Part 14

Oftentimes the college friends would turn their conversation to days long past, to reminiscences of their sojourn in Italy. The lore of classic and romantic associations of that wonderful country; the graphic illustrations of life, and scenes, and elegance, and delights, in that delicious clime, enchanted their young listener. Dissertations on the political changes there enacting; surmises of changes impending, necessarily drew forth a detail of social, historic and scenic minutiæ, that expanded her young mind to poetic conceptions; distance lent its enchantment to the view, and her rich fancy glowed with the beauty of its imaginings. A longing, secret and subtle at first, then craving and irrepressible, to taste the sweets of forbidden fruit, took possession of her. She was betrothed at that time; she knew that with Roderick she could not enjoy those pleasures; she ought and did know that this longing would breed discontent;—hence the subtle manner of its entering on possession of her heart. Long she repelled it; principle forbade it; her reasonings were very nice; and lax as she may have become speculatively, she nourished a high-minded honor that would have done credit to any child of Adam. Soon she thought it no harm to enjoy the victory she had, with so great an effort, gained over herself; frequently she did so. Then her sophistry came to the attack; she might have regrets in secret, she thought, and they might not be at all detrimental to her husband’s happiness; hers would be the only loss, the only pain, if pain there were;—and she let her longing take its way. Still, she loved her betrothed as much as ever, none the less on that account; it is true she became a shade more thoughtful, not quite so light-hearted as she was, but she did not notice any change. If her heart lost any of its feeling, her harp did not. She took it more rarely; her touch was bolder, and still more delicate; a beautiful originality undulated more in her modulations, and she played more without the words than she ever did before. Her spirit was more self-dependent. There was something of the wild energy of insidious despair.

About this time the younger Reisach was summoned from England to attend his father, who was very ill. Soon the good old count died, and his heir entered upon the title and estates, in a manner so becoming and consistent with filial affliction, that every one said the young count was quite equal to the old one. The rougher field sports he had been accustomed to in England were now abandoned, and he lent his mind to the more quiet and refined German tastes. Study, poetry, music, painting, sculpture, divided his attention; he aimed at conciliating and winning all, the little as well as the great, and no undue ostentation had place in the details of his establishment. Regular and attentive at church, he gained the confidence and esteem of pastor as well as flock. Refined and delicate in his speech, no virtuous peasant-girl shrunk from his attention whenever he thought proper to bestow it. To the _reunions_ at the mansion the Curé had a standing invitation; and in return, the young nobleman strolled out upon many a welcome call at the parsonage. It would be harsh, it would be unjust, to say that Count Frederick commenced his attentions there with any deliberate design of wrong. Ella’s harp and voice were frequently brought into request for his passing entertainment, and he was not sparing of his eulogiums upon them. He soon began to experience deeper and more lasting sensations than the momentary pleasure she intended; no one could do otherwise. In his presence Ella conversed little, but that little was full of refinement, of thought and taste. He felt it difficult to smother his feelings or restrain them; and although he strictly maintained the distinction in their conditions, in his intercourse with her, and knew that a violent death must await all his more tender sentiments toward her, still he was unwilling to deprive himself of the pleasure he enjoyed in her presence. He was deeply in love with her, and he knew it; yet supposed that, like many other impressions he had experienced, it would soon pass away, that he might as well enjoy it whilst it lasted;—no one would ever be the wiser in the end.

It was before, and about this time, that Roderick and Ella were accustomed to spend their hours, and almost days together, at the bower. She had grown into womanhood, had entered into her twentieth year; and it was on her last birth-day, that she and Roderick had knelt before her uncle, to receive his blessing on their betrothal. Roderick had finished his course in the academy, and had already acquired his quota, both of fame and money, in painting. Ella sincerely loved him; and despite the admiration she felt for the young count, would have been supremely happy could she have been promised the realization of her imaginary enjoyments by his side. She loved him more when in his presence than when away. Absence threw no enchantment around him; it was in the sunshine of his tenderness and devotion that she felt the full glow of her affection for him; at other times she would feel the chilly mingling of her regrets. Had they been married then, they would have been very happy.

I said, Count Frederick deemed his love for Ella to be harmless, and that he felt no scruples in giving full play to it. It was only when, in his frequent rides, he caught a glimpse of the lovers enjoying their honest happiness under their own vine and fig-tree, as one might say, that the demon of envy, then of jealousy, took possession of him. There are few who can look unmoved on the unalloyed happiness of others, nor feel one pang of envy; that can see the appropriation by another of a secretly-coveted object, even an object one has no right or title to, or expectation of, and feel no sting of jealousy. Thus was it with Count Frederick: from the window of a mansion he frequently visited in Heidelberg, he could look right up to the bower. In the recess of that window he frequently sat; and with glass in hand, following with his eye every movement of the doomed pair, he conjured up a host of demons to torment him. He knew that her faith was given to another; he was aware and resolved that he could not marry her; yet, the long and constant dwelling of his thoughts upon her, the enlistment of his feelings and affections for her, seemed, in his disordered mind, to invest him with an indefinable title; he felt the outrage done to it, and casting full rein to both anger and passion, vowed to wreak his vengeance on what he thenceforward dreamed to be his mistress, and her lover.

