THE PILGRIMS OF THE RHINE
CHAPTER I. IN WHICH THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO QUEEN NYMPHALIN
IN one of those green woods which belong so peculiarly to our island (for the Continent has its forests, but England its woods) there lived, a short time ago, a charming little fairy called Nymphalin. I believe she is descended from a younger branch of the house of Mab; but perhaps that may only be a genealogical fable, for your fairies are very susceptible to the pride of ancestry, and it is impossible to deny that they fall somewhat reluctantly into the liberal opinions so much in vogue at the present day.
However that may be, it is quite certain that all the courtiers in Nymphalin’s domain (for she was a queen fairy) made a point of asserting her right to this illustrious descent; and accordingly she quartered the Mab arms with her own,—three acorns vert, with a grasshopper rampant. It was as merry a little court as could possibly be conceived, and on a fine midsummer night it would have been worth while attending the queen’s balls; that is to say, if you could have got a ticket, a favour not obtained without great interest.
But, unhappily, until both men and fairies adopt Mr. Owen’s proposition, and live in parallelograms, they will always be the victims of ennui. And Nymphalin, who had been disappointed in love, and was still unmarried, had for the last five or six months been exceedingly tired even of giving balls. She yawned very frequently, and consequently yawning became a fashion.
“But why don’t we have some new dances, my Pipalee?” said Nymphalin to her favourite maid of honour; “these waltzes are very old-fashioned.”
“Very old-fashioned,” said Pipalee.
The queen gaped, and Pipalee did the same.
It was a gala night; the court was held in a lone and beautiful hollow, with the wild brake closing round it on every side, so that no human step could easily gain the spot. Wherever the shadows fell upon the brake a glow-worm made a point of exhibiting itself, and the bright August moon sailed slowly above, pleased to look down upon so charming a scene of merriment; for they wrong the moon who assert that she has an objection to mirth,—with the mirth of fairies she has all possible sympathy. Here and there in the thicket the scarce honeysuckles—in August honeysuckles are somewhat out of season—hung their rich festoons, and at that moment they were crowded with the elderly fairies, who had given up dancing and taken to scandal. Besides the honeysuckle you might see the hawkweed and the white convolvulus, varying the soft verdure of the thicket; and mushrooms in abundance had sprung up in the circle, glittering in the silver moonlight, and acceptable beyond measure to the dancers: every one knows how agreeable a thing tents are in a fete champetre! I was mistaken in saying that the brake closed the circle entirely round; for there was one gap, scarcely apparent to mortals, through which a fairy at least might catch a view of a brook that was close at hand, rippling in the stars, and checkered at intervals by the rich weeds floating on the surface, interspersed with the delicate arrowhead and the silver water-lily. Then the trees themselves, in their prodigal variety of hues,—the blue, the purple, the yellowing tint, the tender and silvery verdure, and the deep mass of shade frowning into black; the willow, the elm, the ash, the fir, and the lime, “and, best of all, Old England’s haunted oak;” these hues were broken again into a thousand minor and subtler shades as the twinkling stars pierced the foliage, or the moon slept with a richer light upon some favoured glade.
It was a gala night; the elderly fairies, as I said before, were chatting among the honeysuckles; the young were flirting, and dancing, and making love; the middle-aged talked politics under the mushrooms; and the queen herself and half-a-dozen of her favourites were yawning their pleasure from a little mound covered with the thickest moss.
“It has been very dull, madam, ever since Prince Fayzenheim left us,” said the fairy Nip.
The queen sighed.
“How handsome the prince is!” said Pipalee.
The queen blushed.
“He wore the prettiest dress in the world; and what a mustache!” cried Pipalee, fanning herself with her left wing.
“He was a coxcomb,” said the lord treasurer, sourly. The lord treasurer was the honestest and most disagreeable fairy at court; he was an admirable husband, brother, son, cousin, uncle, and godfather,—it was these virtues that had made him a lord treasurer. Unfortunately they had not made him a sensible fairy. He was like Charles the Second in one respect, for he never did a wise thing; but he was not like him in another, for he very often said a foolish one.
The queen frowned.
“A young prince is not the worse for that,” retorted Pipalee. “Heigho! does your Majesty think his Highness likely to return?”
“Don’t tease me,” said Nymphalin, pettishly.
The lord treasurer, by way of giving the conversation an agreeable turn, reminded her Majesty that there was a prodigious accumulation of business to see to, especially that difficult affair about the emmet-wasp loan. Her Majesty rose; and leaning on Pipalee’s arm, walked down to the supper tent.
