Melmoth the Wanderer, Vol. 4

by Charles Robert Maturin

The Lovers’ Tale.

“In a part of that heretic country lies a portion of land they call Shropshire, (“I have had dealings with Shrewsbury merchants,” said Aliaga to himself, “they furnished goods, and paid bills with distinguished punctuality,”)—there stood Mortimer Castle, the seat of a family who boasted of their descent from the age of the Norman Conqueror, and had never mortgaged an acre, or cut down a tree, or lowered a banner on their towers at the approach of a foe, for five hundred years. Mortimer castle had held out during the wars of Stephen and Matilda,—it had even defied the powers that summoned it to capitulation alternately, (about once a week), during the struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster,—it had also disdained the summons of Richard and Richmond, as their successive blasts shook its battlements, while the armies of the respective leaders advanced to the field of Bosworth. The Mortimer family, in fact, by their power, their extensive influence, their immense wealth, and the independency of their spirit, had rendered themselves formidable to every party, and superior to all.

“At the time of the Reformation, Sir Roger Mortimer, the descendant of this powerful family, vigorously espoused the cause of the Reformers; and when the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood sent their usual dole, at Christmas, of beef and ale to their tenants, Sir Roger, with his chaplain attending him, went about from cottage to cottage, distributing Bibles in English, of the edition printed by Tyndal in Holland. But his loyalism prevailed so far, that he circulated along with them the uncouth print, cut out of his own copy, of the King (Henry VIII.) dispensing copies of the Bible from both hands, which the people, as represented in the engraving, caught at with theirs, and seemed to devour as the word of life, almost before it could reach them.

“In the short reign of Edward, the family was protected and cherished; and the godly Sir Edmund, son and successor to Sir Roger, had the Bible laid open in his hall window, that while his domestics passed on their errands, as he expressed himself,—“he that runs may read.” In that of Mary, they were oppressed, confiscated, and menaced. Two of their servants were burned at Shrewsbury; and it was said that nothing but a large sum, advanced to defray the expences of the entertainments made at Court on the arrival of Philip of Spain, saved the godly Sir Edmund from the same fate.

“Sir Edmund, to whatever cause he owed his safety, did not enjoy it long. He had seen his faithful and ancient servants brought to the stake, for the opinions he had taught them,—he had attended them in person to the awful spot, and seen the Bibles he had attempted to place in their hands flung into the flames, as they were kindled round them,—he had turned with tottering steps from the scene, but the crowd, in the triumph of their barbarity, gathered round, and kept him close, so that he not only involuntarily witnessed the whole spectacle, but felt the very heat of the flames that were consuming the bodies of the sufferers. Sir Edmund returned to Mortimer Castle, and died.

“His successor, during the reign of Elizabeth, stoutly defended the rights of the Reformers, and sometimes grumbled at those of prerogative. These grumblings were said to have cost him dear—the court of purveyors charged him £.3000, an enormous sum in those days, for an expected visit of the Queen and her court—a visit which was never paid. The money was, however, paid; and it was said that Sir Orlan de Mortimer raised part of the money by disposing of his falcons, the best in England, to the Earl of Leicester, the then favourite of the Queen. At all events, there was a tradition in the family, that when, on his last ride through his territorial demesne, Sir Orlando saw his favourite remaining bird fly from the falconer’s hand, and break her jesses, he exclaimed, “Let her fly; she knows the way to my lord of Leicester’s.”

“During the reign of James, the Mortimer family took a more decided part. The influence of the Puritans (whom James hated with a hatred passing that of even a controversialist, and remembered with pardonable filial resentment, as the inveterate enemies of his ill-fated mother) was now increasing every hour. Sir Arthur Mortimer was standing by King James at the first representation of “Bartholomew Fair,” written by Ben Jonson, when the prologue uttered these words[(4)]:

“Your Majesty is welcome to a Fair;

Such place, such men, such language, and such ware,

You must expect—with these the zealous noise

Of your land’s faction, scandalized at toys.”

