A NAMELESS ROMANCE.
I have a leisure hour to spend now and then, and I spend it in rambling round the city where I dwell. Perhaps some of you may think this is poor enjoyment, but it does not seem so to me. True, were I young and rich, I might seek my pleasures farther afield—on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, or in the gay gardens of France. I might bask more in the smile of gentle dames, forgetting my loneliness, as one forgets in the sunshine that only a moment before the sky hung black with clouds. But I am neither young nor rich; and even if I were, it seems to me that no place in the world could ever be so dear as those lanes and meadows I love so well.
Yes; I am old now, and chilly sometimes at night when the fire gets low, wearing a greatcoat even on the summer days, and shivering often when the zephyrs fan my face. But I am kept young by my love for nature; I woo her as amorously as ever maid was wooed by swain, and she is not afraid to press her rosy lips to mine, yellow and withered as they are, and to twine her lovely arms round my neck. I love her for her hopefulness, for her inexhaustible store of youth. Everywhere with love she rebukes poor mortals for sitting down sad with folded hands, and with a glad voice bids them be up and doing. She is irrepressible. You may crush her down with stony hand and plaster over every vestige of her beauty, and then say to yourself, in pride of heart, ‘I have made a city, a place for commerce and traffic, and pleasure and sorrow;’ and yet, turn your back for an instant, lo! a little blade of grass comes up between the stones of the causeway and laughs in your very face. We may build our houses up story upon story, with the dingy attic at the top, for women’s hearts to break in, and the squalid court beneath in which little children may get their first taint of sin; but a gleam of sunshine will day after day work its way down to the very centre of the filth and squalidness, and a rose will bud and bloom in some poor man’s window, blushing back with pleasure into the face of its kindly keeper.
Then think how charitable she is, how slow to return an insult, how cheerfully she bears an affront. I often think—though, of course, it is but the vagary of an old dreamer—that those who build up masses of brick and mortar would be well repaid if nature left a sterile belt round their work, a belt gray and cold as their own walls. But no! She takes no such revenge as this. Long before the city-smoke has mingled with the clouds, or the hum of city-life died away, we come on patches of green, smiling us a welcome; on trees, too, sprouting forth in beauty, or draped with leaves and flowers, nodding to us in a grave and stately way, as if to show that they at least bear no grudge, and are prepared to be friendly in spite of all rebuffs. Ruminating thus, many a lesson have I learned on charity and forgiveness.
Nor are my rambles unromantic, though the scenes are no longer strange. Every house and farm has become familiar to me. I have seen a generation or two of cowboys develop into ploughmen, wed themselves to rosy dairymaids, and go their ways. I have beguiled idle hours in weaving webs of fancy round their married lives, listening for the merry laughter of children in their cottages, and watching for the glad light of love on many a mother’s face. And as with men and women, so with things. The old castle with its turreted walls and secret passages has furnished me much food for thought. I have recalled in fancy the noble men and fair women who used to tread its halls, their courtly, gallant ways, their feasts and tournaments; and, as I stand in the chambers, girt with gray stone and canopied by heaven, I can see the coats of mail still on the walls, and hear through the mist of years the voice of some gay warrior recounting his triumphs in the field. And many a story, too, have I heard from the rustic people about the old gray house which stands in the hollow among the trees. You see, I am old enough to pat the comely maidens on the shoulder without exciting the ire of their brawny lovers, and to chat, too, with impunity to the buxom matrons in the cottages while their husbands sit smoking by the fireside. And thus it was I heard the story of the Old House in the Hollow. I had often wondered if it did contain a secret, so silent was it, so forbidding in aspect, with its old porch black with age, and its windows stained and weather-beaten. It looked so grim, that I used to think it, too, must have witnessed deeds of blood, and taken the best way to avoid detection by standing for evermore in gloomy silence. It stood among thick foliage, so thick, that even on a summer day but a stray sunbeam or two rested on its blackened walls, wavering and timorous, as if scared at their bravery in venturing so far. The carriage-road from the gate to the door had faded out of sight, and there was nothing around but grass, heavy and dark-coloured, with the weeds that grew among it. The woman in the cottage not far off was glad enough to give me the key of the rusty iron gate which admitted to the grounds, and there I used to wander, more from curiosity than pleasure. But I always felt morbid under the old trees; and the grass, too, was so thick and rank, that it was like walking over deserted graves.
