ld not but feel apprehensive, sad, and
despondent. He might ask himself, in deed--for the Earl's words
naturally led to such a mistaken question--"Who, then, am I? Who is
it they would have me believe myself, that so proud a man should seek
the alliance which he now scorns, as soon as he knows who I am?" But
there seemed to him a sort of mockery in the very idea, which made
him cast it from him as a vain delusion.
Though freed from ordinary business, and at liberty to go where he
liked, with a thousand refined tastes which he was accustomed to
gratify in his own dwelling, yet Wilton felt not the slightest
inclination to turn his steps homeward on the present occasion.
Music, he knew full well, was by no means calculated to soothe his
mind under the first effects of bitter disappointment. Had it been
but the disappointment of seeing Laura at the time he expected to do
so--had circumstances compelled him to be absent from her for a week
or a month longer than he had expected--had the bright dreams which
he always conjured up of pleasant hours and happy days, and warm
smiles and sweet words, when he proposed to go down to Somersbury,
been left unrealized by the interposition of some unexpected
event--the disappointment would certainly have been great; but
nevertheless he might have then found a pleasure, a consolation in
music, in singing the songs, in playing the airs, of which Laura was
fond; in calling up from memory the joys that were denied to hope,
which can never so well be done, so powerfully, as by the magic voice
of song.
But now all was uncertain: his heart was too full of despondency and
grief to find relief by re-awakening even the brightest memories of
the past: he could not gaze upon the days gone by, like the painter
or the poet looking upon some beautiful landscape, for his situation
he felt to be that rather of some unhappy exile looking back upon a
bright land that he loved, when quitting it, perhaps never to return.
Neither could books afford him relief; for his own sorrowful feelings
were now too actively present to suffer him to rove with the gay
imagination of others, or to meditate on abstracted subjects with the
thoughtful and the grave.
To fly from the crowds that at that time thronged the streets--to
seek solitary thought--to wander on, changing his place
continually--to suffer and give way to all the many strange and
confused ideas and feelings of grief, and disappointment, and
bitterness of heart, and burning indignation, at il