Every hour, every moment was full of incident to him; every look of Gertrude's was entered in the tablets of his heart; so that his love knew no languor, it required no change: he was absorbed in it,--it was himself! And he was soft, and watchful as the step of a mother by the couch of her sick child; the lion within him was tamed by indomitable love; the sadness, the presentiment, that was mixed with all his passion for Gertrude, filled him too with that poetry of feeling which is the result of thoughts weighing upon us, and not to be expressed by ordinary language. In this part of their journey, as I find by the date, were the following lines written; they are to be judged as the lines of one in whom emotion and truth were the only inspiration:--
I.
As leaves left darkling in the flush of day, When glints the glad sun checkering o'er the tree, I see the green earth brightening in the ray, Which only casts a shadow upon me!
II.
What are the beams, the flowers, the glory, all Life's glow and gloss, the music and the bloom, When every sun but speeds the Eternal Pall, And Time is Death that dallies with the Tomb?
III.
And yet--oh yet, so young, so pure!--the while Fresh laugh the rose-hues round youth's morning sky, That voice, those eyes, the deep love of that smile, Are they not soul--all soul--and can they die?
IV.
Are there the words "NO MORE" for thoughts like ours? Must the bark sink upon so soft a wave? Hath the short summer of thy life no flowers But those which bloom above thine early grave?
V.
O God! and what is life, that I should live? (Hath not the world enow of common clay?) And she--the Rose--whose life a soul could give To the void desert, sigh its sweets away?
VI.
And I that love thee thus, to whom the air, Blest by thy breath, makes heaven where'er it be, Watch thy cheek wane, and smile away despair, Lest it should dim one hour yet left to Thee.
VII.
Still let me conquer self; oh, still conceal By the smooth brow the snake that coils below; Break, break my heart! it comforts yet to feel That she dreams on, unwakened by my woe!
VIII.
Hushed, where the Star's soft angel loves to keep Watch o'er their tide, the morning waters roll; So glides my spirit,--darkness in the deep, But o'er the wave the presence of thy soul!
Gertrude had not as yet the presentiments that filled the soul of Trevylyan. She thought too little of herself to know her danger, and those hours to her were hours of unmingled sweetness. Sometimes, indeed, the exhaustion of her disease tinged her spirits with a vague sadness, an abstraction came over her, and a languor she vainly struggled against. These fits of dejection and gloom touched Trevylyan to the quick; his eye never ceased to watch them, nor his heart to soothe. Often when he marked them, he sought to attract her attention from what he fancied, though erringly, a sympathy with his own forebodings, and to lead her young and romantic imagination through the temporary beguilements of fiction; for Gertrude was yet in the first bloom of youth, and all the dews of beautiful childhood sparkled freshly from the virgin blossoms of her mind. And Trevylyan, who had passed some of his early years among the students of Leipsic, and was deeply versed in the various world of legendary lore, ransacked his memory for such tales as seemed to him most likely to win her interest; and often with false smiles entered into the playful tale, or oftener, with more faithful interest, into the graver legend of trials that warned yet beguiled them from their own. Of such tales I have selected but a few; I know not that they are the least unworthy of repetition,--they are those which many recollections induce me to repeat the most willingly. Gertrude loved these stories, for she had not yet lost, by the coldness of the world, one leaf from that soft and wild romance which belonged to her beautiful mind; and, more than all, she loved the sound of a voice which every day became more and more musical to her ear. "Shall I tell you," said Trevylyan, one morning, as he observed her gloomier mood stealing over the face of Gertrude,--"shall I tell you, ere yet we pass into the dull land of Holland, a story of Malines, whose spires we shall shortly see?" Gertrude's face brightened at once, and as she leaned back in the carriage as it whirled rapidly along, and fixed her deep blue eyes on Trevylyan, he began the following tale.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MAID OF MALINES.
IT was noonday in the town of Malines, or Mechlin, as the English usually term it; the Sabbath bell had summoned the inhabitants to divine worship; and the crowd that had loitered round the Church of St. Rembauld had gradually emptied itself within the spacious aisles of the sacred edifice.
A young man was standing in the street, with his eyes bent on the ground, and apparently listening for some sound; for without raising his looks from the rude pavement, he turned to every corner of it with an intent and anxious expression of countenance.