Alone, and in secret, did he plot his plans to circumvent them. Lost now to every feeling of shame and honor, he repelled no scheme, however base, that presented itself; and though the better and more manly exercise of his faculties drooped and withered under his scorching passion, a deeper, deadlier cunning than he ever knew before, sweltered and forged unceasingly the most crafty implements for his hellish purpose. He would trust not an iota to the assistance of other hands, but assumed the whole burden of contriving and executing upon himself. Not a breath did he breathe of his infamous design to human ears. His demeanor in public possessed all the semblance of urbanity and good feeling that he once felt; but his interior Vulcan reposed not from his craft. Every piece of information that he could unsuspectingly acquire concerning either poor Roderick or Ella, he stored up and revolved in his aristocratic mind, digesting it with his moral venom, as a viper would revolve and masticate with poison its loath-some morsel. He learned from many sources, partially from herself, the particulars of Ella’s history, as far as was known; and contrasting several portions with certain circumstances that had fallen under his observation when in England, was astonished at the result of his machinations, which now doubled upon himself, to involve him too in their fatal entanglement. Thus far he had stood apart, aloof, as it were, upon a height above his contemplated victims. His baser passions had thrown aside the drapery of virtue and honor which once veiled the lovely woman from the gaze of rude thought, and he could look down upon her very graces as an object of his intended prey; but when the artful interlocking of his web and woof turned up to his astonished eyes, in gathered forms, the whole and real picture of his contemplated deed; when his study brought to light the astounding fact that Ella could claim close kindred with the proudest titles of the British peerage, his craven spirit of profligacy slunk away, for the time awed, but not quelled, by the air of reverence, and veneration that breathed upon it. At its return, elevated, softened, warmed, but not purified, by its admixture of romance, he felt his sternest anger giving way, his haughtiest pride tottering, his very soul melting into admiration and love; he reeled from his position aloof, and writhed a whole burnt offering among the other victims to his passion. His subtle ingenuity soon brought to the crucible the extraordinary change in his sentiments toward the unconscious girl, and the analysis did not dispel the new charm that enveloped her. He saw it was perfectly natural, and the only fruit of his discovery was a resolution to bring the charm to operate upon her own mind—it would open the avenue to a secret discontent with her present position, unfold a vast and snare-beset field to the vagaries of a romantic imagination, and bring her feelings to a sympathetic appreciation of the fellowship of caste that existed between her and himself.

Full of this dark resolve, Count Frederick went forth alone one afternoon. He had designedly employed the unsuspecting Roderick to restore some old paintings that had accumulated the dust of ages. They were in a studio in town. There Roderick had labored busily all the day, and when evening drew near he was still detained by some management of the count, in order to give his lordship the opportunity for his coveted interview with Ella. He had learned at what hour she would probably be at the appointed rendezvous, and timed his evening excursion accordingly. It was a beautiful afternoon in April. From the castle heights, the sun was seen slowly creeping down the skies of France, and the changing tints of the glittering clouds, were gorgeously reflected by the distant waters of the Rhine, and the intermediate mirrors of the Neckar. Villages, hamlets, cottages, spread over the plain, rolled their black smoke in heavy volumes against the green mountains, about whose feet the lights and shadows already had begun to sketch fantastic tableaux. How naturally did the words of the Mantuan poet’s pastoral seem to spring to Count Frederick’s lips, as he stood within a few paces of the bower, gazing abroad upon the scene, observed by the startled inmate, and feigning not to observe again. Ella understood perfectly well the words of the text, and as they were feelingly and eloquently poured forth, as though spontaneously, by the handsome youth, as he threw himself upon the turf, lost her surprise in the appropriate beauty of the poet’s effusion—

Hic tamen hac mecum poteris requiescere nocte, Frondes super virides; sunt nobis mitia poma, Castaneæque molles, et pressi copia lactis. Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant, Majoresque codunt altis de montibus umbrae.

