music and poetry are aided by obscurity like mystery, and silence deep as thought. A murmur of applause, and a burst of song thrilling in its sweetness, aroused Algernon[8], and, leaning over the front, he saw—her dark hair gathered with three bands of costly diamonds in front, and a starry tiara behind—her crimson robe shining with gold—her dazzlingly white arms raised in eloquent expostulation—her voice filling the air with its melody—in the Medea of the stage he saw the devotee of the Virgin.
Pass we over the first steps of attachment—so delicious to tread, but so little pleasant to retrace, either for ourselves or others—till another evening of purple sunset saw, in that church where they had first met, Algernon kneeling by the side of the beautiful Francisca, while a priest pronounced the marriage blessing—a pale, aged man, to whose wan lips seemed rather to belong the prayer for a burial than aught that had to do with life or enjoyment.
Truly does passion live but in the present. Algernon[9] knew his marriage was not legal; but her he loved was now his by a sacred vow—and when the future came, he might be entirely his own master: the Janus of Love's year may have two faces, but they look only on each other. The worst of a mind so constituted is, that its feelings cannot last, least of all its love; it measures all things by its expectations—and expectations have that sort of ideal beauty no reality can equal: moreover, in the moral as in the physical world, the violent is never the lasting—the tree forced into unnatural luxuriance of blossom bears them and dies. Francisca, beautiful but weak, without power to comprehend, or intellect to take part with her lover, somewhat accelerated the re-action; and Algernon[10] now saw the full extent of the sacrifice he had made, and the mortifications that were to come, since love had no longer strength to bear him through them.
If there be one part of life on which the curse spoken at Eden rests in double darkness—if there be one part of life on which is heaped the gathered wretchedness of years, it is the time when guilty love has burnt itself out, and the heart sees crowd around those vain regrets, that deep remorse, whose voices are never heard but in the silence of indifference. Who ever repented or regretted during the reign of that sweet madness when one beloved object was more, ay a thousand times more, than the world forgotten for its sake? But when the silver cord of affection is loosened, and the golden bowl of intoxicating passion broken—when that change which passes over all earth's loveliest has passed, too, over the heart—when that step which was once our sweetest music falls on the ear a fear, not a hope—when we know that we love no more as once we loved—when memory broods on the past, which yields but a terrible repentance, and hope turns sickening from a future, which is her grave—if there be a part of life where misery and weariness contend together till the agony is greater than we can bear, this is the time.
Francisca saw the change, and in a few weeks Algernon[11] was almost startled by the change in her also; but hers was an external change—the bright cheek had lost its colour and outline, and she was wasted, even to emaciation. He was often absent from their villa, wandering, in all the restlessness of discontent, in the wild environs of Vesuvius; and on every return did he observe more alteration, when remorse urged to kindness, and he reproached himself bitterly for leaving her so much to solitude. Under this influence he returned suddenly and unexpectedly one day, and sought Francisca in a fit of repenting fondness; a faint moan made him enter the room, and there, on the bare rough pavement, knelt Francisca. A coarse dress of sackcloth strangely contrasted with her delicate shape—drops of blood were on the floor—and her slight hand yet held the scourge: a shriek told her recognition of Algernon[12], and she fell senseless on the ground.
In her state of bodily weakness, the least sudden emotion was enough to bring on a crisis—and before night she was in a brain fever; from her ravings and a few questions he learnt the cause. She had marked his growing coldness, and, with the wild superstition of the ardent and the weak, had held it as a judgment for loving a heretic; the belief that some fearful judgment was hanging over both grew upon her daily; and by fasts, rigid and severe penance, she strove to avert the penalty, and obtain pardon. Body and mind alike sank under this; and she died in a fearful paroxysm of terror, without one sign of recognition, in Algernon[13]'s arms. He returned to England too late to see his father living; and the first object he met in the old chestnut avenue were the black horses, the dark plumes of the hearse, which were bearing Lord Etheringhame to the vault of his ancestors.
Algernon[14] thenceforth lived in the deepest seclusion: one only object yet had an interest for him—his young brother; perhaps the very loneliness of his affection made it the deeper. In many points of character Edward resembled his brother; but he had an energy which the other had not—a buoyancy of spirit, to which difficulty was a delight. As he advanced in life, many an effort did he make to rouse Lord Etheringhame from his lethargy, but in vain. Grief, after all, is like smoking in a damp country—what was at first a necessity becomes afterwards an indulgence.