“Pray,” said the fairy Trip to the fairy Nip, “what is all this talk about Prince Fayzenheim? Excuse my ignorance; I am only just out, you know.”
“Why,” answered Nip, a young courtier, not a marrying fairy, but very seductive, “the story runs thus: Last summer a foreigner visited us, calling himself Prince Fayzenheim: one of your German fairies, I fancy; no great things, but an excellent waltzer. He wore long spurs, made out of the stings of the horse-flies in the Black Forest; his cap sat on one side, and his mustachios curled like the lip of the dragon-flower. He was on his travels, and amused himself by making love to the queen. You can’t fancy, dear Trip, how fond she was of hearing him tell stories about the strange creatures of Germany,—about wild huntsmen, water-sprites, and a pack of such stuff,” added Nip, contemptuously, for Nip was a freethinker.
“In short?” said Trip.
“In short, she loved,” cried Nip, with a theatrical air.
“And the prince?”
“Packed up his clothes, and sent on his travelling-carriage, in order that he might go at his ease on the top of a stage-pigeon; in short—as you say—in short, he deserted the queen, and ever since she has set the fashion of yawning.”
“It was very naughty in him,” said the gentle Trip.
“Ah, my dear creature,” cried Nip, “if it had been you to whom he had paid his addresses!”
Trip simpered, and the old fairies from their seats in the honeysuckles observed she was “sadly conducted;” but the Trips had never been too respectable.
Meanwhile the queen, leaning on Pipalee, said, after a short pause, “Do you know I have formed a plan!”
“How delightful!” cried Pipalee. “Another gala!”
“Pooh, surely even you must be tired with such levities: the spirit of the age is no longer frivolous; and I dare say as the march of gravity proceeds, we shall get rid of galas altogether.” The queen said this with an air of inconceivable wisdom, for the “Society for the Diffusion of General Stupefaction” had been recently established among the fairies, and its tracts had driven all the light reading out of the market. “The Penny Proser” had contributed greatly to the increase of knowledge and yawning, so visibly progressive among the courtiers.
“No,” continued Nymphalin; “I have thought of something better than galas. Let us travel!”
Pipalee clasped her hands in ecstasy.
“Where shall we travel?”
“Let us go up the Rhine,” said the queen, turning away her head. “We shall be amazingly welcomed; there are fairies without number all the way by its banks, and various distant connections of ours whose nature and properties will afford interest and instruction to a philosophical mind.”
“Number Nip, for instance,” cried the gay Pipalee.
“The Red Man!” said the graver Nymphalin.
“Oh, my queen, what an excellent scheme!” and Pipalee was so lively during the rest of the night that the old fairies in the honeysuckle insinuated that the lady of honour had drunk a buttercup too much of the Maydew.
CHAPTER II. THE LOVERS
I WISH only for such readers as give themselves heart and soul up to me,—if they begin to cavil I have done with them; their fancy should put itself entirely under my management; and, after all, ought they not to be too glad to get out of this hackneyed and melancholy world, to be run away with by an author who promises them something new?
From the heights of Bruges, a Mortal and his betrothed gazed upon the scene below. They saw the sun set slowly amongst purple masses of cloud, and the lover turned to his mistress and sighed deeply; for her cheek was delicate in its blended roses, beyond the beauty that belongs to the hues of health; and when he saw the sun sinking from the world, the thought came upon him that she was his sun, and the glory that she shed over his life might soon pass away into the bosom of the “ever-during Dark.” But against the clouds rose one of the many spires that characterize the town of Bruges; and on that spire, tapering into heaven, rested the eyes of Gertrude Vane. The different objects that caught the gaze of each was emblematic both of the different channel of their thoughts and the different elements of their nature: he thought of the sorrow, she of the consolation; his heart prophesied of the passing away from earth, hers of the ascension into heaven. The lower part of the landscape was wrapped in shade; but just where the bank curved round in a mimic bay, the waters caught the sun’s parting smile, and rippled against the herbage that clothed the shore, with a scarcely noticeable wave. There are two of the numerous mills which are so picturesque a feature of that country, standing at a distance from each other on the rising banks, their sails perfectly still in the cool silence of the evening, and adding to the rustic tranquillity which breathed around. For to me there is something in the still sails of one of those inventions of man’s industry peculiarly eloquent of repose: the rest seems typical of the repose of our own passions, short and uncertain, contrary to their natural ordination; and doubly impressive from the feeling which admonishes us how precarious is the stillness, how utterly dependent on every wind rising at any moment and from any quarter of the heavens! They saw before them no living forms, save of one or two peasants yet lingering by the water-side.
