CHAPTER XI.
It may seem perhaps a paradox to say that expectation is enjoyment. Nevertheless it is so on this earth. Fruition is for heaven. With the accomplishment of every desire, there is so much of disappointment mingled, that it cannot be really called enjoyment, for fancy always exercises itself upon the future; and when we obtain the hard reality for which we wished, the charms with which imagination decorated it are gone. Did we but state the case to ourselves as it truly is, whenever we conceive any of the manifold desires which lead us on from step to step through life, the proposition would be totally different from that which man for ever puts before his own mind, and we should take one step towards undeceiving ourselves. We continually say, "if I could attain such an object, I should be quite contented." But what man ought to say to himself is, "I believe this or that acquisition would give me happiness." He would soon find that it did not do so; and the never ceasing recurrence of the lesson might, in the end, teach him to ask what was the source of his disappointment?--Was it that other circumstances in his own fate were so altered, even while he pursued the path of endeavour, as to render attainment no longer satisfactory?--was it that the object sought was intrinsically different when attained from that which he had reasonably believed it to be while pursuing it?--or was it that his fancy had gilded it with charms not its own, and that he had voluntarily and blindly persuaded himself that it was brighter and more excellent than it was? Perhaps the answer, yes, might be returned to all these questions; but yet I fear the chief burden of deceit would rest with imagination, and that man would ever find he had judged of the future without sufficient grounds, and had suffered desire to stimulate hope, and hope to cheat expectation. Yet, perhaps, if he would but turn back and look behind, when disappointment and success had been obtained together, he would find that the pleasures tasted in the pursuit, especially at the time when fruition was drawing nearer and nearer, would, in the sum, make up the amount of enjoyment which he had anticipated in possession. I will go to a certain town, says man, and there I will spend this sum in my purse, in buying things which are necessary to my comfort and satisfaction. He travels on the road. He spends his money here, he spends his money there; and when he arrives, he finds that he has not sufficient to purchase one-half of what he proposed to buy. Yet he enjoyed himself by the way, and has no cause to complain.
If we thus decorate, as I have stated a few sentences ago, the object of desire with charms not its own, we may well say that we enjoy in anticipation even while the pursuit continues, and more especially do so where success seems to us certain, though remote. In the case of Lord Gowrie it was truly so. He looked to his union with Julia as a consummation of happiness; and he longed for the passing of the time till she should be his own for ever; but yet the days were very bright which he passed beside her in the interval. Hope went on before them and they followed; but they gathered many a flower by the way. Bound by his promise, he knew that a certain interval must elapse before their fate could be inseparably united. There was no use in hastening their movements. There was no object in hurrying on towards his native land. He felt inclined to linger amongst fair scenes, and in a climate where winter comes slowly and departs soon, by the side of her he loved, with little restraint but what his own feeling of right imposed upon him, with a sense of deep happiness in the present, and expectation to brighten the hereafter.
In Piedmont and Savoy, all danger was at an end; for while the southern and eastern parts of Italy were still under that system of tyranny and superstition which strove to control the thoughts as well as the actions of men, the states bordering on France had cast off the bondage in a considerable degree, and the power of the most cruel and arbitrary tribunal that ever was founded by man was no longer recognised.
Still there was something due to opinion, especially to the opinion of those he reverenced and loved. Doubts might naturally arise if he halted without any reasonable motive by the way; if he detained her who was to be his bride before she was his bride, in any lengthened sojourn, almost alone with him, in distant lands. They went slowly, therefore; but they still proceeded. They stopped sometimes during a whole day for rest; and for that purpose they chose the most beautiful scenes they could find--scenes which harmonised with the feelings of their own hearts. It would have been too much to expect that two beings, loving as they loved, should ride post through the most beautiful parts of Europe. Their journeys, too, were slow and short. They sought to enjoy everything worth enjoying that presented itself. They loved to see, and to comment, and to delight--to pour into each other's bosoms every thought as it arose, and to blend, as it were, their minds together as their hearts were already blended. For the deeds that were enacted round them--and there were many at that time of surpassing interest--they cared very little. What was to them what princes or potentates said or did? What was to them the shifting scenes of policy or war? They had a world apart within themselves, in which every feeling and every thought was centred. As they approached the mountains of Savoy, however, they heard some rumours of military movements, which caused alarm in the mind of Mr. Rhind. He was a very peaceable man, and somewhat timid; but Lord Gowrie treated the matter lightly, and Julia seemed hardly to comprehend that there was any danger to unwarlike persons in the strife of monarchs. Their progress, however, was rendered even slower than before, by other circumstances. Mountains to climb presented themselves at every step; roads were bad and dangerous, towns became few, and accommodation difficult to be procured. The art of the engineer had not at that time triumphed over the barriers which nature had placed between land and land, and the first fall of snow, though scanty, had added to the difficulties of the way.
The modern reader would derive little amusement or instruction from a detailed account of the passage of the Alps, in the reign of Elizabeth. Suffice it, that after a long and fatiguing day's journey, the party of Lord Gowrie arrived, towards sunset, at the small town of Barraux. Julia was weary and exhausted, Mr. Rhind was hungry and low-spirited, and nothing was to be obtained at the inn, in the way of food, but some brown bread and some small fish out of the Isere. Nevertheless, youth and hope and love made a great difference between the two younger and the elder of the travellers. The tendency, I fear, of all the experience of age, is selfish; and it is strange that the nearer we approach towards the period of quitting earth, the more we prize its comforts. True, indeed, there are some who preserve the finer things of the unworn fresh heart even unto the end; but, of all the many trials to which man's soul is subject in this state of probation, I cannot but think that a tendency to that apathy for what is great and fine, and to that concentration of the mind upon the body which are incident to old age and long experience of life, is amongst the greatest. Mr. Rhind could not enjoy at all, though the scene around him, as the reader who may have wandered that way will know, was full of objects both to soothe and to elevate. He consoled himself with the wine, which was very good, while Julia and Gowrie wandered up to the base of the old castle on the hill, to get one last look of the beautiful soft valley through which the Isere wanders on, with gentle cultivated hills hemming it round, and blue gigantic mountains towering up beyond, while the sun, set to them, still tipped the peaks with purple and with gold.
