Godolphin Part 18

Since the young idealist had left England, the elements of his character had been slowly performing the ordination of time, and working their due change in its general aspect. The warm fountains of youth flowed not so freely as before the selfishness that always comes, sooner or later, to solitary men of the world, had gradually mingled itself with all the channels of his heart. The brooding and thoughtful disposition of his faculties having turned from romance to what he deemed philosophy, that which once was enthusiasm had hardened into wisdom. He neither hated men nor loved them with a sanguine philanthropy; he viewed them with cool and discerning eyes. He did not think it within the power of governments to make the ma.s.s, in any country, much happier or more elevated than they are. Republics, he was wont to say, favoured aristocratic virtues, and despotisms extinguished them: but, whether in a monarchy or republic, the hewers of wood and the drawers of the water, the mult.i.tude, still remained intrinsically the same.

This theory heightened his indifference to ambition. The watchwords of party appeared to him ridiculous; and politics in general--what a great moralist termed one question in particular--a shuttlec.o.c.k kept up by the contention of noisy children. His mind thus rested as to all public matters in a state of quietude, and covered over with the mantle of a most false, a most perilous philosophy. His appet.i.tes to pleasure had grown somewhat dulled by experience, but he was as yet neither sated nor discontented. One feeling at his breast still remained scarcely diminished of its effect, when the string was touched--his tender remembrance of Constance; and this had prevented any subsequent but momentary attachment deepening into love. Thus, at the age of seven and twenty, Percy G.o.dolphin reappears on our stage.

There was a great deal in the Italian character that our traveller liked: its love of ease, reduced into a system; its courtesy; its content with the world as it is; its moral apathy as regards all that agitates life, save one pa.s.sion--and the universal tenderness, ardour, and delicacy which, in that pa.s.sion, it enn.o.bles itself in displaying.

The commonest peasant of Rome or Naples, though not perhaps in the freer land of Tuscany, can comprehend all the romance and mystery of the most subtle species of love; all that it requires in England the idle habits of aristocracy, or the sensitive fibre of genius, even to conceive. And what is yet stranger, the worn-out debauches, sage with an experience and variety of licentiousness, which come not within the compa.s.s of a northern profligacy, remains alive to the earliest and most innocent sentiments of the pa.s.sion. And if Platonism in its coldest purity exist on earth, it is among the Aretins of southern Italy.

This unworldly refinement, amidst so much worldly callousness, was a peculiarity that afforded perpetual amus.e.m.e.nt to the nice eye and subtle judgment of G.o.dolphin. He loved not to note the common elements of character; whatever was most abstract and difficult to a.n.a.lyse, pleased him most. He mixed then much with the Romans, and was a favourite amongst them; but, during his present visit to the Immortal City, he did not, how distantly soever, a.s.sociate with the English. His carelessness of show, and the independence of a single man from burdensome connexions, rendered his income fully competent to his wants; but, like many proud men, he was not willing to make it seem even to himself, as a comparative poverty, beside the lavish expenses of his ostentatious countrymen. Travel, moreover, had augmented those stores of reflection which rob solitude of ennui.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

MAGNETISM.--SYMPATHY.--THE RETURN OF ELEMENTS TO ELEMENTS.

Daily did the health of Volktman decline; Lucilla was the only one ignorant of his danger. She had never seen the gradual approaches of death: her mother's abrupt and rapid illness made the whole of her experience of disease. Physicians and dark rooms were necessarily coupled in her mind with all graver maladies; and as the astrologer, wrapt in his calculations, altered not any of his habits, and was insensible to pain, she fondly attributed his occasional complaints to the melancholy induced by seclusion. With sedentary men, diseases being often those connected with the Organisation of the heart, do not usually terminate suddenly: it was so with Volktman.

One day he was alone with G.o.dolphin, and their conversation turned upon one of the doctrines of the old Magnetism, a doctrine which, depending as it does so much upon a seeming reference to experience, survived the rest of its a.s.sociates, and is still not wholly out of repute among the wild imaginations of Germany.

"One of the most remarkable and abstruse points in what students call metaphysics," said Volktman, "is sympathy! the first principle, according to some, of all human virtue. It is this, say they, which makes men just, humane, charitable. When one who has never heard of the duty of a.s.sisting his neighbour, sees another drowning, he plunges into the water and saves him. Why? because involuntarily, and at once, his imagination places himself in the situation of the stranger: the pain he would experience in the watery death glances across him: from this pain he hastens,--without a.n.a.lysing its cause, to deliver himself.