Trevylyan drew closer to his Gertrude; for his love was inexpressibly tender, and his vigilant anxiety for her made his stern frame feel the first coolness of the evening even before she felt it herself.
“Dearest, let me draw your mantle closer round you.”
Gertrude smiled her thanks.
“I feel better than I have done for weeks,” said she; “and when once we get into the Rhine, you will see me grow so strong as to shock all your interest for me.”
“Ah, would to Heaven my interest for you may be put to such an ordeal!” said Trevylyan; and they turned slowly to the inn, where Gertrude’s father already awaited them.
Trevylyan was of a wild, a resolute, and an active nature. Thrown on the world at the age of sixteen, he had passed his youth in alternate pleasure, travel, and solitary study. At the age in which manhood is least susceptible to caprice, and most perhaps to passion, he fell in love with the loveliest person that ever dawned upon a poet’s vision. I say this without exaggeration, for Gertrude Vane’s was indeed the beauty, but the perishable beauty, of a dream. It happened most singularly to Trevylyan (but he was a singular man), that being naturally one whose affections it was very difficult to excite, he should have fallen in love at first sight with a person whose disease, already declared, would have deterred any other heart from risking its treasures on a bark so utterly unfitted for the voyage of life. Consumption, but consumption in its most beautiful shape, had set its seal upon Gertrude Vane, when Trevylyan first saw her, and at once loved. He knew the danger of the disease; he did not, except at intervals, deceive himself; he wrestled against the new passion: but, stern as his nature was, he could not conquer it. He loved, he confessed his love, and Gertrude returned it.
In a love like this, there is something ineffably beautiful,—it is essentially the poetry of passion. Desire grows hallowed by fear, and, scarce permitted to indulge its vent in the common channel of the senses, breaks forth into those vague yearnings, those lofty aspirations, which pine for the Bright, the Far, the Unattained. It is “the desire of the moth for the star;” it is the love of the soul!
Gertrude was advised by the faculty to try a southern climate; but Gertrude was the daughter of a German mother, and her young fancy had been nursed in all the wild legends and the alluring visions that belong to the children of the Rhine. Her imagination, more romantic than classic, yearned for the vine-clad hills and haunted forests which are so fertile in their spells to those who have once drunk, even sparingly, of the Literature of the North. Her desire strongly expressed, her declared conviction that if any change of scene could yet arrest the progress of her malady it would be the shores of the river she had so longed to visit, prevailed with her physicians and her father, and they consented to that pilgrimage along the Rhine on which Gertrude, her father, and her lover were now bound.
It was by the green curve of the banks which the lovers saw from the heights of Bruges that our fairy travellers met. They were reclining on the water-side, playing at dominos with eye-bright and the black specks of the trefoil; namely, Pipalee, Nip, Trip, and the lord treasurer (for that was all the party selected by the queen for her travelling cortege), and waiting for her Majesty, who, being a curious little elf, had gone round the town to reconnoitre.
“Bless me!” said the lord treasurer; “what a mad freak is this! Crossing that immense pond of water! And was there ever such bad grass as this? One may see that the fairies thrive ill here.”
“You are always discontented, my lord,” said Pipalee; “but then you are somewhat too old to travel,—at least, unless you go in your nutshell and four.”
The lord treasurer did not like this remark, so he muttered a peevish pshaw, and took a pinch of honeysuckle dust to console himself for being forced to put up with so much frivolity.
At this moment, ere the moon was yet at her middest height, Nymphalin joined her subjects.
“I have just returned,” said she, with a melancholy expression on her countenance, “from a scene that has almost renewed in me that sympathy with human beings which of late years our race has well-nigh relinquished.