They returned slowly to their light supper, which was preparing during their absence, and shortly after, Julia retired to rest. Mr. Rhind was not long ere he left the room also; but it was a large old rambling house, which had formerly been a priory of the suppressed order of the Temple, standing near the centre of the little bourg--I think the reader can see it still--and Mr. Rhind could not find his room. He came back, and disturbed the earl in a reverie, to ask which it was; and the landlord had to be summoned to show him. If Gowrie was sleepy before, the inclination to slumber had now passed away; and he sat for some time longer in meditation. The landlord looked in at length; and remembering that he was keeping up a race of people devoted to early hours, he rose, got a taper, and retired to his own chamber. Then setting down the light, he looked around, and again fell into a fit of thought.
There are times when--we know not why--the spirit of the mind, if I may use a strange term, seems completely to triumph over the mere corporal part of our nature, to conquer its sensations, to make light of its necessities, to overcome its habitual resistance almost without an effort--times when soul seems to possess the whole, when every faculty is subdued to thought. Vain is it to struggle against it--vain to say I will read, I will sport, I will sleep. Thought replies, no; and for the time we are her slave. Such was the case with Gowrie that night; and though he gazed round the chamber as I have said, what it contained made merely an impression upon the eye, which reached not the mind within.
It was a large, wide, old-fashioned chamber, the walls of which had no hangings, although two wide pieces of a tapestry, with which the whole room had probably formerly been decorated, were drawn across the windows. On one side of the room was a large bed, almost lost in the extent of the floor, and having curtains of a dingy green hue, and of a silk stuff, the manufacture of which had even then long passed away, formerly called cendal. There was a small round table in the middle of the room, a mirror in a black oak frame standing forth from the wall, supported by two iron bars, a washing-table in the corner, and two or three chairs. That was all that it contained; and, as I have said, it was very large and very gloomy. Nevertheless, although the year was approaching winter, there was something close and oppressive in the atmosphere. It felt as if the windows had not been opened for many a year. Gowrie did not remark it, but sat down at the table and fell into thought again. He remained thus for more than an hour. I have called it thought, but yet it was of that trance-like character wherein all things seem more like impressions than ideas, when dead affections rise up from the tomb of memory in the shape of living existences, and from the future the shadows of unborn events, clad in the forms of actual realities, present themselves for warning or encouragement. There is no continuity, there is no arrangement, there is no operation of the intellect. Mind sits as a spectator while the pageant passes, called up before our eyes by some unnamed power.--What?
Who can say? There are things within us and without us that we know not of--that the hardest handed metaphysician has never been able to grasp.
In the midst of such fits the body will sometimes renew the struggle, and strive to regain its power, especially if anything affects it strongly. The earl seemed to feel the oppressive closeness of the room. He rose, went to the window near the bed, pulled down the tapestry, and threw open the rattling small-paned casement. It looked to the east; and the bright moon, within a few days of the full, peeped in from above the Alps, pouring a long line of splendour over the floor. He knew not, indeed, that he had moved. The external eye might see the casement and the moon, and the faint line of mountains flooded with silver light; but the mind saw not. It had other visions; and leaning his arms upon the bar on which played the part of the casement that opened, he remained buried in the same reverie. Its tone was melancholy--not exactly sad, but of that high grave stern cast which seems to rob the things of earth of all their unreal brightness, stripping off the gilding and the gauds, and leaving the hard leaden forms alone, while another light than that of the world's day spreads around, as if streaming from a higher sphere, and showing all the emptiness and the nakedness of the illusions of the earth.
How long he had remained thus I know not, and he himself did not know, but something--what he could never tell--made him suddenly turn round.
How shall I tell what followed? Was it an illusion of the fancy? Was it a dream? Was it a reality?--Who shall say? But there before him was a face and form well known, though never seen in life. It was that of a tall dark pale man, with traces of sickness on his face, a bloody dagger in his hand, and marks of gore upon his arm. His portrait hung in the earl's palace at Perth, though with a more glowing cheek, and in unspotted robes. But there he stood before him now, as if the grave had given up its dead, his father's father, the slayer of the hapless Rizzio. There was the same haggard look, the same ashy cheek, the same rolling eye with which he had sunk into a seat in the presence of his queen when the dreadful deed was done, and the full horror of the act was poured upon his conscience. There the same gasping movement of the lips with which he called for water to allay the burning thirst which was never to be quenched but by the cold cup of death. A pale hazy light spread around him, and he seemed to raise his hand with a menacing gesture. He spoke, or Gowrie thought he spoke, in tones low and stern, "Shall the blood of Douglas and of Ruthven mingle once more?" he said. "Shall the child of him who denied all participation in the act he prompted, and left his betrayed friend to perish in a distant land, unite her fate to the heir of him who was destroyed! Beware, boy, beware! Upon the children's children the blood of the slain shall call for vengeance; and the unborn of the dark hour shall seek a fatal retribution!"
As he spoke, the earl's head seemed to become giddy with awe and surprise, the figure vanished, all that the room contained became indistinct; and when Lord Gowrie again opened his eyes, he found himself lying across the bed with his clothes on, and with the morning light streaming brightly through the casement.