CHAPTER III. FEELINGS.
GERTRUDE and her companions proceeded by slow and, to her, delightfulstages to Rotterdam. Trevylyan sat by her side, and her hand was everin his; and when her delicate frame became sensible of fatigue, her headdrooped on his shoulder as its natural resting-place. Her father wasa man who had lived long enough to have encountered many reverses offortune, and they had left him, as I am apt to believe long adversityusually does leave its prey, somewhat chilled and somewhat hardened toaffection; passive and quiet of hope, resigned to the worst as tothe common order of events, and expecting little from the best, as anunlooked-for incident in the regularity of human afflictions. He wasinsensible of his daughter's danger, for he was not one whom the fearof love endows with prophetic vision; and he lived tranquilly in thepresent, without asking what new misfortune awaited him in the future.Yet he loved his child, his only child, with whatever of affectionwas left him by the many shocks his heart had received; and in herapproaching connection with one rich and noble as Trevylyan, hefelt even something bordering upon pleasure. Lapped in the apatheticindifference of his nature, he leaned back in the carriage, enjoying thebright weather that attended their journey, and sensible--for he was oneof fine and cultivated taste--of whatever beauties of nature or remainsof art varied their course. A companion of this sort was the mostagreeable that two persons never needing a third could desire; he leftthem undisturbed to the intoxication of their mutual presence; he markednot the interchange of glances; he listened not to the whisper, the lowdelicious whisper, with which the heart speaks its sympathy to heart. Hebroke not that charmed silence which falls over us when the thoughts arefull, and words leave nothing to explain; that repose of feeling; thatcertainty that we are understood without the effort of words, whichmakes the real luxury of intercourse and the true enchantment of travel.What a memory hours like these bequeath, after we have settled down intothe calm occupation of common life! How beautiful, through the vista ofyears, seems that brief moonlight track upon the waters of our youth!
And Trevylyan's nature, which, as I have said before, was naturallyhard and stern, which was hot, irritable, ambitious, and prematurelytinctured with the policy and lessons of the world, seemed utterlychanged by the peculiarities of his love. Every hour, every moment wasfull of incident to him; every look of Gertrude's was entered in thetablets of his heart; so that his love knew no languor, it required nochange: he was absorbed in it,--_it was himself_! And he was soft, andwatchful as the step of a mother by the couch of her sick child;the lion within him was tamed by indomitable love; the sadness, thepresentiment, that was mixed with all his passion for Gertrude, filledhim too with that poetry of feeling which is the result of thoughtsweighing upon us, and not to be expressed by ordinary language. In thispart of their journey, as I find by the date, were the following lineswritten; they are to be judged as the lines of one in whom emotion andtruth were the only inspiration:--
The Pilgrims of the Rhine Page 19