In that old garden, said the villagers, a lady in a white mantle used to walk among the trees, and look with yearning glance towards the windows of the old house. There I have waited for her, but she never came; for, through habit, I have fallen into believing the stories I hear. Perhaps the sunshine frightened her away; perhaps, from long living in the shades, her eyes had grown too weak to bear the light; perhaps she cared not that strangers should share her grief, and wished to mourn there alone, with the darkness for her friend, and the winds sighing comfort to her among the trees. Whatever the reason was, I never met her face to face in that gloomy hollow. Yet, although she was so fair and young, the older villagers could not tell her tale without a shudder; and though the lads and lasses laughed aloud, yet it was a wavering, uncertain laugh, which died on their lips, and left a silence all the more profound.
Forty years had passed since the oaken door creaked on its hinges to admit the master and his fair young bride; and a year later, it had closed on her as they bore her away to sleep in the churchyard, to the grave that had proved too small for her wandering, restless spirit. On that day, cold, and with a drizzling, chilling rain, the small cortège passed through the gate, a man walking behind, with head bent and eyes cast on the ground, his face calm, but chill and gray as the sky. And if the curious one had turned his eyes on the house, he would have seen, at an upper window, a woman’s figure, clad in mourning, with head bent, intently watching the pallbearers as they wound along the muddy road. Had the curious one cared to look closer, he might have seen the gleam of triumph in her eyes—dark, flashing, coal-black eyes—as she watched the tall bent figure walk behind with such a weary, listless step. But soon a turn in the road hid the company from view, and the window was empty again.
One year had sufficed to darken the brightness of that fair young life. Did it ever strike you, reader, that some men and women seem to have had a sunlight bath before entering this world, so destined are they to make everything around them pure and good; while others, wafted from the regions of gloom, cast all around them the shadow of death? Into this baleful darkness had the young bride fallen, and in it her spirit had been quenched. She loved her husband truly, that tall, bronzed man, who had come from the Indies to woo her in the sunny lanes of her own England. Right glad, too, had she been to become mistress of his old home. For months, no spot had come on their home-picture. He was happy in his treasure; she, too, in her simple life in the village, where, from her kindness, she already was receiving the homage due to a queen. But one day, when the snow was on the ground and the flowers were dead, a woman came to the Old House in the Hollow. She was dark, and radiantly beautiful, with the beauty that blossoms under western skies. She neither asked nor received leave to stay as a member of the family circle in the old house, but there was no one to oppose her action. The master was her cousin, she said; and even as she spoke, the gleam in her eyes gave her words the lie. Yet he said nothing, for suddenly he had grown silent and cold, avoiding even the wistful, questioning glances of his wife.
The shadow spread slowly over the house, up the staircases, into the nooks and corners of the rooms, laying its black hand now on this and now on that, but nowhere so strongly as on the heart of the young mistress. Her rippling laughter changed to sighs, her bright smiles were replaced by downcast looks; she passed from summer to winter with no mellowing autumn days to make the change less sad. It was not that the woman, who had come so strangely, sought the love of her husband, or in any other way attempted to dispel the sunshine of her life; she simply dwelt with them, nay, was friendly enough at times; but the dark dress which she wore, and the masses of dark hair which at times she would let fall about her shoulders, seemed indicative of the moral cloud which was slowly gathering over their lives. The lily drooped day by day for want of sunlight. She became morbid, nervous, full of strange and wayward fancies. She thought the love of her husband was dead; and she took to dressing herself in her wedding garb, to try if by that strange way she might make it live again. Clad in the soft, lustrous satins—in which as a happy bride she had blushed and smiled in the little English church but a few months before—she would pace her room for hours, and stand, too, longingly before the glass, peering wistfully to see if aught of her charm were gone. In this garb, too, she would walk among the old trees, and deck her bosom with the snowdrops of spring; but they seemed to wither away at her touch and hang listless and dead. Thus it was, one day she was found sitting among the trees on the fresh spring grass, some faded snowdrops in her lifeless hand, her golden hair surmounting a face darkened with some mysterious presence. A pale gleam of spring sunlight had crept down and settled on her brow; but it was out of place, and timid as the sunbeams which I have seen playing on the old house itself.
Thus quietly as the gliding of a river did her spirit depart, or rather was effaced, as a cloud can hide the silver moon from us for a time. And so, they tell me, she can be seen at times in the old garden, just as, when the clouds grow faint, the welcome shafts of light come down to assure us that their mother orb still lives.