Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848

by Various

To most observers, Stephania Wangrave would have seemed only born to be gay—the mere habit of being happy having made its life-long imprint upon her expression of countenance, and all of her nature, that would be legible to a superficial reader, being brought out by the warm translucence of her smiles. But while I had seen this, in the first hour of my study of her, I was too advanced in my knowledge (of such works of nature as encroach on the models of Heaven) not to know this to be a light veil over a picture of melancholy meaning. Sadness was the tone of her mind's inner coloring. Tears were the subterranean river upon which her soul's bark floated with the most loved freight of her thought's accumulation—the sunny waters of joy, where alone she was thought to voyage, being the tide on which her heart embarked no venture, and which seemed to her triflingly garish and even profaning to the hallowed delicacy of the inner nature.

It was so strange to me that Palgray did not see this through every lineament of her marvelous beauty. There was a glow under her skin, but no color—an effect of paleness—fair as the lotus-leaf, but warmer and brighter, and which came through the alabaster fineness of the grain, like something the eye cannot define, but which we know by some spirit-perception to be the effluence of purer existence, the breathing through, as it were, of the luminous tenanting of an angel. To this glowing paleness, with golden hair, I never had seen united any but a disposition of predominant melancholy; and it seemed to me dull indeed otherwise to read it. But there were other betrayals of the same inner nature of Stephania. Her lips, cut with the fine tracery of the penciling upon a tulip-cup, were of a slender and delicate fullness, expressive of a mind which took—(of the senses)—only so much life as would hold down the spirit during its probation; and when this spiritual mouth was at rest, no painter has ever drawn lips on which lay more of the unutterable pensiveness of beauty which we dream to have been Mary's, in the childhood of Jesus. A tear in the heart was the instinctive answer to Stephania's every look when she did not smile; and her large, soft, slowly-lifting eyes, were to any elevated perception, it seemed to me, most eloquent of tenderness as tearful as it was unfathomable and angelic.

I shall have failed, however, in portraying truly the being of whom I am thus privileged to hold the likeness in my memory, if the reader fancies her to have nurtured her pensive disposition at the expense of a just value for real life, or a full development of womanly feelings. It was a peculiarity of her beauty, to my eye, that, with all her earnest leaning toward a thoughtful existence, there did not seem to be one vein beneath her pearly skin, not one wavy line in her faultless person, that did not lend its proportionate consciousness to her breathing sense of life. Her bust was of the slightest fullness which the sculptor would choose for the embodying of his ideal of the best blending of modesty with complete beauty; and her throat and arms—oh, with what an inexpressible pathos of loveliness, so to speak, was moulded, under an infantine dewiness of surface, their delicate undulations. No one could be in her presence without acknowledging the perfection of her form as a woman, and rendering the passionate yet subdued homage which the purest beauty fulfills its human errand by inspiring; but, while Palgray made the halo which surrounded her outward beauty the whole orbit of his appreciation, and made of it, too, the measure of the circle of topics he chose to talk upon, there was still another and far wider ring of light about her, which he lived in too dazzling a gayety of his own to see—a halo of a mind more beautiful than the body which shut it in; and in this intellectual orbit of guidance to interchange of mind, with manifold deeper and higher reach than Palgray's, upon whatever topic chanced to occur, revolved I, around her who was the loveliest and most gifted of all the human beings I had been privileged to meet.

PART IV.

The month was expiring at Vallambrosa, but I had not mingled, for that length of time, with a fraternity of thoughtful men, without recognition of some of that working of spontaneous and elective magnetism to which I have alluded in a previous part of this story. Opposite me, at the table of the convent refectory, had sat a taciturn monk, whose influence I felt from the first day—a stronger consciousness of his presence, that is to say, than of any one of the other monks—though he did not seem particularly to observe me, and till recently had scarce spoken to me at all. He was a man of perhaps fifty years of age, with the countenance of one who had suffered and gained a victory of contemplation—a look as if no suffering could be new to him, and before whom no riddle of human vicissitudes could stay unread; but over all this penetration and sagacity was diffused a cast of genial philanthropy and good-fellowship which told of his forgiveness of the world for what he had suffered in it. With a curiosity more at leisure, I should have sought him out, and joined him in his walks to know more of him; but spiritually acquainted though I felt we had become, I was far too busy with head and heart for any intercourse, except it had a bearing on the struggle for love that I was, to all appearance, so hopelessly making.

Preparations were beginning for departure, and with the morrow, or the day after, I was to take my way to Venice—my friends bound to Switzerland and England, and propriety not permitting me to seek another move in their company. The evening on which this was made clear to me, was one of those continuations of day into night made by the brightness of a full Italian moon; and Palgray, whose face, troubled, for the first time, betrayed to me that he was at a crisis of his fate with Stephania, evidently looked forward to this glowing night as the favorable atmosphere in which he might urge his suit, with nature pleading in his behalf. The reluctance and evident irresolution of his daughter puzzled Mr. Wangrave—for he had no doubt that she loved Palgray, and his education of her head and heart gave him no clue to any principle of coquettishness, or willingness to give pain, for the pleasure of an exercise of power. Her mother, and all the members of the party, were aware of the mystery that hung over the suit of the young guardsman, but they were all alike discreet, while distressed, and confined their interference to the removal of obstacles in the way of the lovers being together, and the avoidance of any topics gay enough to change the key of her spirits from the natural softness of the evening.

Vespers were over, and the sad-colored figures of the monks were gliding indolently here and there, and Stephania, with Palgray beside her, stood a little apart from the group at the door of the secular refectory, looking off at the fading purple of the sunset. I could not join her without crossing rudely the obvious wishes of every person present; yet for the last two days, I had scarce found the opportunity to exchange a word with her, and my emotion now was scarce controllable. The happier lover beside her, with his features heightened in expression (as I thought they never could be) by his embarrassment in wooing, was evidently and irresistibly the object of her momentary admiration. He offered her his arm, and made a movement toward the path off into the forest. There was an imploring deference infinitely becoming in his manner, and see it she must, with pride and pleasure. She hesitated—gave a look to where I stood, which explained to me better than a world of language, that she had wished at least to speak to me on this last evening—and, before the dimness over my eyes had passed away, they were gone. Oh! pitying Heaven! give me never again, while wrapt in mortal weakness, so harsh a pang to suffer.

PART V.

The convent-bell struck midnight, and there was a foot-fall in the cloister. I was startled by it out of an entire forgetfulness of all around me, for I was lying on my bed in the monastery cell, with my hands clasped over my eyes, as I had thrown myself down on coming in; and, with a strange contrariety, my mind, broken rudely from its hope, had flown to my far away home, oblivious of the benumbed links that lay between. A knock at my door completed the return to my despair, for with a look at the walls of my little chamber, in the bright beam of moonlight that streamed in at the narrow window, I was, by recognition, again at Vallambrosa, and Stephania, with an accepted lover's voice in her ear, was again near me, her moistened eyes steeped with Palgray's in the same beam of the all-visiting and unbetraying moon.

Father Ludovic entered. The gentle tone of his benedicite, told me that he had come on an errand of sympathy. There was little need of preliminary between two who read the inner countenance as habitually as did both of us; and as briefly as the knowledge and present feeling of each could be re-expressed in words, we confirmed the spirit-mingling that had brought him there, and were presently as one. He had read truly the drama of love, enacting in the party of visiters to his convent, but his judgment of the possible termination of it was different from mine.