CHAPTER XXXIV.
The first employment in which I purposed to engage my new-found liberty and youth, was a visit to my daughters. I now carried a disguise perpetually about with me, that would render my journey incapable of proving injurious to them. My daughters were all that remained, if indeed they still remained, of my once idolised family. For twelve years I had continued totally ignorant of their fortune, and even of their existence. Part of the plan I had adopted for their advantage necessarily precluded me from all correspondence or communication with them or any one near them, that might satisfy and tranquillise the anxieties of a father. If it had been otherwise, deprived, as I had been, of the common benefits of light and air, and cast out from the society of mankind, I could have obtained no intelligence of their welfare. In visiting, I determined not to make myself known to them; yet, notwithstanding the greatness of this disadvantage, I felt that one of the most exquisite gratifications the earth could afford me was to behold my children. What a multitude of adventures and incidents might they not have encountered in the space of twelve years! Imagination and affection dwell impatiently on the interval; nor can any thing quiet the conjectures of him that loves, short of the most complete information. What a difference must twelve years have produced in the very persons and figures of creatures so young? With what mingled and exquisite emotions does the father contemplate his daughter, whom he left a child, grown up into a woman? He sees her with astonishment and rapture, displaying maturer beauties, discovering in her countenance new traces of knowledge and sentiment, and in her gesture and manners a character finished, matronly, and sedate. The very circumstance that I should visit them unknown, and converse intimately with them without being discovered, while it cut me off from many pure and ingenuous pleasures, added in some respects a new relish to the indulgence; for it gave it a character, singular, and perhaps unprecedented, in the history of mankind. I anticipated with eager transport the hour at which I should revisit the place of my birth, wander amidst the shades where my careless infancy had strayed, recognise objects made sacred to my heart by associations with my venerable mother and my adorable wife, now illumined with the presence of my children, and steal a joy, unsuspected and unknown, to which the very secrecy with which it was ravished would give a tenfold gust.
I embraced the nearest route, by Pampeluna and the Pyrenees, to the banks of the Garonne. One particular pleasure that I reaped during this tour, which the climate and scenery might alone have rendered delightful, consisted in the youthful sensation with which every thing I saw was enjoyed. Every one who can call to mind the amusements of his childhood will be conscious that during that period all his senses were in a tone adapted to convey the most exquisite gratification. This is not merely, as is vulgarly supposed, the result of the novelty and freshness with which at that time every thing strikes us. The extremities of the nerves are in a state of the most delicate susceptibility, upon which no touch, however slight and evanescent, is lost, and which makes us, upon every occasion favourable to enjoyment, gasp and tremble with the pleasure we imbibe. We feel it thrilling through every pulse, and communicating its tone to every part. Our attention is engrossed by a single object; or, if we are sensible to accompanying incidents, it spreads over them an animating sunshine, and totally varies their appearance and hue. Age, on the contrary, imperceptibly brings along with it callosity and sluggishness of sensation, our gratifications are coldly relished, and our desires feebly awakened. Such is the difference in our perception, of delicious fruits, of fragrant smells, of smooth and glossy surfaces, of the vividness of colour, and the heavenly sweetness of sound. If this be a just account, I leave the reader to imagine how I enjoyed my tour from Valladolid to the beautiful and romantic retirement of St. Leon.
There was however one sentiment with which I was at this time impressed, that I shall find it difficult to make the reader understand in the extent in which I felt it, and that formed a powerful drawback upon the pleasures I have just described. A short time ago I had been old; now I was young: I had quaffed of the elixir of immortality. The revolution this had produced in my sentiments was not less memorable than that which it had effected in my corporeal lineaments and my mental elasticity. It is so different a thing to conceive a proposition theoretically, and to experience it in practice! The case is parallel to that of the expectation which an ordinary Christian entertains of eternal bliss. It is an article in his creed; he repeats it every night when he lies down, and every morning when he rises. He would be both offended and surprised if you told him he was not persuaded of it; and yet how faint and indistinct a picture it produces in his intellectual retina! The affairs of the world strike him with all the force of vision; to them he cannot make himself a stranger and a pilgrim; he cannot transfer all his affections to the mere creature of his imagination, engendered in solitude, and nurtured by enthusiasm,—heaven. How different must have been the feelings of the celebrated apostle, who had been taken up into the third heaven, and had beheld the new Jerusalem with all its jaspers, its chrysolites, its emeralds, and its sapphires!