"Humanity is thus taught him by sympathy: where is this sympathy placed?--in the nerves: the nerves are the communicants with outward nature; the more delicate the nerves, the finer the sympathies; hence, women and children are more alive to sympathy than men. Well, mark me: do not these nerves have attraction and sympathy---not only with human suffering, but with the powers of what is falsely termed inanimate nature? Do not the wind, the influences of the weather and the seasons, act confessedly upon them? and if one part of nature, why not another, inseparably connected too with that part? If the weather and seasons have sympathy with the nerves, why not the moon and the stars, by which the weather and the seasons are influenced and changed? Ye of the schools may allow that sympathy originates some of our actions; I say it governs the whole world--the whole creation! Before the child is born, it is this secret affinity which can mark and stamp him with the witness of his mother's terror or his mother's desire."

"Yet," said G.o.dolphin, "you would scarcely, in your zeal for sympathy, advocate the same cause as Edricius Mohynnus, who cured wounds by a powder, not applied to the wound, but to the towel that had been dipped in its blood?"

"No," answered Volktman: "it is these quacks and pretenders that have wronged all sciences, by clamouring for false deductions. But I do believe of sympathy, that it has a power to transport ourselves out of the body and reunite us with the absent. Hence, trances, and raptures, in which the patient, being sincere, will tell thee, in grave earnestness, and with minute detail, of all that he saw, and heard, and encountered, afar off, in other parts of the earth, or even above the earth. As thou knowest the accredited story of the youth, who, being transported with a vehement and long-nursed desire to see his mother, did, through that same desire, become as it were rapt, and beheld her, being at the distance of many miles, and giving and exchanging signs of their real and bodily conference."

G.o.dolphin turned aside to conceal an involuntary smile at this grave affirmation; but the mystic, perhaps perceiving it, continued yet more eagerly:--

"Nay, I myself, at times, have experienced such trance, if trance it be; and have conversed with them who have pa.s.sed from the outward earth--with my father and my wife. And," continued he, after a moment's pause, "I do believe that we may, by means of this power of attraction--this elementary and all-penetrative sympathy, pa.s.s away, in our last moments, at once into the bosom of those we love. For, by the intent and rapt longing to behold the Blest and to be amongst them, we may be drawn insensibly into their presence, and the hour being come when the affinity between the spirit and the body shall be dissolved, the mind and desire, being so drawn upward, can return to earth no more. And this sympathy, refined and extended, will make, I imagine, our powers, our very being, in a future state. Our sympathy being only, then, with what is immortal, we shall partake necessarily of that nature which attracts us; and the body no longer clogging the intenseness of our desires, we shall be able by a wish to transport ourselves wheresoever we please,--from star to star, from glory to glory, charioted and winged by our wishes."

G.o.dolphin did not reply, for he was struck with the growing paleness of the mystic, and with a dreaming and intent fixedness that seemed creeping over his eyes, which were usually bright and restless. The day was now fast declining, Lucilla entered the room, and came caressingly to her father's side.

"Is the evening warm, my child?" said the astrologer.

"Very mild and warm," answered Lucilla.

"Give me your arm then," said he; "I will sit a little while without the threshold."

The Romans live in flats, as at Edinburgh, and with a common stair.

Volktman's abode was in the secondo piano. He descended the stairs with a step lighter than it had been of late; and sinking into a seat without the house, seemed silently and gratefully to inhale the soft and purple air of an Italian sunset.

By and by the sun had entirely vanished: and that most brief but most delicious twilight, common to the clime, had succeeded. Veil-like and soft, the mist that floats at that hour between earth and heaven, lent its transparent shadow to the scene around them: it seemed to tremble as for a moment, and then was gone. The moon arose, and cast its light over Volktman's earnest countenance,--over the rich bloom and watchful eye of Lucilla,--over the contemplative brow and motionless figure of G.o.dolphin. It was a group of indefinable interest: the Earth was so still, that the visionary might well have fancied it had hushed itself, to drink within its quiet heart the voices of that Heaven in whose oracles he believed. Not one of the group spoke,--the astrologer's mind and gaze were riveted above; and neither of his companions wished to break the meditations of the old and dreaming man.

