PART II.
I was at the Baths of Lucca during a season made gay by the presence of a large proportion of the agreeable and accessible court of Tuscany. The material for my untiring study was in abundance, yet it was all of the worldly character which the attractions of the place would naturally draw together, and my homage had but a choice between differences of display, in the one pursuit of admiration. In my walks through the romantic mountain-paths of the neighborhood, and along the banks of the deep-down river that threads the ravine above the village, I had often met, meantime, a lady accompanied by a well-bred and scholar-like looking man; and though she invariably dropped her veil at my approach, her admirable movement, as she walked, or stooped to pick a flower, betrayed that conscious possession of beauty and habitual confidence in her own grace and elegance, which assured me of attractions worth taking trouble to know. By one of those "unavoidable accidents" which any respectable guardian angel will contrive, to oblige one, I was a visiter to the gentleman and lady—father and daughter—soon after my curiosity had framed the desire; and in her I found a marvel of beauty, from which I looked in vain for my usual escape—that of placing the ladder of my heart against a loftier and fairer.
Mr. Wangrave was one of those English gentlemen who would not exchange the name of an ancient and immemorially wealthy family for any title that their country could give them, and he used this shield of modest honor simply to protect himself in the enjoyment of habits, freed, as far as refinement and culture could do it, from the burthens and intrusions of life above and below him. He was ceaselessly educating himself—like a man whose whole life was only too brief an apprenticeship to a higher existence—and, with an invalid but intellectual and lovely wife, and a daughter who seemed unconscious that she could love, and who kept gay pace with her youthful-hearted father in his lighter branches of knowledge, his family sufficed to itself, and had determined so to continue while abroad. The society of no Continental watering-place has a very good name, and they were there for climate and seclusion. With two ladies, who seemed to occupy the places and estimation of friends, (but who were probably the paid nurse and companion to the invalid,) and a kind-hearted old secretary to Mr. Wangrave, whose duties consisted in being as happy as he could possibly be, their circle was large enough, and it contained elements enough—except only, perhaps, the réveille that was wanting for the apparently slumbering heart of Stephania.
A month after my first call upon the Wangraves, I joined them on their journey to Vallambrosa, where they proposed to take refuge from the sultry coming of the Italian autumn. My happiness would not have been arranged after the manner of this world's happiness, if I had been the only addition to their party up the mountain. They had received with open arms, a few days before leaving Lucca, a young man from the neighborhood of their own home, and who, I saw with half a glance, was the very Eidolon and type of what Mr. Wangrave would desire as a fitting match for his daughter. From the allusions to him that had preceded his coming, I had learned that he was the heir to a brilliant fortune, and was coming to his old friends to be congratulated on his appointment to a captaincy in the Queen's Guards—as pretty a case of an "irresistible" as could well have been compounded for expectation. And when he came—the absolute model of a youth of noble beauty—all frankness, good manners, joyousness, and confidence, I summoned courage to look alternately at Stephania and him, and the hope, the daring hope that I had never yet named to myself, but which was already master of my heart, and its every pulse and capability, dropped prostrate and lifeless in my bosom. If he did but offer her the life-minute of love, of which I would give her, it seemed to me, for the same price, an eternity of countless existences—if he should but give her a careless word, where I could wring a passionate utterance out of the aching blood of my very heart—she must needs be his. She would be a star else that would resign an orbit in the fair sky, to illumine a dim cave; a flower that would rather bloom on a bleak moor, than in the garden of a king—for, with such crushing comparisons, did I irresistibly see myself as I remembered my own shape and features, and my far humbler fortunes than his, standing in her presence beside him.
Oh! how every thing contributed to enhance the beauty of that young man. How the mellow and harmonizing tenderness of the light of the Italian sky gave sentiment to his oval cheek, depth to his gray-blue eye, meaning to their overfolding and thick-fringed lashes. Whatever he said with his finely-cut lips, was looked into twenty times its meaning by the beauty of their motion in that languid atmosphere—an atmosphere that seemed only breathed for his embellishment and Stephania's. Every posture he took seemed a happy and rare accident, which a painter should have been there to see. The sunsets, the moonlight, the chance back-ground and fore-ground, of vines and rocks—every thing seemed in conspiracy to heighten his effect, and make of him a faultless picture of a lover.
"Every thing," did I say? Yes, even myself—for my uncomely face and form were such a foil to his beauty as a skillful artist would have introduced to heighten it when all other art was exhausted, and every one saw it except Stephania; and little they knew how, with perceptions far quicker than theirs, I felt their recognition of this, in the degree of softer kindness in which they unconsciously spoke to me. They pitied me, and without recognizing their own thought—for it was a striking instance of the difference in the gifts of nature—one man looking scarce possible to love, and beside him, another, of the same age, to whose mere first-seen beauty, without a word from his lips, any heart would seem unnatural not to leap in passionate surrender.
We were the best of sudden friends, Palgray and I. He, like the rest, walked only the outer vestibule of the sympathies, viewlessly deepening and extending, hour by hour, in that frank and joyous circle. The interlinkings of soul, which need no language, and which go on, whether we will or no, while we talk with friends, are so strangely unthought of by the careless and happy. He saw in me no counter-worker to his influence. I was to him but a well-bred and extremely plain man, who tranquilly submitted to forego all the first prizes of life, content if I could contribute to society in its unexcited voids, and receive in return only the freedom of its outer intercourse, and its friendly esteem. But, oh! it was not in the same world that he and I knew Stephania. He approached her from the world in whose most valued excellences, beauty and wealth, he was pre-eminently gifted—I, from the viewless world, in which I had at least more skill and knowledge. In the month that I had known her before he came, I had sedulously addressed myself to a character within her, of which Palgray had not even a conjecture; and there was but one danger of his encroachment on the ground I had gained—her imagination might supply in him the nobler temple of soul-worship, which was still unbuilt, and which would never be builded except by pangs such as he was little likely to feel in the undeepening channel of happiness. He did not notice that I never spoke to her in the same key of voice to which the conversation of others was attuned. He saw not that, while she turned to him with a smile as a preparation to listen, she heard my voice as if her attention had been arrested by distant music—with no change in her features except a look more earnest. She would have called him to look with her at a glowing sunset, or to point out a new comer in the road from the village; but if the moon had gone suddenly into a cloud and saddened the face of the landscape, or if the wind had sounded mournfully through the trees, as she looked out upon the night, she would have spoken of that first to me.