“I hurried through the town without noticing much food for adventure. I paused for a moment on a fat citizen’s pillow, and bade him dream of love. He woke in a fright, and ran down to see that his cheeses were safe. I swept with a light wing over a politician’s eyes, and straightway he dreamed of theatres and music. I caught an undertaker in his first nap, and I have left him whirled into a waltz. For what would be sleep if it did not contrast life? Then I came to a solitary chamber, in which a girl, in her tenderest youth, knelt by the bedside in prayer, and I saw that the death-spirit had passed over her, and the blight was on the leaves of the rose. The room was still and hushed, the angel of Purity kept watch there. Her heart was full of love, and yet of holy thoughts, and I bade her dream of the long life denied to her,—of a happy home, of the kisses of her young lover, of eternal faith, and unwaning tenderness. Let her at least enjoy in dreams what Fate has refused to Truth! And, passing from the room, I found her lover stretched in his cloak beside the door; for he reads with a feverish and desperate prophecy the doom that waits her; and so loves he the very air she breathes, the very ground she treads, that when she has left his sight he creeps, silently and unknown to her, to the nearest spot hallowed by her presence, anxious that while yet she is on earth not an hour, not a moment, should be wasted upon other thoughts than those that belong to her; and feeling a security, a fearful joy, in lessening the distance that now only momentarily divides them. And that love seemed to me not as the love of the common world, and I stayed my wings and looked upon it as a thing that centuries might pass and bring no parallel to, in its beauty and its melancholy truth. But I kept away the sleep from the lover’s eyes, for well I knew that sleep was a tyrant, that shortened the brief time of waking tenderness for the living, yet spared him; and one sad, anxious thought of her was sweeter, in spite of its sorrow, than the brightest of fairy dreams. So I left him awake, and watching there through the long night, and felt that the children of earth have still something that unites them to the spirits of a finer race, so long as they retain amongst them the presence of real love!”
And oh! is there not a truth also in our fictions of the Unseen World? Are there not yet bright lingerers by the forest and the stream? Do the moon and the soft stars look out on no delicate and winged forms bathing in their light? Are the fairies and the invisible hosts but the children of our dreams, and not their inspiration? Is that all a delusion which speaks from the golden page? And is the world only given to harsh and anxious travellers that walk to and fro in pursuit of no gentle shadows? Are the chimeras of the passions the sole spirits of the universe? No! while my remembrance treasures in its deepest cell the image of one no more,—one who was “not of the earth, earthy;” one in whom love was the essence of thoughts divine; one whose shape and mould, whose heart and genius, would, had Poesy never before dreamed it, have called forth the first notion of spirits resembling mortals, but not of them,—no, Gertrude! while I remember you, the faith, the trust in brighter shapes and fairer natures than the world knows of, comes clinging to my heart; and still will I think that Fairies might have watched over your sleep and Spirits have ministered to your dreams.
CHAPTER III. FEELINGS
GERTRUDE and her companions proceeded by slow and, to her, delightful stages to Rotterdam. Trevylyan sat by her side, and her hand was ever in his; and when her delicate frame became sensible of fatigue, her head drooped on his shoulder as its natural resting-place. Her father was a man who had lived long enough to have encountered many reverses of fortune, and they had left him, as I am apt to believe long adversity usually does leave its prey, somewhat chilled and somewhat hardened to affection; passive and quiet of hope, resigned to the worst as to the common order of events, and expecting little from the best, as an unlooked-for incident in the regularity of human afflictions. He was insensible of his daughter’s danger, for he was not one whom the fear of love endows with prophetic vision; and he lived tranquilly in the present, without asking what new misfortune awaited him in the future. Yet he loved his child, his only child, with whatever of affection was left him by the many shocks his heart had received; and in her approaching connection with one rich and noble as Trevylyan, he felt even something bordering upon pleasure. Lapped in the apathetic indifference of his nature, he leaned back in the carriage, enjoying the bright weather that attended their journey, and sensible—for he was one of fine and cultivated taste—of whatever beauties of nature or remains of art varied their course. A companion of this sort was the most agreeable that two persons never needing a third could desire; he left them undisturbed to the intoxication of their mutual presence; he marked not the interchange of glances; he listened not to the whisper, the low delicious whisper, with which the heart speaks its sympathy to heart. He broke not that charmed silence which falls over us when the thoughts are full, and words leave nothing to explain; that repose of feeling; that certainty that we are understood without the effort of words, which makes the real luxury of intercourse and the true enchantment of travel. What a memory hours like these bequeath, after we have settled down into the calm occupation of common life! How beautiful, through the vista of years, seems that brief moonlight track upon the waters of our youth!
And Trevylyan’s nature, which, as I have said before, was naturally hard and stern, which was hot, irritable, ambitious, and prematurely tinctured with the policy and lessons of the world, seemed utterly changed by the peculiarities of his love. 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.