"No, sir," interrupted Lucille, faintly, "I am better, I am well. This arm, if you please—we are not far from your hotel now."
But the stranger's ear, tutored to every inflection of voice, told him at once of the pain she suffered; he drew from her by degrees the confession of the injury she had sustained; but the generous girl did not tell him it had been incurred solely in his protection. He now insisted on reversing their duties, and accompanying her to her home; and Lucille, almost fainting with pain, and hardly able to move, was forced to consent. But a few steps down the next turning stood the humble mansion of her father—they reached it—and Lucille scarcely crossed the threshold, before she sank down, and for some minutes was insensible to pain. It was left to the stranger to explain, and to beseech them immediately to send for a surgeon, "the most skilful—the most practised in town," said he. "See, I am rich, and this is the least I can do to atone to your generous daughter for not forsaking even a stranger in peril."
He held out his purse as he spoke, but the father refused the offer; and it saved the blind man some shame that he could not see the blush of honest resentment with which so poor a species of remuneration was put aside.
The young man staid till the surgeon arrived, till the arm was set; nor did he depart until he had obtained a promise from the mother, that he should learn the next morning how the sufferer had passed the night.
The next morning, indeed, he had intended to quit a town that offers but little temptation to the traveller; but he tarried day after day, until Lucille herself accompanied her mother to assure him of her recovery.
You know, or at least I do, dearest Gertrude, that there is such a thing as love at the first meeting—a secret and unaccountable affinity between persons (strangers before,) which draws them irresistibly together. If there were truth in Plato's beautiful phantasy, that our souls were a portion of the stars, it might be, that spirits thus attracted to each other, have drawn their original light from the same orb; and they thus but yearn for a renewal of their former union. Yet, without recurring to such ideal solutions of a daily mystery, it was but natural that one in the forlorn and desolate condition of Eugene St. Amand, should have felt a certain tenderness for a person who had so generously suffered for his sake.
The darkness to which he was condemned did not shut from his mind's eye the haunting images of ideal beauty; rather, on the contrary, in his perpetual and unoccupied solitude, he fed the reveries of an imagination naturally warm, and a heart eager for sympathy.
He had said rightly that his only test of beauty was in the melody of voice; and never had a softer or a more thrilling tone than that of the young maiden touched upon his ear. Her exclamation, so beautifully denying self, so devoted in its charity, "Thank God, you are saved!" uttered too, in the moment of her own suffering, rang constantly upon his soul, and he yielded, without precisely defining their nature, to vague and delicious sentiments, that his youth had never awakened to till then. And Lucille—the very accident that had happened to her on his behalf, only deepened the interest she had already conceived for one who, in the first flush of youth, was thus cut off from the glad objects of life, and led to a night of years, desolate and alone. There is, to your beautiful and kindly sex, a perpetual and gushing lovingness to protect. This makes them the angels of sickness, the comforters of age, the fosterers of childhood; and this feeling, in Lucille peculiarly developed, had already inexpressibly linked her compassionate nature to the lot of the unfortunate traveller. With ardent affections, and with thoughts beyond her station and her years, she was not without that modest vanity which made her painfully susceptible to her own deficiencies in beauty. Instinctively conscious of how deeply she herself could love, she believed it impossible that she could ever be so loved in return. This stranger, so superior in her eyes to all she had yet seen, was the first out of her own household who had ever addressed her in that voice, which by tones, not words, speaks that admiration most dear to a woman's heart. To him she was beautiful, and her lovely mind spoke out undimmed by the imperfections of her face. Not, indeed, that Lucille was wholly without personal attraction; her light step and graceful form were elastic with the freshness of youth, and her mouth and smile had so gentle and tender an expression, that there were moments when it would not have been the blind only who would have mistaken her to be beautiful. Her early childhood had indeed given the promise of attractions, which the small-pox, that then fearful malady, had inexorably marred. It had not only seared the smooth skin and the brilliant hues, but utterly changed even the character of the features. It so happened that Lucille's family were celebrated for beauty, and vain of that celebrity; and so bitterly had her parents deplored the effects of the cruel malady, that poor Lucille had been early taught to consider them far more grievous than they really were, and to exaggerate the advantages of that beauty, the loss of which was considered by her parents so heavy a misfortune. Lucille too, had a cousin named Julie, who was the wonder of all Malines for her personal perfections; and as the cousins were much together, the contrast was too striking not to occasion frequent mortification to Lucille. But every misfortune has something of a counterpoise; and the consciousness of personal inferiority, had meekened, without souring, her temper—had given gentleness to a spirit that otherwise might have been too high, and humility to a mind that was naturally strong, impassioned, and energetic.
And yet Lucille had long conquered the one disadvantage she most dreaded in the want of beauty. Lucille was never known but to be loved. Wherever came her presence, her bright and soft mind diffused a certain inexpressible charm; and where she was not, a something was missing from the scene which not even Julie's beauty could replace.
"I propose," said St. Amand to Madame le Tisseur, Lucille's mother, as he sat in her little salon,—for he had already contracted that acquaintance with the family which permitted him to be led to their house, to return the visits Madame le Tisseur had made him, and his dog, once more returned a penitent to his master, always conducted his steps to the humble abode, and stopped instinctively at the door,—"I propose," said St. Amand, after a pause, and with some embarrassment, "to stay a little while longer at Malines; the air agrees with me, and I like the quiet of the place; but you are aware, Madame, that at a hotel among strangers, I feel my situation somewhat cheerless. I have been thinking"—St. Amand paused again—"I have been thinking that if I could persuade some agreeable family to receive me as a lodger, I would fix myself here for some weeks. I am easily pleased."