G.o.dolphin, with folded arms and downcast eyes, was pursuing his own thoughts; and Lucilla, to whom G.o.dolphin's presence was a subtle and subduing intoxication, looked indeed upward to the soft and tender heavens, but with the soul of the loving daughter of earth.

Slowly, nor marked by his companions, the gaze of the mystic deepened and deepened in its fixedness.

The minutes went on; and the evening waned, till a chill breeze, floating down from the Latian Hills, recalled Lucilla's attention to her father. She covered him tenderly with her own mantle, and whispered gently in his ear her admonition to shun the coldness of the coming night. He did not answer; and on raising her voice a little higher, with the same result, she looked appealingly to G.o.dolphin. He laid his hand on Volktman's shoulder; and, bending forward to address him,--was struck dumb by the glazed and fixed expression of the mystic's eyes. The certainty flashed across him; he hastily felt Volktman's pulse--it was still. There was no doubt left on his mind; and yet the daughter, looking at him all the while, did not even dream of this sudden and awful stroke. In silence, and unconsciously, the strange and solitary spirit of the mystic had pa.s.sed from its home--in what exact instant of time, or by what last contest of nature, was not known.

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

A SCENE.--LUCILLA'S STRANGE CONDUCT-G.o.dOLPHIN Pa.s.sES THROUGH A SEVERE ORDEAL.--EGERIA'S GROTTO, AND WHAT THERE HAPPENS.

Let us pa.s.s over G.o.dolphin's most painful task. What Lucilla's feelings were, the reader may imagine; and yet, her wayward and una.n.a.lysed temper mocked at once imagination and expression to depict its sufferings or its joys.

The brother of Volktman's wife was sent for: he and his wife took possession of the abode of death. This, if possible, heightened Lucilla's anguish. The apathetic and vain character of the middle cla.s.ses in Rome, which her relations shared, stung her heart by contrasting its own desolate abandonment to grief. Above all, she was revolted by the unnatural ceremonies of a Roman funeral. The corpse exposed--the cheeks painted--the parading procession, all shocked the delicacy of her real and reckless affliction. But when this was over--when the rite of death was done, and when, in the house wherein her sire had presided, and she herself had been left to a liberty wholly unrestricted, she saw strangers (for such comparatively her relatives were to her) settling themselves down, with vacant countenances and light words, to the common occupations of life,--when she saw them move, alter (nay, talk calmly, and sometimes with jests, of selling), those little household articles of furniture which, homely and worn as they were, were hallowed to her by a thousand dear, and infantine, and filial recollections;--when, too, she found herself treated as a child, and, in some measure, as a dependant,--when she, the wild, the free, saw herself subjected to restraint--nay, heard the commonest actions of her life chidden and reproved,--when she saw the trite and mean natures which thus presumed to lord it over her, and a.s.sume empire in the house of one, of whose wild and lofty, though erring speculations--of whose generous though abstract elements of character, she could comprehend enough to respect, while what she did not comprehend heightened the respect into awe;--then, the more vehement and indignant pa.s.sions of her mind broke forth! her flas.h.i.+ng eye, her scornful gesture, her mysterious threat, and her open defiance, astonished always, sometimes amused, but more often terrified, the apathetic and superst.i.tious Italians.

G.o.dolphin, moved by interest and pity for the daughter of his friend, called once or twice after the funeral at the house; and commended, with promises and gifts, the desolate girl to the tenderness and commiseration of her relations. There is nothing an Italian will not promise, nothing he will not sell; and G.o.dolphin thus purchased, in reality, a forbearance to Lucilla's strange temper (as it was considered) which otherwise, a.s.suredly, would not have been displayed.

More than a month had elapsed since the astrologer's decease; and, the season of the malaria verging to its commencement, G.o.dolphin meditated a removal to Naples. He strolled, two days prior to his departure, to the house on the Appia Via, in order to take leave of Lucilla, and bequeath to her relations his parting injunctions.

It was a strange and harsh face that peered forth on him through the iron grating of the door before he obtained admittance; and when he entered, he heard the sound of voices in loud altercation. Among the rest, the naturally dulcet and silver tones of Lucilla were strained beyond their wonted key, and breathed the accents of pa.s.sion and disdain.

