Adieu! Direct as usual: for though I certainly mean to accept the invitation of a Prince, yet I intend, in a few days, to return home, to obviate suspicion, and to have my books and wardrobe removed to the Lodge, which now possesses a stronger magnet of attraction than when I first fixed on it as my headquarters.
LETTER VII.
TO J. D. ESQ., M. P.
This is the sixth day of my convalescence, and the first of my descent from my western tower; for I find it is literally in a tower, or turret, which terminates a wing of these ruins, I have been lodged. These good people, however, would have persuaded me into the possession of a slow fever, and confined me to my room another day, had not the harp of Glorvina, with “supernatural solicitings,” spoken more irresistibly to my heart than all their eloquence.
I have just made my toilette, for the first time since my arrival at the castle; and with a black ribbon of the nurse’s across my forehead, and a silk handkerchief of the priest’s supporting my arm, with my own “customary suit of solemn black,” tintless cheek, languid eye, and pensive air, I looked indeed as though “melancholy had marked me for her own or an excellent personification of pining atrophy” in its last stage of decline.
While I contemplated my memento mori of a figure in the glass, I heard a harp tuning in an underneath apartment. The Prince I knew had not yet left his bed, for his infirmities seldom permit him to rise early; the priest had rode out; and the venerable figure of the old harper at that moment gave a fine effect to a ruined arch under which he was passing, led by a boy, just opposite my window. “It is Glorwna then,” said I, “and alone!” and down I sallied; but not with half the intrepidity that Sir Bertram followed the mysterious blue flame along the corridors of the enchanted castle.
A thousand times since my arrival in this transmundane region, I have had reason to feel how much we are the creatures of situation; how insensibly our minds and our feelings take their tone from the influence of existing circumstances. You have seen me frequently the very prototype of nonchalence, in the midst of a circle of birthday beauties, that might have put the fabled charms of the Mount Ida triumviri to the blush of inferiority. Yet here I am, groping my way down the dismantled stone stairs of a ruined castle in the wilds of Connaught, with my heart fluttering like the pulse of green eighteen, in the presence of its first love, merely because on the point of appearing before a simple rusticated girl, whose father calls himself a prince, with a potatoe ridge for his dominions! O! with what indifference I should have met her in the drawingroom, or at the opera!—there she would have been merely a woman!—here she is the fairy vision of my heated fancy.
Well, having finished the same circuitous journey that a squirrel diurnally performs in his cage, I found myself landed in a stone passage, which was terminated by the identical chamber of fatal memory already mentioned, and through the vista of a huge folding door, partly thrown back, beheld the form of Glorvina! She was alone, and bending over her harp; one arm was gracefully thrown over the instrument, which she was tuning; with the other she was lightly modulating on its chords.
Too timid to proceed, yet unwilling to retreat, I was still hovering near the door, when turning round, she observed me, and I advanced. She blushed to the eyes, and returned my profound bow with a slight inclination of the head, as if I were unworthy a more marked obeisance.