"Alice, I have read the letter,--I know all. Alice, sit down and hear
me,--it is you who have to learn from me. In our young days I was
accustomed to tell you stories in winter nights like these,--stories of
love like our own, of sorrows which, at that time, we only knew by
hearsay. I have one now for your ear, truer and sadder than they were.
Two children, for they were then little more--children in ignorance of
the world, children in freshness of heart, children almost in years--were
thrown together by strange vicissitudes, more than eighteen years ago.
They were of different sexes,--they loved and they erred. But the error
was solely with the boy; for what was innocence in her was but passion in
him. He loved her dearly; but at that age her qualities were half
developed. He knew her beautiful, simple, tender; but he knew not all
the virtue, the faith, and the nobleness that Heaven had planted in her
soul. They parted,--they knew not each other's fate. He sought her
anxiously, but in vain; and sorrow and remorse long consumed him, and her
memory threw a shadow over his existence. But again--for his love had
not the exalted holiness of hers (_she_ was true!)--he sought to renew in
others the charm he had lost with her. In vain,--long, long in vain.
Alice, you know to whom the tale refers. Nay, listen yet. I have heard
from the old man yonder that you were witness to a scene many years ago
which deceived you into the belief that you beheld a rival. It was not
so: that lady yet lives,--then, as now, a friend to me; nothing more. I
grant that, at one time, my fancy allured me to her, but my heart was
still true to thee."
"Bless you for those words!" murmured Alice; and she crept more closely
to him.
He went on. "Circumstances, which at some calmer occasion you shall
hear, again nearly connected my fate by marriage to another. I had then
seen you at a distance, unseen by you,--seen you apparently surrounded by
respectability and opulence; and I blessed Heaven that your lot, at
least, was not that of penury and want." (Here Maltravers related where
he had caught that brief glimpse of Alice,*--how he had sought for her
again and again in vain.) "From that hour," he continued, "seeing you in
circumstances of which I could not have dared to dream, I felt more
reconciled to the past; yet, when on the verge of marriage with
another--beautiful, gifted, generous as she was--a thought, a memory half
acknowledged, dimly traced, chained back my sentiments; and admiration,
esteem, and gratitude were not love! Death--a death melancholy and
tragic--forbade this union; and I went forth in the world, a pilgrim and
a wanderer. Years rolled away, and I thought I had conquered the desire
for love,--a desire that had haunted me since I lost thee. But, suddenly
and recently, a being, beautiful as yourself--sweet, guileless, and young
as you were when we met--woke in me a new and a strange sentiment. I
will not conceal it from you: Alice, at last I loved another! Yet,
singular as it may seem to you, it was a certain resemblance to yourself,
not in feature, but in the tones of the voice, the nameless grace of
gesture and manner, the very music of your once happy laugh,--those
traits of resemblance which I can now account for, and which children
catch not from their parents only, but from those they most see, and,
loving most, most imitate in their tender years,--all these, I say, made
perhaps a chief attraction, that drew me towards--Alice, are you prepared
for it?--drew me towards Evelyn Cameron. Know me in my real character,
by my true name: I am that Maltravers to whom the hand of Evelyn was a
few weeks ago betrothed!"
* See "Ernest Maltravers," book v., p. 228.