From this onward, until the day of their separation, the spirits of our young lovers were more and more overcast, and the mirthful intercourse of confident love altogether gone. Their communion was now marked by despondency and by tears, for the most part shed during their confidential interviews with each other. In company they were silent and dejected, and ever as their eyes met in long and loving glances, they could scarcely repress their grief. Sometimes, indeed, Jane on being spoken to, after a considerable silence, would attempt in vain to reply, her quivering voice and tearful eyes affording unequivocal proof of the subject which engaged her heart. Their friends, of course, endeavored to console and sustain them on both sides; and frequently succeeded in soothing them into a childlike resignation to the necessity that occasioned the dreary period of absence that lay before them. These intervals of patience, however, did not last long; the spirits of our young lovers were, indeed, disquieted within them, and the heart of each drooped under the severest of all its calamities—the pain of loss for that object which is dearest to its affections.
It was arranged that, on the day previous to Charles’ departure, Osborne’s family should dine at Mr. Sinclair’s; for they knew that the affliction caused by their separation would render it necessary that Jane, on that occasion, should be under her own roof, and near the attention and aid of her friends. Mr. Osborne almost regretted the resolution to which he had come of sending his son to travel, for he feared that the effect of absence from the fair girl to whom he was so deeply attached, might possibly countervail the benefits arising from a more favorable climate; but as he had already engaged the services of an able and experienced tutor, who on two or three previous occasions had been over the Continent, he expected, reasonably enough, that novelty, his tutor’s good sense, and the natural elasticity of youth would soon efface a sorrow in general so transient, and in due time restore him to his usual spirits. He consequently adhered to his resolution—the day of departure was fixed, and arrangements made for the lovers to separate, as we have already intimated.
Jane Sinclair, from the period when Osborne’s attachment and hers was known and sanctioned by their friends, never slept a night from her beloved sister Agnes; nor had any other person living, not even Osborne himself, such an opportunity as Agnes had of registering in the record of a sisterly heart so faithful a transcript of her love.
On the night previous to their leave taking, Agnes was astonished at the coldness of her limbs, and begged her to allow additional covering to be put on the bed.
“No, dear Agnes, no; only grant me one favor—do not speak to me—leave my heart to its own sorrows—to its own misery—to its own despair; for, Agnes, I feel a presentiment that I shall never see him again.”
She pressed her lips against Agnes’ cheek when she had concluded, and Agnes almost started, for that lip hitherto so glowing and warm, felt hard and cold as marble.
Osborne, who for some time past had spent almost every day at Mr. Sinclair’s, arrived the next morning ere the family had concluded breakfast. Jane immediately left the table, for she had tasted nothing but a cup of tea, and placing herself beside him on the sofa, looked up mournfully into his face for more than a minute; she then caught his hand, and placing it between hers, gazed upon him again, and smiled. The boy saw at once that the smile was a smile of misery, and that the agony of separation was likely to be too much for her to bear. The contrast at that moment between them both was remarkable. She pale, cold, and almost abstracted from the perception of her immediate grief; he glowing in the deep carmine of youth and apparent health—his eye as well as hers sparkling with a light which the mere beauty of early life never gives. Alas, poor things! little did they, or those to whom they were so very dear, imagine that, as they then gazed upon each other, each bore in lineaments so beautiful the symptoms of the respective maladies that were to lay them low.
“I wish, Jane, you would try and get up your spirits, love, and see and be entertaining to poor Charles, as this is the last day he is to be with you.”
She looked quickly at her mother, “The I last, mamma?”
“I mean for a while, dear, until after his I return from the Continent.”