The last two lines he rapturously repeated several times, then turning his eyes, as though perchance toward the bower, he hastily arose, and in a moment stood blandly before Ella, apologizing for his intrusion, and in the same breath requesting the favor of one of her pastoral songs. She challenged him for a repetition of the verses, and he uttered them in so off-hand, theatrical a way, that they both burst into a laugh. The ice was broken. Never before had he so far descended from his dignity in her presence. There and alone with him, she felt the charm of this novelty, and bandied words with him willingly, for she supposed that Roderick would soon come, and she thought it would be fine to pique his jealousy a little, only to reward it the better afterward with the sweetness of perfect tranquillity. He gradually drew forth from her own lips what little she knew of her father’s history and family, and artfully beguiled away the key to her enjoyments and her regrets. He had been intimate, very intimate, he told her, with a nobleman in England, whom he now knew must be her uncle. The identity of her father’s history, even to his fall in a duel, with that of a brother of Lord B.; the same name, even a perceptible resemblance of Ella to him, rendered his assurance doubly sure. Then followed many particulars which completely set Ella’s willing mind at rest in regard to the nobility of her parentage.

So far, all was well. As he anticipated, the disclosure was to her astounding and pleasing at the same time. The shadows of incredulity that for a moment hovered before the citadel of her happiness, flitted away before the march of pleasurable emotions. Her first feelings were those of gratitude, and in the liveliness of her satisfaction, as he poured into her ears the minuter details of her family history, she could have smiled almost any thing, looked almost any reward for him who bore her the welcome tidings. She divined the emotion that quivered on his lip, fathomed the eloquence that sparkled in his eye, suffusing his whole face with its light, and trembled, trembled like an aspen, with momentary terror: but, as his glowing speech expatiated on the time-honored and world-worshiped glory and privileges of the _noblesse_, the spirit of high-toned chivalry that begot, that chose, that ever ornamented the knightly order of Christendom, her terrors flew to the winds, and left her trembling frame a play-thing in the frenzied hands of wilder discord than her bosom had ever known. She no longer shunned his gaze; their eyes met again and again; a shadow, as of a dream, passed over her faculties; phantoms of law and duty and religion sprang up, to clamor for their rights; hastily she breathed an acquiescence, and then spurned them away as phantoms, as disturbers of the serenity of her soul. For the first time in all her life she felt the thrill of passion; the sorcerer beheld it, and closer and closer did he wind his web around them both, until, convulsed by the mighty battery within, he leaped from his seat, folded her resistless form in her arms, imprinted one passionate kiss upon her lips, and disappeared down the precipice.

When she recovered a little self-possession, her mind soon comprehended all; she felt and knew that passion had taken possession of her, and that love was gone; but never for a moment did she advert to any fault of her own. If conscience arose, she hastily repressed it, and despite what she inmostly _felt_, declared in her own mind that she could not see, measuring by laws of right and possession, wherein she had transgressed. Then stepped in pride. She transgressed! Oh! that one idea condemns the cause. She, who never had sinned, even in thought, against womanly decorum! yet, though her face burned with indignation at the thought, it was her own unerring conscience that accused, and against which she turned in so virtuous a scorn. Poor Ella! the great sin was already done. The loose rein she had given to her ideas, had permitted the birth, the growth, the _manifestation_ of what she felt, consequently the encouragement of Count Frederick’s excited passion. What would strict principle have done? Trembled, and crushed the serpent in the egg. It had glided in and twined itself around her bosom so gently and unconsciously that she scarcely felt its presence; so brilliant and changing were its deadly eyes in their repose, so yielding its soft and graceful neck, that, trusting to its tameness, she nursed its strength and venom there. At once she felt a tightening of the coils. Who, but one willfully deceived, would not have felt death! She did not; she saw no death, but felt she could not cast her visitant aside, felt that she might have to struggle on and bear her burden triumphantly along. What harm if no positive evil came of it? It was her own burden; might she not bear it if she could? Thus she beguiled her better reason; she did not reflect that whosoever loveth danger shall perish in it.

