CHAPTER I. THE SOLITARY SAGE AND THE SOLITARY MAID.
While such the entrance of Marmaduke Nevile into a court, that if farless intellectual and refined than those of later days, was yet morecalculated to dazzle the fancy, to sharpen the wit, and to charm thesenses,--for round the throne of Edward IV. chivalry was magnificent,intrigue restless, and pleasure ever on the wing,--Sibyll had ampleleisure in her solitary home to muse over the incidents that hadpreceded the departure of the young guest. Though she had rejectedMarmaduke's proffered love, his tone, so suddenly altered, his abrupt,broken words and confusion, his farewell, so soon succeeding hispassionate declaration, could not fail to wound that pride of womanwhich never sleeps till modesty is gone. But this made the least causeof the profound humiliation which bowed down her spirit. The meaningtaunt conveyed in the rhyme of the tymbesteres pierced her to the quick;the calm, indifferent smile of the stranger, as he regarded her, thebeauty of the dame he attended, woke mingled and contrary feelings, butthose of jealousy were perhaps the keenest: and in the midst of all shestarted to ask herself if indeed she had suffered her vain thoughts todwell too tenderly upon one from whom the vast inequalities of humanlife must divide her evermore. What to her was his indifference?Nothing,--yet had she given worlds to banish that careless smile fromher remembrance.
Shrinking at last from the tyranny of thoughts till of late unknown, hereye rested upon the gipsire which Alwyn had sent her by the old servant.The sight restored to her the holy recollection of her father, the sweetjoy of having ministered to his wants. She put up the little treasure,intending to devote it all to Warner; and after bathing her heavy eyes,that no sorrow of hers might afflict the student, she passed with alistless step into her father's chamber.
There is, to the quick and mercurial spirits of the young, something ofmarvellous and preternatural in that life within life, which the strongpassion of science and genius forms and feeds,--that passion so muchstronger than love, and so much more self-dependent; which asks nosympathy, leans on no kindred heart; which lives alone in its works andfancies, like a god amidst his creations.
The philosopher, too, had experienced a great affliction since they metlast. In the pride of his heart he had designed to show Marmaduke themystic operations of his model, which had seemed that morning to openinto life; and when the young man was gone, and he made the experimentalone, alas! he found that new progress but involved him in newdifficulties. He had gained the first steps in the gigantic creationof modern days, and he was met by the obstacle that baffled so long thegreat modern sage. There was the cylinder, there the boiler; yet, workas he would, the steam failed to keep the cylinder at work. And now,patiently as the spider re-weaves the broken web, his untiring ardourwas bent upon constructing a new cylinder of other materials. "Strange,"he said to himself, "that the heat of the mover aids not the movement;"and so, blundering near the truth, he laboured on.
Sibyll, meanwhile, seated herself abstractedly on a heap of fagots piledin the corner, and seemed busy in framing characters on the dusty floorwith the point of her tiny slipper. So fresh and fair and young sheseemed, in that murky atmosphere, that strange scene, and beside thatworn man, that it might have seemed to a poet as if the youngest of theGraces were come to visit Mulciber at his forge.
The man pursued his work, the girl renewed her dreams, the dark eveninghour gradually stealing over both. The silence was unbroken, for theforge and the model were now at rest, save by the grating of Adam'sfile upon the metal, or by some ejaculation of complacency now andthen vented by the enthusiast. So, apart from the many-noised, gaudy,babbling world without, even in the midst of that bloody, turbulent, andsemi-barbarous time, went on (the one neglected and unknown, the otherloathed and hated) the two movers of the ALL that continues the airylife of the Beautiful from age to age,--the Woman's dreaming Fancy andthe Man's active Genius.