mber? Look to that beech-tree yonder!
Summer clothed it then! Do you not remember! as under that tree we
stood--that same, same note came, musical as now, undulating with rise
and fall--came, as if to interpret, by a voice from fairyland, the
beating of my own mysterious heart. You had been pleading for pardon to
one less ungrateful--less perfidious--than my comforter proved herself.
I had listened to you, wondering why anger and wrong seemed banished
from the world; and I murmured, in answer, without conscious thought
of myself: 'Happy the man whose faults your bright charity will
admonish--whose griefs your tenderness will chase away! But when, years
hence, children are born to yourself, spare me the one who shall most
resemble you, to replace the daughter whom I can only sincerely pardon
when something else can spring up to my desolate being--something that
I can cherish without the memory of falsehood and the dread of shame.'
Yes, as I ceased, came that music; and as it thrilled through the summer
air, I turned and met your eyes--turned and saw you blush--turned
and heard some faint faltering words drowning the music with diviner
sweetness; and suddenly I knew, as by a revelation, that the Child I had
fostered had grown the Woman I loved. My own soul was laid bare to me
by the flash of hope. Over the universe rushed light and colour! Oh, the
Caroline of old! What wonder that she became so fatally, so unspeakably
beloved! As some man in ancient story, banished from his native land, is
told by an oracle to seek a happier isle in undiscovered seas--freights
with his all a single bark--collects on his wandering altar the last
embers of his abandoned hearth-places beside it his exiled household
gods; so all that my life had left to me, hallowing and hallowed, I
stored in you.... I tore myself from the old native soil, the old hardy
skies. Through time's wide ocean I saw but the promised golden isle.
Fables, fables!--lying oracle!--sunken vessel!--visionary isle! And life
to me had till then been so utterly without love!--had passed in such
hard labours, without a holyday of romance--all the fountains of the
unknown passion sealed till the spell struck the rock, and every wave,
every drop sparkled fresh to a single star. Yet my boyhood, like other
men's, had dreamed of its Ideal. There at last that Ideal, come to life,
bloomed before me; there, under those beech-trees--the Caroline of old.
O wretched woman, now weeping at m