“My lord,” said the King, (for Sir Arthur was one of the lords of the privy council), “how deem you by that?”—“Please your Majesty,” answered Sir Arthur, “those Puritans, as I rode to London, cut off mine horse’s tail, as they said the ribbons with which it was tied savoured too much of the pride of the beast on which the scarlet whore sits. Pray God their shears may never extend from the tails of horses to the heads of kings!” And as he spoke with affectionate and ominous solicitude, he happened to place his hand on the head of Prince Charles, (afterwards Charles I.), who was sitting next his brother Henry, Prince of Wales, and to whom Sir Arthur Mortimer had had the high honour to be sponsor, as proxy for a sovereign prince.

“The awful and troubled times which Sir Arthur had predicted soon arrived, though he did not live to witness them. His son, Sir Roger Mortimer, a man lofty alike in pride and in principle, and immoveable in both,—an Arminian in creed, and an aristocrat in politics,—the zealous friend of the misguided Laud, and the bosom-companion of the unfortunate Strafford,—was among the first to urge King Charles to those high-handed and impolitic measures, the result of which was so fatal.

“When the war broke out between the King and the Parliament, Sir Roger espoused the royal cause with heart and hand,—raised a large sum in vain, to prevent the sale of the crown-jewels in Holland,—and led five hundred of his tenants, armed at his own expence, to the battles of Edge-hill and Marston-moor.

“His wife was dead, but his sister, Mrs Ann Mortimer, a woman of uncommon beauty, spirit, and dignity of character, and as firmly attached as her brother to the cause of the court, of which she had been once the most brilliant ornament, presided over his household, and by her talents, courage, and promptitude, had been of considerable service to the cause.

“The time came, however, when valour and rank, and loyalty and beauty, found all their efforts ineffectual; and of the five hundred brave men that Sir Roger had led into the field to his sovereign’s aid, he brought back thirty maimed and mutilated veterans to Mortimer Castle, on the disastrous day that King Charles was persuaded to put himself into the hands of the disaffected and mercenary Scots, who sold him for their arrears of pay due by the Parliament.

“The reign of rebellion soon commenced,—and Sir Roger, as a distinguished loyalist, felt the severest scourge of its power. Sequestrations and compositions,—fines for malignancy, and forced loans for the support of a cause he detested,—drained the well-filled coffers, and depressed the high spirit, of the aged loyalist. Domestic inquietude was added to his other calamities. He had three children.—His eldest son had fallen fighting in the King’s cause at the battle of Newbury, leaving an infant daughter, then supposed the heiress of immense wealth. His second son had embraced the Puritanic cause, and, lapsing from error to error, married the daughter of an Independent, whose creed he had adopted; and, according to the custom of those days, fought all day at the head of his regiment, and preached and prayed to them all night, in strict conformity with that verse in the psalms, which served him alternately for his text and his battle-word—“Let the praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hands.” This double exercise of the sword and the word, however, proved too much for the strength of the saint-militant; and after having, during Cromwell’s Irish campaign, vigorously headed the attack on Cloghan Castle[(5)], the ancient seat of the O’Moores, princes of Leix,—and being scalded through his buff-coat by a discharge of hot water from the bartizan,—and then imprudently given the word of exhortation for an hour and forty minutes to his soldiers, on the bare heath that surrounded the castle, and under a drenching rain,—he died of a pleurisy in three days, and left, like his brother, an infant daughter who had remained in England, and had been educated by her mother. It was said in the family, that this man had written the first lines of Milton’s poem “on the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament.” It is certain, at least, that when the fanatics who surrounded his dying bed were lifting up their voices to sing a hymn, he thundered with his last breath,

“Because ye have thrown off your prelate lord,

And with stiff vows renounce his Liturgy,

To seize the widowed w—e pluralitie,

From them whose sin ye envied not, abhorr’d,” &c.

“Sir Roger felt, though from different causes, pretty much the same degree of emotion on the deaths of his two sons. He was fortified against affliction at the death of the elder, from the consolation afforded him by the cause in which he had fallen; and that in which the apostate, as his father always called him, had perished, was an equal preventive against his feeling any deep or bitter grief on his dissolution.

“When his eldest son fell in the royal cause, and his friends gathered round him in officious condolence, the old loyalist replied, with a spirit worthy of the proudest days of classic heroism, “It is not for my dead son that I should weep, but for my living one.” His tears, however, were flowing at that time for another cause.

