Page:The Bride of Lindorf.pdf/8

Rh to her young companions, and the evening saw her the gayest, as well as the loveliest of the assembled circle. This was a relief to Ernest–it left him more at liberty to indulge his own solitary pursuits, and to feed on the visionary melancholy, which was half thought–and half feeling. He was wrong, however, in the conclusion that he drew from the change in his cousin; he merely supposed that she was attracted by the amusements so natural to her age; he knew not that even that fair young brow had already learnt the bitter task of dissembling. He knew not that often did that bright young head lay down in weariness and sorrow on a pillow wet with frequent tears. Love only rightly interprets love. Pauline saw that her cousin had only for her the calm and gentle tenderness of a brother;–they had been brought up together, and there was nothing in the pretty and playful child, that had grown up beside him, to excite his imagination. But she–she loved him with all that poetry which is only to be found in a woman’s first affection; it is the early colour that the rose-bud opens to the south wind,–the warmth that morning breathes upon a cloud whose blush reddens, but returns not. Pure, shy, sensitive, tender, and unreal; it is the most ethereal, yet most lasting feeling life can know. The influence of a woman’s first love is felt on her whole after-existence: never can she dream such dream again. For a woman there is no second-love–youth, hope, belief, are all given to her first attachment; if unrequited, the heart becomes its own Prometheus, creative, ideal, but with the vulture preying upon it for ever.–If deceived, the whole poetry of life is gone; the very essence of poetry is belief, and how can she, whose sweet eager credulity has once learnt the bitter truth–that its reliance was in vain, how can she ever believe again?

Pauline learnt to know Ernest’s heart by her own, and she felt the difference. Night after night she left the ball-room in all the false flutter of that excitement whose fever destroys the heart which it animates. But once in her own room, the colour left her cheek, and the light, her eye; she flung herself down, with a burst of tears, long and painfully repressed, while she thought that Ernest had not entered the hall throughout the evening. He, in the meanwhile, saw her seemingly happy and amused–and gave more and more into his pursuits; he would spend days in the old forest adjoining, till the midnight stars shone through the darkling branches like the eyes of a spirit, awakening all that was most ethereal in his nature. Hours too were past on the winding and lovely river–lost in those vague but impassioned reveries which fade, and for ever, amid the sterner realities of life. The dreaming boyhood prepares for adventurous man; we first fancy, then feel, and, at last, act and think. He delighted too in rambling through the ancient castle–filled with the memory of other days: not a face in the picture gallery but he conjured up its history, and he loved to assign to each some one of the spacious chambers for the site of their adventures. Many of the rooms in the left wing were all but deserted,–and one afternoon, while wandering carelessly along, he found his way into a chamber that had apparently not been opened for years; he was struck with the beauty of some richly wrought oak panels. While leaning against one of them he chanced to touch a hidden spring; the panel flew open–and discovered a narrow flight of winding stairs. To kindle a phosphorous match,