“It was,” said he, “just such a summer night as this, and, though in a foreign country, amidst scenes of which these woodland hills remind me, that the world seemed to me to have changed into a Fairyland; and, looking into my heart, I said to myself, ‘This, then, is—love.’ And a little while after, on such a night, and under such a moon, and amidst such hills and groves, the world seemed blighted into a desert—life to be evermore without hope or object; and, looking again into my heart, I said, ‘This, then, is love denied!’”
“Alas!” answered I, “there are few men in whose lives there is not some secret memoir of an affection thwarted; but rarely indeed does an affection thwarted leave a permanent influence on the after-destinies of a man’s life. On that question I meditate an essay, which, if ever printed, I will send to you.”
I said this, wishing to draw him on, and expecting him to contradict my assertion as to the enduring influence of a disappointed love. He mused a moment or so in silence, and then said, “Well, perhaps so; an unhappy love may not permanently affect our after-destinies, still it colours our after-thoughts. It is strange that I should have only seen, throughout my long and various existence, one woman whom I could have wooed as my wife—one woman in whose presence I felt as if I were born for her and she for me.”
“May I ask you what was her peculiar charm in your eyes; or, if you permit me to ask, can you explain it?”
“No doubt,” answered Tracey, “much must be ascribed to the character of her beauty, which realised the type I had formed to myself from boyhood of womanly loveliness in form and face, and much also to a mind with which a man, however cultivated, could hold equal commune. But to me her predominating attraction was in a simple, unassuming nobleness of sentiment—a truthful, loyal, devoted, self-sacrificing nature. In her society I felt myself purified, exalted, as if in the presence of an angel. But enough of this. I am resigned to my loss, and have long since hung my votive tablet in the shrine of ‘Time the Consoler.’”
“Forgive me if I am intrusive; but did she know that you loved her?”
“I cannot say; probably most women discover if they are loved; but I rejoice to think that I never told her so.”
“Would she have rejected you if you had?”
“Yes, unhesitatingly; her word was plighted to another. And though she would not, for the man to whom she had betrothed herself, have left her father alone in poverty and exile, she would never have married any one else.”
“You believe, then, that she loved your rival with a heart that could not change?”