“His only daughter, during his absence, in spite of the vigilance of Mrs Ann, had been seduced by some Puritan servants in a neighbouring family, to hear an Independent preacher of the name of Sandal, who was then a serjeant in Colonel Pride’s regiment, and who was preaching in a barn in the neighbourhood, in the intervals of his military exercises. This man was a natural orator, and a vehement enthusiast; and, with the license of the day, that compromised between a pun and a text, and delighted in the union of both, this serjeant-preacher had baptized himself by the name of—“Thou-art-not-worthy-to-unloose-the-latchets-of-his-shoes,—Sandal.”

“This was the text on which he preached, and his eloquence had such effect on the daughter of Sir Roger Mortimer, that, forgetting the dignity of her birth, and the loyalty of her family, she united her destiny with this low-born man; and, believing herself to be suddenly inspired from this felicitous conjunction, she actually out-preached two female Quakers in a fortnight after their marriage, and wrote a letter (very ill-spelled) to her father, in which she announced her intention to “suffer affliction with the people of God,” and denounced his eternal damnation, if he declined embracing the creed of her husband;—which creed was changed the following week, on his hearing a sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and a month after, on hearing an itinerant preacher of the Ranters or Antinomians, who was surrounded by a troop of licentious, half-naked, drunken disciples, whose vociferations of—“We are the naked truth,” completely silenced a fifth-monarchy man, who was preaching from a tub on the other side of the road. To this preacher Sandal was introduced, and being a man of violent passions, and unsettled principles, he instantly embraced the opinions of the last speaker, (dragging his wife along with him into every gulph of polemical or political difficulty he plunged in), till he happened to hear another preacher of the Cameronians, whose constant topic, whether of triumph or of consolation, was the unavailing efforts made in the preceding reign, to force the Episcopalian system down the throats of the Scots; and, in default of a text, always repeated the words of Archy, jester to Charles the First, who, on the first intimation of the reluctance of the Scots to admit Episcopal jurisdiction, exclaimed to Archbishop Laud, “My Lord, who is the fool now?”—for which he had his coat stripped over his head, and was forbid the court. So Sandal vacillated between creed and creed, between preacher and preacher, till he died, leaving his widow with one son. Sir Roger announced to his widowed daughter, his determined purpose never to see her more, but he promised his protection to her son, if entrusted to his care. The widow was too poor to decline compliance with the offer of her deserted father.

“So in Mortimer Castle were, in their infancy, assembled the three grandchildren, born under such various auspices and destinies. Margaret Mortimer the heiress, a beautiful, intelligent, spirited girl, heiress of all the pride, aristocratical principle, and possible wealth of the family; Elinor Mortimer, the daughter of the Apostate, received rather than admitted into the house, and educated in all the strictness of her Independent family; and John Sandal, the son of the rejected daughter, whom Sir Roger admitted into the Castle only on the condition of his being engaged in the service of the royal family, banished and persecuted as they were; and he renewed his correspondence with some emigrant loyalists in Holland, for the establishment of his protegé, whom he described, in language borrowed from the Puritan preachers, as “a brand snatched from the burning.”

“While matters were thus at the Castle, intelligence arrived of Monk’s unexpected exertions in favour of the banished family. The result was as rapid as it was auspicious. The Restoration took place within a few days after, and the Mortimer family were then esteemed of so much consequence, that an express, girthed from his waist to his shoulders, was dispatched from London to announce the intelligence. He arrived when Sir Roger, whose chaplain he had been compelled by the ruling party to dismiss as a malignant, was reading prayers himself to his family. The return and restoration of Charles the Second was announced. The old loyalist rose from his knees, waved his cap, (which he had reverently taken from his white head), and, suddenly changing his tone of supplication for one of triumph, exclaimed, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation!” As he spoke, the old man sunk on the cushion which Mrs Ann had placed beneath his knees. His grandchildren rose from their knees to assist him,—it was too late,—his spirit had parted in that last exclamation.

CHAPTER XXX.

———She sat, and thought

Of what a sailor suffers.

Cowper.