My situation was similar to this. I had long known, as far as reflection could assure me of it, that I possessed the elixir of immortality. But never till now had I felt the julep tingling in my veins, and known the effects of it in every joint and articulation of my frame. I before believed, I now felt, that I was immortal. The consequence of this intimate persuasion was not without its portion of melancholy. I still bore the figure and lineaments of a human creature; but I knew that I was not what I seemed. There was a greater distance between me and the best constructed and most consummate of the human species, than there is between him and an ant or a muskito, crushed by the first accidental tread, or consumed by the first spark wafted by the wind. I can no longer cheat my fancy; I know that I am alone. The creature does not exist with whom I have any common language, or any genuine sympathies. Society is a bitter and galling mockery to my heart; it only shows in more glaring colours my desolate condition. The nearer I attempt to draw any of the nominal ties of our nature, the more they start and shrink from my grasp. From this moment I could not shake off the terrible impression of my loneliness; no, not for an hour. Often does this impression induce me to regard my immortality with loathing indescribable; often do I wish to shelter myself from it in the sweet oblivion of the grave. From this hour I had no passions, no interests, no affections; my heart has never expanded with one natural emotion; I have never delivered myself up to the repose of one genuine amusement. If at any time I have had a glimpse of pleasure, it has irritated, only to deceive; it has increased the appetite, while it displayed in stronger colours my impotence to gratify it. What is worse, every added year has still subtracted something from the little poignancy and relish which the bowl of human life continued to retain. I have the power of assuming a youthful and glossy appearance whenever I think proper; but this is only a bitter mockery of the furrows ploughed in my heart. In so much of my adventures as remains for me to describe, I feel that I shall be obliged to employ the established terms of human description. I cannot interrupt the history of my sensations, by a recital of those pangs by which they have been every moment interrupted. The terms I must use may delude the reader into an imagination that I still participate of enjoyment and of hope. Be it so; they may cheat the reader; they cannot cheat myself!
Previously to my arrival in the vicinity of the Garonne, I equipped myself in the habit of an Armenian, and assumed the character of a merchant travelling from country to country for the sale of his commodities.
It was in the close of a wintry day in the bleak and cheerless month of December, that I first viewed from a distance the turrets of St. Leon. I procured myself accommodations for the night in the adjoining village. Being now, after so long an absence, within reach of the residence of these lovely treasures, I sought, without any direct consciousness of the sentiment, to delay our interview. When I entered the little auberge, sheltered under a small plantation of olives, I dreaded to hear the repetition of my family name. I longed most fervently to be informed of the welfare of my daughters, yet I could have died sooner than utter a single question on the subject. I found that that ardent love which had urged me with rapid steps from Valladolid to St. Leon, gradually, as the distance grew little, changed from an impetuous vehemence to hear of, and to see them, to fearful, awe-struck, motionless anxiety. Their light and airy figures, as I last saw them at Montauban in 1547, danced before the eyes of my imagination: what casualties, what calamities might not have overtaken them since! I was afraid almost to breathe, lest I should dissolve the unreal scene that played around me. How did I know that I did not indulge this cheerful imagination for the last time? Again and again in the course of the evening, I felt as if I could have wasted ages in this auberge and the neighbouring fields, still believing that my daughters inhabited yonder towers, still hovering round their fancied residence, but never daring to utter their name, lest it should be found the prelude to some fatal intelligence. How rich and refined a repast in some cases is uncertainty! It had the power to impart to these precious pledges a share of that immortality of which I was the destined monopolist.
Why had I not the courage never to overpass the limit at which I was now arrived, and, wherever I afterwards wandered on the various surface of the globe, still to be able to repeat to myself the complacent whisper, “I have visited my daughters in their separated abode, and my visit was productive of none but agreeable sensations?” My passions were too much afloat to suffer me really to rest in this patient, contemplative gratification. Before the morning’s dawn, I walked forth, and turned my eyes towards the castle. I loitered from bank to bank, and from point to point. Daylight slowly broke in upon me, but all was silent and quiet in my paternal château. “The family is not yet stirring,” said I to myself. I turned my steps to the spot where the ashes of my mother were mingled with their parent earth. The time that had intervened since her decease, the various fortunes and impressions I had experienced, had somewhat obliterated the vividness of her picture in my memory, and deadened the tremblingness of sensation with which I once thought of her. Yet enough was left, to make it an interesting moment to me, when I kneeled at her tomb. Why, oh why, as it had been with my great forefathers, was it not a moment of exultation to me, when I thus feelingly saluted the shade of a parent! He that exults in such an hour, must feel that he has illustrated his birth, and honoured his progenitors. I had done nothing of this: I was an exile on the face of the earth, had acquired no trophies, and accumulated no fame. I had none to honour, none even to know me; I had no family, I had no friend! These bitter recollections started up in array before me, and cut me to the heart. The spirit of my mother frowned upon her son; and I returned along the path by which I came, disgraced and disconsolate.
“I am now,” said I, “in a fit temper to learn intelligence of my daughters: if they have been unhappy, to hear it will not make me more forlorn; if they have been fortunate, that knowledge, and that alone, may revive my courage.” I hastened towards the avenue. I looked into the thickets and winding paths, as I passed. They communicated to me mingled pictures of my own boyish days, and of the amusements of the present inhabitants.
I told the nature of my pretended traffic to the servants of the house, and proposed an exhibition of my commodities; I was admitted, as I desired, to the apartment of their mistresses. I saw two young ladies, who appeared to be respectively about twenty-eight and twenty-four years of age, and whom without much difficulty I recognised for my daughters Louisa and Marguerite. Their situation and their ages identified them; and when afterwards I came to peruse their features attentively, I could easily discover traits of the amiable young woman and the playful child they had been when last we parted. I found them employed upon a piece of embroidery; a comely and respectable looking young woman, a servant, was sewing in another part of the room. Every thing about the ladies bespoke the ease of their circumstances, and the propriety of their sentiments. Both had on an elegant morning-habit; both had an air of sedateness and sobriety, that to my apprehension told that they had not lived unchastened by misfortune.