She was right; St. Amand had long since in bitterness repented of a transient infatuation, had long since distinguished the true Florimel from the false, and felt that, in Julie, Lucilles wrongs were avenged. But in the hurry and heat of war he plunged that regretthe keenest of allwhich embodies the bitter words, TOO LATE!
Years passed away, and in the resumed tranquillity of Lucilles life the brilliant apparition of St. Amand appeared as something dreamed of, not seen. The star of Napoleon had risen above the horizon; the romance of his early career had commenced; and the campaign of Egypt had been the herald of those brilliant and meteoric successes which flashed forth from the gloom of the Revolution of France.
You are aware, dear Gertrude, how many in the French as well as the English troops returned home from Egypt blinded with the ophthalmia of that arid soil. Some of the young men in Lucilles town, who had joined Napoleons army, came back darkened by that fearful affliction, and Lucilles alms and Lucilles aid and Lucilles sweet voice were ever at hand for those poor sufferers, whose common misfortune touched so thrilling a chord of her heart.
Her father was now dead, and she had only her mother to cheer amidst the ills of age. As one evening they sat at work together, Madame le Tisseur said, after a pause,
I wish, dear Lucille, thou couldst be persuaded to marry Justin; he loves thee well, and now that thou art yet young, and hast many years before thee, thou shouldst remember that when I die thou wilt be alone.
Ah, cease, dearest mother, I never can marry now; and as for loveonce taught in the bitter school in which I have learned the knowledge of myselfI cannot be deceived again.
My Lucille, you do not know yourself. Never was woman loved if Justin does not love you; and never did lover feel with more real warmth how worthily he loved.
And this was true; and not of Justin alone, for Lucilles modest virtues, her kindly temper, and a certain undulating and feminine grace, which accompanied all her movements, had secured her as many conquests as if she had been beautiful. She had rejected all offers of marriage with a shudder; without even the throb of a flattered vanity. One memory, sadder, was also dearer to her than all things; and something sacred in its recollections made her deem it even a crime to think of effacing the past by a new affection.
I believe, continued Madame le Tisseur, angrily, that thou still thinkest fondly of him from whom only in the world thou couldst have experienced ingratitude.
Nay, Mother, said Lucille, with a blush and a slight sigh, Eugene is married to another.
While thus conversing, they heard a gentle and timid knock at the door; the latch was lifted. This, said the rough voice of a commissionaire of the town, this, monsieur, is the house of Madame le Tisseur, and voila mademoiselle! A tall figure, with a shade over his eyes, and wrapped in a long military cloak, stood in the room. A thrill shot across Lucilles heart. He stretched out his arms. Lucille, said that melancholy voice, which had made the music of her first youth, where art thou, Lucille? Alas! she does not recognize St. Amand.
Thus was it indeed. By a singular fatality, the burning suns and the sharp dust of the plains of Egypt had smitten the young soldier, in the flush of his career, with a secondand this time with an irremediableblindness! He had returned to France to find his hearth lonely. Julie was no more,a sudden fever had cut her off in the midst of youth; and he had sought his way to Lucilles house, to see if one hope yet remained to him in the world!
And when, days afterwards, humbly and sadly he re-urged a former suit, did Lucille shut her heart to its prayer? Did her pride remember its wound; did she revert to his desertion; did she reply to the whisper of her yearning love, Thou hast been before forsaken? That voice and those darkened eyes pleaded to her with a pathos not to be resisted. I am once more necessary to him, was all her thought; if I reject him who will tend him? In that thought was the motive of her conduct; in that thought gushed back upon her soul all the springs of checked but unconquered, unconquerable love! In that thought, she stood beside him at the altar, and pledged, with a yet holier devotion than she might have felt of yore, the vow of her imperishable truth.
And Lucille found, in the future, a reward, which the common world could never comprehend. With his blindness returned all the feelings she had first awakened in St. Amands solitary heart; again he yearned for her step, again he missed even a moments absence from his side, again her voice chased the shadow from his brow, and in her presence was a sense of shelter and of sunshine. He no longer sighed for the blessing he had lost; he reconciled himself to fate, and entered into that serenity of mood which mostly characterizes the blind.
Perhaps after we have seen the actual world, and experienced its hollow pleasures, we can resign ourselves the better to its exclusion; and as the cloister, which repels the ardour of our hope, is sweet to our remembrance, so the darkness loses its terror when experience has wearied us with the glare and travail of the day. It was something, too, as they advanced in life, to feel the chains that bound him to Lucille strengthening daily, and to cherish in his overflowing heart the sweetness of increasing gratitude; it was something that he could not see years wrinkle that open brow, or dim the tenderness of that touching smile; it was something that to him she was beyond the reach of time, and preserved to the verge of a grave (which received them both within a few days of each other) in all the bloom of her unwithering affection, in all the freshness of a heart that never could grow old!
Gertrude, who had broken in upon Trevylyans story by a thousand anxious interruptions, and a thousand pretty apologies for interrupting, was charmed with a tale in which true love was made happy at last, although she did not forgive St. Amand his ingratitude, and although she declared, with a critical shake of the head, that it was very unnatural that the mere beauty of Julie, or the mere want of it in Lucille, should have produced such an effect upon him, if he had ever really loved Lucille in his blindness.
As they passed through Malines, the town assumed an interest in Gertrudes eyes to which it scarcely of itself was entitled. She looked wistfully at the broad market-place, at a corner of which was one of those out-of-door groups of quiet and noiseless revellers, which Dutch art has raised from the Familiar to the Picturesque; and then glancing to the tower of St. Rembauld, she fancied, amidst the silence of noon, that she yet heard the plaintive cry of the blind orphan, Fido, Fido, why hast thou deserted me?
CHAPTER V. ROTTERDAM.THE CHARACTER OF THE DUTCH.THEIR RESEMBLANCE TO
THE GERMANS.A DISPUTE BETWEEN VANE AND TREVYLYAN, AFTER THE MANNER OF THE ANCIENT NOVELISTS, AS TO WHICH IS PREFERABLE, THE LIFE OF ACTION OR THE LIFE OF REPOSE.TREVYLYANS CONTRAST BETWEEN LITERARY AMBITION AND THE AMBITION OF PUBLIC LIFE.
OUR travellers arrived at Rotterdam on a bright and sunny day. There is a cheerfulness about the operations of Commerce,a life, a bustle, an action which always exhilarate the spirits at the first glance. Afterwards they fatigue us; we get too soon behind the scenes, and find the base and troublous passions which move the puppets and conduct the drama.
But Gertrude, in whom ill health had not destroyed the vividness of impression that belongs to the inexperienced, was delighted at the cheeriness of all around her. As she leaned lightly on Trevylyans arm, he listened with a forgetful joy to her questions and exclamations at the stir and liveliness of a city from which was to commence their pilgrimage along the Rhine. And indeed the scene was rife with the spirit of that people at once so active and so patient, so daring on the sea, so cautious on the land. Industry was visible everywhere; the vessels in the harbour, the crowded boat putting off to land, the throng on the quay,all looked bustling and spoke of commerce. The city itself, on which the skies shone fairly through light and fleecy clouds, wore a cheerful aspect. The church of St. Lawrence rising above the clean, neat houses, and on one side trees thickly grouped, gayly contrasted at once the waters and the city.