“The intelligence that was the cause of old Sir Roger’s death, who might be said to be conducted from this world to the next by a blessed euthanasia, (a kind of passing with a light and lofty step from a narrow entry to a spacious and glorious apartment, without ever feeling he trod the dark and rugged threshold that lies between), was the signal and pledge to this ancient family of the restitution of their faded honours, and fast-declining possessions. Grants, reversals of fines, restoration of land and chattels, and offers of pensions, and provisions, and remunerations, and all that royal gratitude, in the effervescence of its enthusiasm, could bestow, came showering on the Mortimer family, as fast and faster than fines, confiscations, and sequestrations, had poured on them in the reign of the usurper. In fact, the language of King Charles to the Mortimers was like that of the Eastern monarchs to their favourites,—“Ask what thou wilt, and it shall be granted to thee, even to the half of my kingdom.” The Mortimers asked only for their own,—and being thus more reasonable, both in their expectations and demands, than most other applicants at that period, they succeeded in obtaining what they required.

“Thus Mrs Margaret Mortimer (so unmarried females were named at the date of the narrative) was again acknowledged as the wealthy and noble heiress of the Castle. Numerous invitations were sent to her to visit the court, which, though recommended by letters from divers of the court-ladies, who had been acquainted, traditionally at least, with her family, and enforced by a letter from Catherine of Braganza, written by her own hand, in which she acknowledged the obligations of the king to the house of Mortimer, were steadily rejected by the high-minded heiress of its honours and its spirit.—“From these towers,” said she to Mrs Ann, “my grandfather led forth his vassals and tenants in aid of his king,—to these towers he led what was left of them back, when the royal cause seemed lost for ever. Here he lived and died for his sovereign,—and here will I live and die. And I feel that I shall do more effectual service to his Majesty, by residing on my estates, and protecting my tenants, and repairing,”—she added with a smile,—“even with my needle, the rents made in the banners of our house by many a Puritan’s bullet, than if I flaunted it in Hyde-Park in my glass coach, or masqueraded it all night in that of [(6)]St James’s, even though I were sure to encounter the Duchess of Cleveland on one side, and Louise de Querouaille on the other,—fitter place for them than me.”—And so saying, Mrs Margaret Mortimer resumed her tapestry work. Mrs Ann looked at her with an eye that spoke volumes,—and the tear that trembled in it made the lines more legible.

“After the decided refusal of Mrs Margaret Mortimer to go to London, the family resumed their former ancestorial habits of stately regularity, and decorous grandeur, such as became a magnificent and well-ordered household, of which a noble maiden was the head and president. But this regularity was without rigour, and this monotony without apathy—the minds of these highly fated females were too familiar with trains of lofty thinking, and images of noble deeds, to sink into vacancy, or feel depression from solitude. I behold them,” said the stranger, “as I once saw them, seated in a vast irregularly shaped apartment, wainscotted with oak richly and quaintly carved, and as black as ebony—Mrs Ann Mortimer, in a recess which terminated in an ancient casement window, the upper panes of which were gorgeously emblazoned with the arms of the Mortimers, and some legendary atchievements of the former heroes of the family. A book she valued much[(7)] lay on her knee, on which she fixed her eyes intently—the light that came through the casement chequering its dark lettered pages with hues of such glorious and fantastic colouring, that they resembled the leaves of some splendidly-illuminated missal, with all its pomp of gold, and azure, and vermilion.

“At a little distance sat her two grand-nieces, employed in work, and relieving their attention to it by conversation, for which they had ample materials. They spoke of the poor whom they had visited and assisted,—of the rewards they had distributed among the industrious and orderly,—and of the books which they were studying; and of which the well-filled shelves of the library furnished them with copious and noble stores.

“Sir Roger had been a man of letters as well as of arms. He had been often heard to say, that next to a well-stocked armoury in time of war, was a well-stocked library in time of peace; and even in the midst of his latter grievances and privations, he contrived every year to make an addition to his own.

“His grand-daughters, well instructed by him in the French and Latin languages, had read Mezeray, Thuanus, and Sully. In English, they had Froissart in the black-letter translation of Pynson, imprinted 1525. Their poetry, exclusive of the classics, consisted chiefly of Waller, Donne, and that constellation of writers that illuminated the drama in the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, and the commencement of that of James,—Marlow, and Massinger, and Shirley, and Ford—cum multis aliis. Fairfax’s translations had made them familiar with the continental poets; and Sir Roger had consented to admit, among his modern collection, the Latin poems (the only ones then published) of Milton, for the sake of that in Quintum Novembris,—for Sir Roger, next to the fanatics, held the Catholics in utter abomination.”