He entered the room whence the sounds of dispute proceeded, and the first face that presented itself to him was that of Lucilla. It was flushed with anger; the veins in the smooth forehead were swelled; the short lip breathed beautiful contempt. She stood at some little distance from the rest of the inmates of the room, who were seated; and her posture was erect and even stately, though in wrath: her arms were folded upon her bosom, and the composed excitement of her figure contrasted with the play, and fire, and energy of her features.

At G.o.dolphin's appearance, a sudden silence fell upon the conclave; the uncle and the aunt (the latter of whom had seemed the noisiest) subsided into apologetic respect to the rich (he was rich to them) young Englishman; and Lucilla sank into a seat, covered her face with her small and beautiful hands, and--humbled from her anger and her vehemence--burst into tears.

"And what is this?" said G.o.dolphin, pityingly.

The Italians hastened to inform him. Lucilla had chosen to absent herself from home every evening; she had been seen, the last night on the Corso,--crowded as that street was with the young, the profligate, and the idle. They could not but reprove "the dear girl" for this indiscretion (Italians, indifferent as to the conduct of the married, are generally attentive to that of their single, women); and she announced her resolution to persevere in it.

"Is this true, my pupil?" said G.o.dolphin, turning to Lucilla: the poor girl sobbed on, but returned no answer. "Leave me to reprimand and admonish her," said he to the aunt and uncle; and they, without appearing to notice the incongruity of reprimand in the mouth of a man of seven-and-twenty to a girl of fifteen, chattered forth a Babel of conciliation and left the apartment.

G.o.dolphin, young as he might be, was not unfitted for his task. There was a great deal of quiet dignity mingled with the kindness of his manner; and his affection for Lucilla had hitherto been so pure, that he felt no embarra.s.sment in addressing her as a brother. He approached the corner of the room in which she sat; he drew a chair near to her; and took her reluctant and trembling hand with a gentleness that made her weep with a yet wilder vehemence.

"My dear Lucilla," said he, "you know your father honoured me with his regard: let me presume on that regard, and on my long acquaintance with yourself, to address you as your friend--as your brother." Lucilla drew away her hand; but again, as if ashamed of the impulse, extended it towards him.

"You cannot know the world as I do, dear Lucilla," continued G.o.dolphin; "for experience in its affairs is bought at some little expense, which I pray that it may never cost you. In all countries, Lucilla, an unmarried female is exposed to dangers which, without any actual fault of her own, may embitter her future life. One of the greatest of these dangers lies in deviating from custom. With the woman who does this, every man thinks himself ent.i.tled to give his thoughts--his words--nay, even his actions, a license which you cannot but dread to incur. Your uncle and aunt, therefore, do right to advise your not going alone, to the public streets of Rome more especially, except in the broad daylight; and though their advice be irksomely intruded, and ungracefully couched, it is good in its principle, and--yes, dearest Lucilla, even necessary for you to follow."

"But," said Lucilla, through her tears, "you cannot guess what insults, what unkindness, I have been forced to submit to from them. I, who never knew, till now, what insult and unkindness were! I, who----" here sobs checked her utterance.

"But how, my young and fair friend, how can you mend their manners by destroying their esteem for you? Respect yourself, Lucilla, if you wish others to respect you. But, perhaps,"--and such a thought for the first time flashed across G.o.dolphin--"perhaps you did not seek the Corso for the _crowd_ but for _one;_ perhaps you went there to meet--dare I guess the fact?--an admirer, a lover."

"Now _you_ insult me!" cried Lucilla, angrily.

"I thank you for your anger; I accept it as a contradiction," said G.o.dolphin. "But listen yet a while, and for give frankness. If there be any one, among the throng of Italian youths, whom you have seen, and could be happy with; one who loves you and whom you do not hate;--remember that I am your father's friend; that I am rich; that I can----"

"Cruel, cruel!" interrupted Lucilla and withdrawing herself from G.o.dolphin, she walked to and fro with great and struggling agitation.

"Is it not so, then?" said G.o.dolphin, doubtingly.

"No, sir: no!"

"Lucilla Volktman," said G.o.dolphin, with a colder gravity than he had yet called forth, "I claim some attention from you, some confidence, nay, some esteem;--for the sake of your father--for the sake of your early years, when I a.s.sisted to teach you my native tongue, and loved you as a brother. Promise me that you will not commit this indiscretion any more--at least till we meet again; nay, that you will not stir abroad, save with one of your relations."