I am flying over the track, of what was to me a torrent--outlining its course by alighting upon, here and there, a point where it turned or lingered.
The reader has been to Vallambrosa--if not once as a pilgrim, at least often with writers of travels in Italy. The usages of the convent are familiar to all memories--their lodging of the gentlemen of a party in cells of their own monastic privilege, and giving to the ladies less sacred hospitalities, in a secular building of meaner and unconsecrated architecture. (So, oh, mortifying brotherhood, you shut off your only chance of entertaining angels unaware!)
Not permitted to eat with the ladies while on the holy mountain, Mr. Wangrave and his secretary, and Palgray and I, fed at the table with the aristocratic monks--(for they are the aristocrats of European holiness, these monks of Vallambrosa.) It was somewhat a relief to me, to be separated with my rival from the party in the feminine refectory, even for the short space of a meal-time; for the all-day suffering of presence with an unconscious trampler on my heart-strings; and in circumstances where all the triumphs were his own, were more than my intangible hold upon hope could well enable me to bear. I was happiest, therefore, when I was out of the presence of her to be near whom was all for which my life was worth having; and when we sat down at the long and bare table, with the thoughtful and ashen-cowled company, sad as I was, it was an opiate sadness--a suspension from self-mastery, under torture which others took to be pleasure.
The temperature of the mountain-air was just such as to invite us to never enter doors except to eat and sleep; and breakfasting at convent-hours, we passed the long day in rambling up the ravines and through the sombre forests, drawing, botanizing, and conversing in group around some spot of exquisite natural beauty; and all of the party, myself excepted, supposing it to be the un-dissenting, common desire to contrive opportunity for the love-making of Palgray and Stephania. And, bitter though it was, in each particular instance, to accept a hint from one and another, and stroll off, leaving the confessed lovers alone by some musical water-fall, or in the secluded and twilight dimness of some curve in an overhanging ravine--places where only to breathe is to love--I still felt an instinctive prompting to rather anticipate than wait for these reminders, she alone knowing what it cost me to be without her in that delicious wilderness; and Palgray, as well as I could judge, having a mind out of harmony with both the wilderness and her.