LETTER XII
FROM SIBELLA VALMONT
TO
CAROLINE ASHBURN
Hail, dearest Caroline!—Yes, peace and liberty, with every blessing for which Sibella pants, will enter when the 'heavy gates of Valmont castle fly back' to receive her Clement.
I do not count the minutes, for that would be to make time more tedious, but I walk with a quicker step, with a firmer mien. I am ever seeking change of place, and sleep and I are almost unacquainted.
Yet other countenances wear the uniformity they did before. No matter!—but a short time; and, when I went to compare my own transports, I can look on the eye, or read the heart of Clement, and find them more than equalled.
My thoughts haste so pressingly to the future, that it requires an effort stronger than you can conceive, (you who expect no Clement) to turn them back to the detail you require.
I cannot be minute as to a conversation in which the hermit (as you call him) was chief speaker; for some parts of it I have forgotten, and others I did not understand.
He spoke with a rapidity which made him almost unintelligible; and his pauses seemed rather the effect of sudden anxiety, than of attention to my answers; he talked of escapes and accidents in a disjointed manner; so that, from his broken sentences, one might have supposed he meant I had placed him in hazard, and that I had conducted him to the Armoury. That which I remember most clearly was, the earnestness with which he urged me to lay no future restraint on myself. He said his interruptions were now ended—but, he added, and several times repeated, we should one day or other meet again; he then spoke something of dangers, but I know not whether they related to himself or me.
He was very pale, wildness and apprehension were marked on his features. He wore his hermit's hat and cloak, but the former was quite mis-shapen, and both disfigured by dust and cobwebs. Once, in the vehemence of his speech, he raised his arm, the folds of his cloak became loosened, and I saw a sword glitter beneath it.
I left him in the Armoury, nor have I entered it since. The wood is all my own again. No figure glides upon me but that my imagination loves to form.
On the day succeeding that in which I found the hermit in the Armoury, I saw Mrs. Valmont walking on the terrace. I went to her, and spoke of the circumstance. She appeared agitated by my words; she grasped my hand, and said the finger of heaven was in it; and she talked further in a strange way, of something that she called it, and it. She would not be me, she said, for worlds. I do fear the disorder has affected her intellects.
But a little interval between me and perfect happiness! I cannot write. You know, Caroline, I love you, but now, indeed, I cannot write.
Dearest Caroline, adieu.
SIBELLA VALMONT