“Then he will be damned to all eternity,” said Aliaga, “and that’s some satisfaction.”

“Thus their retirement was not inelegant, nor unaccompanied with those delights at once soothing and elating, which arise from a judicious mixture of useful occupation and literary tastes.

“On all they read or conversed of, Mrs Ann Mortimer was a living comment. Her conversation, rich in anecdote, and accurate to minuteness, sometimes rising to the loftiest strains of eloquence, as she related “deeds of the days of old,” and often borrowing the sublimity of inspiration, as the reminiscences of religion softened and solemnized the spirit with which she spake,—like the influence of time on fine paintings, that consecrates the tints it mellows, and makes the colours it has half obscured more precious to the eye of feeling and of taste, than they were in the glow of their early beauty,—her conversation was to her grand-nieces at once history and poetry.

“The events of English history then not recorded, had a kind of traditional history more vivid, if not so faithful as the records of modern historians, in the memories of those who had been agents and sufferers (the terms are probably synonimous) in those memorable periods.

“There was an entertainment then, banished by modern dissipation now, but alluded to by the great poet of that nation, whom your orthodox and undeniable creed justly devotes to eternal damnation.

“In winter’s tedious nights sit by the fire,

*   *   *   *

————————and tell the tales

Of woful ages long ago betid;

And send the hearers weeping to their beds.

*   *   *   *

We cited up a thousand heavy times.”

*   *   *   *

“When memory thus becomes the depository of grief, how faithfully is the charge kept!—and how much superior are the touches of one who paints from the life, and the heart, and the senses,—to those of one who dips his pen in his ink-stand, and casts his eye on a heap of musty parchments, to glean his facts or his feelings from them! Mrs Ann Mortimer had much to tell,—and she told it well. If history was the subject, she could relate the events of the civil wars—events which resembled indeed those of all civil wars, but which derived a peculiar strength of character, and brilliancy of colouring, from the hand by which they were sketched. She told of the time when she rode behind her brother, Sir Roger, to meet the King at Shrewsbury; and she almost echoed the shout uttered in the streets of that loyal city, when the University of Oxford sent in its plate to be coined for the exigences of the royal cause. She told also, with grave humour, the anecdote of Queen Henrietta making her escape with some difficulty from a house on fire,—and, when her life was scarce secure from the flames that consumed it, rushing back among them—to save her lap-dog!

“But of all her historical anecdotes, Mrs Ann valued most what she had to relate of her own family. On the virtue and valour of her brother Sir Roger, she dwelt with an unction whose balm imparted itself to her hearers; and even Elinor, in spite of the Puritanism of her early principles, wept as she listened. But when Mrs Ann told of the King taking shelter for one night in the Castle, under the protection only of her mother and herself, to whom he intrusted his rank and his misfortunes, (arriving under a disguise),—(Sir Roger being absent fighting his battles in Yorkshire)—when she added that her aged mother, Lady Mortimer, then seventy-four, after spreading her richest velvet mantle, lined with fur, as a quilt for the bed of her persecuted sovereign, tottered into the armoury, and, presenting the few servants that followed her with what arms could be found, adjured them by brand and blade, by lady’s love, and their hopes of heaven, to defend her royal guest. When she related that a band of fanatics, after robbing a church of all its silver-plate, and burning the adjacent vicarage, drunk with their success, had invested the Castle, and cried aloud for “the man” to be brought unto them, that he might be hewed to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal—and Lady Mortimer had called on a young French officer in Prince Rupert’s corps, who, with his men, had been billetted on the Castle for some days—and that this youth, but seventeen years of age, had met two desperate attacks of the assailants, and twice retired covered with his own blood and that of the assailants, whom he had in vain attempted to repel—and that Lady Mortimer, finding all was lost, had counselled the royal fugitive to make his escape,—and furnished him with the best horse left in Sir Roger’s stables to effect his flight, while she returned to the great hall, whose windows were now shattered by the balls that hissed and flew round her head, and whose doors were fast yielding to the crows and other instruments which a Puritan smith, who was both chaplain and colonel of the band, had lent them, and instructed them in the use of—and how Lady Mortimer fell on her knees before the young Frenchman, and adjured him to make good the defence till King Charles was safe, and free, and far—and how the young Frenchman had done all that man could do;—and finally, when the Castle, after an hour’s obstinate resistance, yielded to the assault of the fanatics, he had staggered, covered with blood, to the foot of the great chair which that ancient lady had immoveably occupied, (paralyzed by terror and exhaustion), and dropping his sword, then for the first time, exclaimed, “J’ai fait mon devoir!” and expired at her feet—and how her mother sat in the same rigour of attitude, while the fanatics ravaged through the Castle,—drank half the wines in the cellar,—thrust their bayonets through the family-pictures, which they called the idols of the high-places,—fired bullets through the wainscot, and converted half the female servants after their own way,—and on finding their search after the King fruitless, in mere wantonness of mischief, were about to discharge a piece of ordnance in the hall that must have shattered it in pieces, while Lady Mortimer sat torpidly looking on,—till, perceiving that the piece was accidentally pointed towards the very door through which King Charles had passed from the hall, her recollection seemed suddenly to return, and starting up and rushing before the mouth of the piece, exclaimed, “Not there!—you shall not there!”—and as she spoke, dropt dead in the hall. When Mrs Ann told these and other thrilling tales of the magnanimity, the loyalty, and the sufferings of her high ancestry, in a voice that alternately swelled with energy, and trembled with emotion, and as she told them, pointed to the spot where each had happened,—her young hearers felt a deep stirring of the heart,—a proud yet mellowed elation that never yet was felt by the reader of a written history, though its pages were as legitimate as any sanctioned by the royal licenser at Madrid.