The reaction from the state of excitement she had been in, was powerful, and she was just recovering from it, when Roderick came and found her at the bower, “pensive and melancholy,” as he termed it; and, since they could not enjoy the evening together, tenderly and affectionately led her home. This was the first night of Roderick’s grief and Ella’s unhappiness. One great effort would then have shaken off her enemy forever, and restored the serenity of her mind; but she did not see the necessity, the obligation; it could be done at any time. Her pillow was bedewed with her tears, but she attributed them to the agitation of her feelings. All night, that one moment of delirium was prolonged to hours in rapturous dreams. She awoke weary and pale. She was not responsible for her dreams, she reasoned; probably she was not; but I would not answer for the pleasure of them, for whenever her broken slumbers were dispelled by consciousness, through the night, she acknowledged the unlawfulness of dwelling upon that pleasure then, and she courted sleep as a means to enjoyment in irresponsibility. Her harp lay untouched all day. Her daylight reveries were but shadows of her midnight dreams; more she did not dare. To her uncle’s somewhat anxious inquiries she replied, that she had perspired so, all night;—it was true. The next evening was quite as charming as the preceding one. There was no reason why she should not take her accustomed stroll to the bower; it was her castle, as it were; she had built it, and it was her almost daily haunt; she saw no obligation to discontinue her visits there; if any one came, it would be his intrusion, not hers. Besides, if she did not meet Roderick there, he would be hurt, and probably suspect her of growing indifference. Step by step had she advanced so far in blinding herself, as to be deceived by such a transparency; in the days of her innocence it would have shocked her. Her very duty to her betrothed she converted into a pretext to betray him. Still, call her not traitress. Like one who begins to believe his oft-told lie to be the truth, a penalty for his deceit, she more than half trusted her shallow sophistry. No human power now, no stand of honor or pride, can save her now; she has let the enemy within the citadel to parley, and whilst she prates in whispered, cowering tones, of future peace or victory, he quietly possesses himself of every avenue and stronghold, and nothing less than power divine can lend the least effective aid. Will she ask it? Well would she wish to do so, but the mighty effort of instantaneous renunciation (the only condition for God’s help) is too great; and with an ungrounded, forlorn, despairing hope, she still thinks some impossibility _may_ come to pass, to save her soul. She went earlier than usual, and long sat trembling in her accustomed seat. When at last Count Frederick appeared, she was not surprised; but an unaccountable dread seized her, and she would have fled, had he not gently detained her. She stopped; he saw all at a glance, he knew every thought that was agitating her mind; he understood her sudden impulse, that it was a last effort of expiring virtue, and he understood, too, that he possessed the power to overrule it. He knew it was an issue of life or death, and that either way, he held the hat in his hand. Neither spoke. He stood, holding the unresisting arm, gazed on her shrinking form, her imploring eyes, her lips parted in sudden terror, upon her every feature yielding in despair to the agony of a struggle for her very soul; the loud beating of her heart struck upon his ear with unearthly sound; he thought of the affrighted lamb before the altar, felt that in his hand gleamed the keen knife his beautiful victim shrank from; his eyes drank in her exceeding loveliness, his heart melted, and he burst into tears. He sat upon the bench, half turned from her, his elbow resting on the trellis, and his face buried in his handkerchief, overcome by the storm of his feelings. At this moment, the better nature in both, had a strong game. There is something fearful to behold when a strong man bends his head to tears. When a woman weeps, it is the drops from a fleeting cloud, an April shower, or, at times, the ceaseless pouring of a settled rain—a deluge; but there is the flash, and the storm, and the fitful blast that groans and yaws, and bursts through all control. No woman can pass on and not feel the cloak of her human sympathy draw close around her, as if to impel her to go forth and pour the unction of her tenderness upon the troubled heart. And there Ella stood beside him; one hand lay gently on his quivering shoulder, whilst the other pushed back the scattered curls from his noble brow. Oh, what a powerful language there is in the human heart, without words! In all this interview, since first they met, neither had spoken a word. It was a pantomime in real life; yet, what terrible converse they had held! Neither had ever, in all their lives, spoken to the other one word of love; and such a scene!

“I intended,” said he, at length, as he pressed her hand to his lips; “I intended to beg your forgiveness for my extreme rudeness on yesterday. I was overcome, beside myself; and now, when I would utter the words of my supplication, they stick in my throat. I am tossed like a leaf, before you; and here I sit trembling like a child, beneath your touch. I feel in my inmost heart the sweetness of your sympathy. I go, and but for the treasure of that sweetness my heart would wither in its desolation. I dare not speak to you of love, for your troth is another’s. At least, in mercy, vouchsafe to me one glimpse of the Elysium denied me!” He folded her once more to his heart; indistinctly she heard in spasmodic whispers: _life—soul—dearest_—and he was gone. The nobler nature was triumphant; and Ella, overcome by his generosity and her now unquenchable love, wept long and bitterly. She turned from side to side in her loneliness, gazed into the heavens, upon the wide landscape, until the tears blinded her. Then she bent her head upon the trellis where he had leaned; her dark hair hung in loose locks upon the branching vines, and she moaned in very bitterness.

That night she thought of Roderick, and for a moment compared him with Count Frederick. What a contrast! His very name, his only inheritance from his forefathers, was essentially plebeian, rustic. Ackerman! Roderick Ackerman, the husbandman! She had never thought of that before! She, the daughter of a noble house, could never bear that name! Her dreams were not those of pleasure only, for Roderick stood all night, a horrid phantom, between her impatient love and its unlawful object. Next morning she did not quiet her mind with the reflection, that she was not responsible for her dreams; and her midnight dreams, pleasure and displeasure, were her daylight reveries.