she owed! If it be true that the most perfect love subsists between unequals—no more entire attachment ever existed, than that between this man of sorrows, and the happy innocent child. He, worn by passion, oppressed by a sense of guilt, his brow trenched by the struggles of many years—she, stepping pure and free into life, innocent as an angel—animated only by the most disinterested feelings. The link between them of mutual benefit and mutual interest had been cemented by time and habit—by each waking thought, and nightly dream. What is so often a slothful, unapparent sense of parental and filial duty, was with them a living, active spirit, for ever manifesting itself in some new form. It woke with them, went abroad with them—attuned the voice, and shone brightly in the eyes.
It is a singular law of human life, that the past, which apparently no longer forms a portion of our existence, never dies; new shoots, as it were, spring up at different intervals and places, all bearing the indelible characteristics of the parent stalk; the circular emblem of eternity is suggested by this meeting and recurrence of the broken ends of our life. Falkner had been many years absent from England. He had quitted it to get rid of the consequences of an act which he deeply deplored, but which he did not wish his enemies to have the triumph of avenging. So completely during this interval had he been cut off from any, even allusion to the past, that he often tried to deceive himself into thinking it a dream;—often into the persuasion, that, tragical as was the catastrophe he had brought about, it was in its result for the best. The remembrance of the young and lovely victim lying dead at his feet, prevented his ever being really the dupe of these fond deceits—but still, memory and imagination alone ministered to remorse—it was brought home to him by none of the effects from which he had separated himself by a vast extent of sea and land.
The sight of the English at Baden was exceedingly painful to him. They seemed so many accusers and judges; he sedulously avoided their resorts, and turned away when he saw any approach. Yet he permitted Elizabeth to visit among them, and heard her accounts of what she saw and heard even with pleasure; for every word showed the favourable impression she made, and the simplicity of her own tastes and feelings. It was a new world to her, to find herself talked to, praised and caressed, by decrepit, painted, but courteous old princesses, dowagers, and all the tribe of German nobility and English fashionable wanderers. She was much amused, and her lively descriptions often made Falkner smile, and pleased him by proving that her firm and unsophisticated heart was not to be deluded by adulation.
Soon, however, she became more interested by a strange tale she brought home, of a solitary boy. He was English—handsome, and well born—but savage, and secluded to a degree that admitted of no attention being paid him. She heard him spoken of at first, at the house of some foreigners. They entered on a dissertation on the peculiar melancholy of the English, that could develop itself in a lad scarcely sixteen. He was a misanthrope. He was seen rambling the country, either on foot, or on a pony—but he would accept no invitations—shunned the very aspect of his fellows—never appearing, by any chance, in the frequented walks about the baths. Was he deaf and dumb? Some replied in the affirmative, and yet this opinion gained no general belief. Elizabeth once saw him at a little distance, seated under a wide-spreading tree in a little dell—to her he seemed more handsome than any thing she had ever seen, and more sad. One day she was in company with a gentleman, who she was told was his father; a man somewhat advanced in years—of a stern, saturnine aspect—whose smile was a sneer, and who spoke of his only child, calling him that "unhappy boy," in a tone that bespoke rather contempt than commiseration. It soon became rumoured that he was somewhat alienated in mind through the ill-treatment of his parent—and Elizabeth could almost believe this—she was so struck by the unfeeling and disagreeable appearance of the stranger.
All this she related to Falkner with peculiar earnestness—"If you could only see him," she said, "if we could only get him here—we would cure his misery, and his wicked father should no longer torment him. If he is deranged, he is harmless, and I am sure he would love us.—It is too sad to see one so gentle and so beautiful pining away without any to love him."
Falkner smiled at the desire to cure every evil that crossed her path, which is one of the sweetest illusions of youth, and asked, "Has he no mother?"
"No," replied Elizabeth, "he is an orphan like me, and his father is worse than dead, as he is so inhuman. Oh! how I wish you would save him as you saved me."
"That, I am afraid, would be out of my power," said Falkner; "yet, if you can make any acquaintance with him, and can bring him here, perhaps we may discover some method of serving him."
For Falkner had, with all his sufferings and his faults, much of the Don Quixote about him, and never heard a story of oppression without forming a scheme to relieve the victim. On this permission, Elizabeth watched for some opportunity to become acquainted with the poor boy. But it was vain. Sometimes she saw him at a distance; but if walking in the same path, he turned off as soon as he saw her; or, if sitting down, he got up, and disappeared, as if by magic. Miss Jervis thought her endeavours by no means proper, and would give her no assistance. "If any lady introduced him to you," she said, "it would be very well; but, to run after a young gentleman, only because he looks unhappy, is very odd, and even wrong."
Still Elizabeth persisted; she argued, that she did not want to know him herself, but that her father should be acquainted with him—and either induce his father to treat him better, or take him home to live with them.
They lived at some distance from the baths, in a shady dell, whose sides, a little further on, were broken and abrupt. One afternoon, they were lingering not far from their house, when they heard a noise among the underwood and shrubs above them, as if some one was breaking his way through. "It is he,—look!" cried Elizabeth; and there emerged from the covert, on to a more open, but still more precipitous path, the youth they had remarked: he was urging his horse, with wilful blindness to danger, down a declivity which the animal was unwilling to attempt. Falkner saw the danger, and was sure that the boy was unaware of how steep the path grew at the foot of the hill. He called out to him, but the lad did not heed his voice—in another minute the horse's feet slipped, the rider was thrown over his head, and the animal himself rolled over. With a scream, Elizabeth sprang to the side of the fallen youth, but he rose without any appearance of great injury—or any complaint—evidently displeased at being observed: his sullen look merged into one of anxiety as he approached his fallen horse, whom, together with Falkner, he assisted to rise—the poor thing had fallen on a sharp point of a rock, and his side was cut and bleeding. The lad was now all activity, he rushed to the stream that watered the little dell, to procure water, which he brought in his hat to wash the wound; and as he did so, Elizabeth remarked to her father that he used only one hand, and that the other arm was surely hurt. Meanwhile Falkner had gazed on the boy with a mixture of admiration and pain. He was wondrously handsome; large, deep-set hazel eyes, shaded by long dark lashes—full at once of fire, and softness; a brow of extreme beauty, over which clustered a profusion of chesnut-coloured hair; an oval face; a person, light and graceful as a sculptured image—all this, added to an expression of gloom that amounted to sullenness, with which, despite the extreme refinement of his features, a certain fierceness even was mingled, formed a study a painter would have selected for a kind of ideal poetic sort of bandit stripling; but, besides this, there was resemblance, strange, and thrilling, that struck Falkner, and made him eye him with a painful curiosity. The lad spoke with fondness to his horse, and accepted the offer made that it should be taken to Falkner's stable, and looked to by his groom.
"And you, too," said Elizabeth, "you are in pain, you are hurt."
"That is nothing," said the youth; "let me see that I have not killed this poor fellow—and I am not hurt to signify."
Elizabeth felt by no means sure of this. And while the horse was carefully led home, and his wound visited, she sent a servant off for a surgeon, believing, in her own mind, that the stranger had broken his arm. She was not far wrong—he had dislocated his wrist. "It were better had it been my neck," he muttered, as he yielded his hand to the gripe of the surgeon, nor did he seem to wince during the painful operation; far more annoyed was he by the eyes fixed upon him, and the questions asked—his manner, which had become mollified as he waited on his poor horse, resumed all its former repulsiveness; he looked like a young savage, surrounded by enemies whom he suspects, yet is unwilling