“Nor was Mrs Ann Mortimer less qualified to take an interesting share in their lighter studies. When Waller’s poetry was its subject, she could tell of the charms of his Sacharissa, whom she knew well,—the Lady Dorothea Sidney, daughter of the Earl of Leicester,—and compare, with those of his Amoret, the Lady Sophia Murray. And in balancing the claims of these poetical heroines, she gave so accurate an account of their opposite styles of beauty,—entered so minutely into the details of their dress and deportment,—and so affectingly hinted, with a mysterious sigh, that there was one then at court whom Lucius, Lord Falkland, the gallant, the learned, and the polished, had whispered was far superior to both,——that her auditors more than suspected she had herself been one of the most brilliant stars in that galaxy whose faded glories were still reflected in her memory,—and that Mrs Ann, amid her piety and patriotism, still blended a fond reminiscence of the gallantries of that court where her youth had been spent,—and over which the beauty, the magnificent taste, and national gaiete of the ill-fated Henrietta, had once thrown a light as dazzling as it was transient. She was listened to by Margaret and Elinor with equal interest, but with far different feelings. Margaret, beautiful, vivacious, haughty, and generous, and resembling her grandfather and his sister alike in character and person, could have listened for ever to narrations that, while they confirmed her principles, gave a kind of holiness to the governing feelings of her heart, and made her enthusiasm a kind of virtue in her eyes. An aristocrat in politics, she could not conceive that public virtue could soar to a higher pitch than a devoted attachment to the house of Stuart afforded for its flight; and her religion had never given her any disturbance.——Strictly attached to the Church of England, as her forefathers had been from its first establishment, she included in an adherence to this not only all the graces of religion, but all the virtues of morality; and she could hardly conceive how there could be majesty in the sovereign, or loyalty in the subject, or valour in man, or virtue in woman, unless they were comprised within the pale of the Church of England. These qualities, with their adjuncts, had been always represented to her as co-existent with an attachment to monarchy and Episcopacy, and vested solely in those heroic characters of her ancestry, whose lives, and even deaths, it was a proud delight to their young descendant to listen to,—while all the opposite qualities,—all that man can hate, or woman despise,—had been represented to her as instinctively resident in the partizans of republicanism and the Presbytery. Thus her feelings and her principles,—her reasoning powers and the habits of her life, all took one way; and she was not only unable to make the least allowance for a divergence from this way, but utterly unable to conceive that another existed for those who believed in a God, or acknowledged human power at all. She was as much at a loss to conceive how any good could come out of that Nazareth of her abhorrence, as an ancient geographer would have been to have pointed out America in a classical map.—Such was Margaret.

“Elinor, on the other hand, bred up amid a clamour of perpetual contention,—for the house of her mother’s family, in which her first years had been passed, was, in the language of the profane of those times, a scruple-shop, where the godly of all denominations held their conferences of contradiction,—had her mind early awakened to differences of opinion, and opposition of principle. Accustomed to hear these differences and oppositions often expressed with the most unruly vehemence, she had never, like Margaret, indulged in a splendid aristocracy of imagination, that bore every thing before it, and made prosperity and adversity alike pay tribute to the pride of its triumph. Since her admission into the house of her grandfather, the mind of Elinor had become still more humble and patient,—more subdued and self-denied. Compelled to hear the opinions she was attached to decried, and the characters she reverenced vilified, she sat in reflective silence; and, balancing the opposite extremes which she was destined to witness, she came to the right conclusion,—that there must be good on both sides, however obscured or defaced by passion and by interest, and that great and noble qualities must exist in either party, where so much intellectual power, and so much physical energy, had been displayed by both. Nor could she believe that these clear and mighty spirits would be for ever opposed to each other in their future destinations,—she loved to view them as children who had “fallen out by the way,” from mistaking the path that led to their father’s house, but who would yet rejoice together in the light of his presence, and smile at the differences that divided them on their journey.

“In spite of the influence of her early education, Elinor had learned to appreciate the advantages of her residence in her grandfather’s castle. She was fond of literature and of poetry. She possessed imagination and enthusiasm,—and these qualities met with their loveliest indulgence amid the picturesque and historical scenery that surrounded the Castle,—the lofty tales told within its walls, and to which every stone in them seemed to cry out in attestation,—and the heroic and chivalrous characters of its inmates, with whom the portraits of their high descended ancestry seemed starting from their gorgeous frames to converse, as the tale of their virtues and their valour was told in their presence. This was a different scene from that in which she had passed her childhood. The gloomy and narrow apartments, divested of all ornament, and awaking no associations but those of an awful futurity—the uncouth habits, austere visages, denunciatory language, and polemical fury of its inmates or guests, struck her with a feeling for which she reproached herself, but did not suppress; and though she continued a rigid Calvinist in her creed, and listened whenever she could to the preaching of the non-conformist ministers, she had adopted in her pursuits the literary tastes, and in her manners the dignified courtesy, that became the descendant of the Mortimers.

“Elinor’s beauty, though of a style quite different from that of her cousin, was yet beauty of the first and finest character. Margaret’s was luxuriant, lavish, and triumphant,—every movement displayed a conscious grace,—every look demanded homage, and obtained it the moment it was demanded. Elinor’s was pale, contemplative, and touching;—her hair was as black as jet, and the thousand small curls into which, according to the fashion of the day, it was woven, seemed as if every one of them had been twined by the hand of nature,—they hung so softly and shadowingly, that they appeared like a veil dropping over the features of a nun, till she shook them back, and there beamed among them an eye of dark and brilliant light, like a star amid the deepening shades of twilight. She wore the rich dress prescribed by the taste and habits of Mrs Ann, who had never, even in the hour of extreme adversity, relaxed in what may be called the rigour of her aristocratical costume, and would have thought it little less than a desecration of the solemnity, had she appeared at prayers, even though celebrated (as she loved to term it) in the Castle-hall, unless arrayed in satins and velvets, that, like ancient suits of armour, could have stood alone and erect without the aid of human inhabitant. There was a soft and yielding tone in the gently modulated harmony of Elinor’s form and movements,—a gracious melancholy in her smile,—a tremulous sweetness in her voice,—an appeal in her look, which the heart that refused to answer could not have living pulse within its region. No head of Rembrandt’s, amid its contrasted luxuries of light and shade,—no form of Guido’s, hovering in exquisite and speechful undulation between earth and heaven, could vie with the tint and character of Elinor’s countenance and form. There was but one touch to be added to the picture of her beauty, and that touch was given by no physical grace,—no exterior charm. It was borrowed from a feeling as pure as it was intense,—as unconscious as it was profound. The secret fire that lit her eyes with that lambent glory, while it caused the paleness of her young cheek,—that preyed on her heart, while it seemed to her imagination that she clasped a young cherub in her arms, like the unfortunate queen of Virgil,—that fire was a secret even to herself.—She knew she felt, but knew not what she felt.

“When first admitted into the Castle, and treated with sufficient hauteur by her grandfather and his sister, who could not forget the mean descent and fanatic principles of her father’s family, she remembered, that, amid the appalling grandeur and austere reserve of her reception, her cousin, John Sandal, was the only one who spoke to her in accents of tenderness, or turned on her an eye that beamed consolation. She remembered him as the beautiful and gentle boy who had lightened all her tasks, and partaken in all her recreations.

“At an early age John Sandal, at his own request, had been sent to sea, and had never since visited the Castle. On the Restoration, the remembered services of the Mortimer family, and the high fame of the youth’s courage and ability, had procured him a distinguished situation in the navy. John Sandal’s consequence now rose in the eyes of the family, of whom he was at first an inmate on toleration only; and even Mrs Ann Mortimer began to express some anxiety to hear tidings of her valiant cousin John. When she spoke thus, the light of Elinor’s eye fell on her aunt with as rich a glow as ever summer sun on an evening landscape; but she felt, at the same moment, an oppression,—an indefinable suspension of thought, of speech, almost of breath, which was only relieved by the tears which, when retired from her aunt’s presence, she indulged in. Soon this feeling was exchanged for one of deeper and more agitating interest. The war with the Dutch broke out, and Captain John Sandal’s name, in spite of his youth, appeared conspicuous among those of the officers appointed to that memorable service.

“Mrs Ann, long accustomed to hear the names of her family uttered always in the same breath with the stirring report of high heroic deeds, felt the elation of spirit she had experienced in by-gone days, combined with happier associations, and more prosperous auguries. Though far advanced in life, and much declined in strength, it was observed, that during the reports of the war, and while she listened to the accounts of her kinsman’s valour and fast-advancing eminence, her step became firm and elastic, her lofty figure dilated to its youthful height, and a colour at times visited her cheek, with as rich and brilliant a tinge as when the first sighs of love murmured over its young roses. The high minded Margaret, partaking that enthusiasm which merged all personal feeling in the glory of her family and of her country, heard of the perils to which her cousin (whom she hardly remembered) was exposed, only with a haughty confidence that he would meet them as she felt she would have met them herself, had she been, like him, the last male descendant of the family of Mortimer. Elinor trembled and wept,—and when alone she prayed fervently.

“It was observable, however, that the respectful interest with which she had hitherto listened to the family legends so eloquently told by Mrs Ann, was now exchanged for a restless and unappeaseable anxiety for tales of the naval heroes who had dignified the family history. Happily she found a willing narrator in Mrs Ann, who had little need to search her memory, and no occasion to consult her invention, for splendid stories of those whose home was the deep, and whose battle-field was the wild waste ocean. Amid the gallery richly hung with family portraits, she pointed out the likeness of many a bold adventurer, whom the report of the riches and felicities of the new discovered world had tempted on speculations sometimes wild and disastrous, sometimes prosperous beyond the golden dreams of cupidity. “How precarious!—how perilous!” murmured Elinor, shuddering. But when Mrs Ann told the tale of her uncle, the literary speculator, the polished scholar, the brave and gentle of the family, who had accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on his calamitous expedition, and years after died of grief for his calamitous death, Elinor, with a start of horror, caught her aunt’s arm, emphatically extended towards the portrait, and implored her to desist. The decorum of the family was so great, that this liberty could not be taken without an apology for indisposition;—it was duly though faintly made, and Elinor retired to her apartment.

“From February 1665,—from the first intelligence of De Ruyter’s enterprises, till the animating period when the Duke of York was appointed to the command of the Royal fleet,—all was eager and anticipative excitement, and eloquent expatiations on ancient achievements, and presageful hopes of new honours, on the part of the heiress of Mortimer and Mrs Ann, and profound and speechless emotion on that of Elinor.

“The hour arrived, and an express was dispatched from London to Mortimer Castle with intelligence, in which King Charles, with that splendid courtesy which half redeemed his vices, announced himself most deeply interested, inasmuch as it added to the honours of the loyal family, whose services he appreciated so highly. The victory was complete,—and Captain John Sandal, in the phrase which the King’s attachment to French manners and language was beginning to render popular, had “covered himself with glory.” Amid the thickest of the fight, in an open boat, he had carried a message from Lord Sandwich to the Duke of York, under a shower of balls, and when older officers had stoutly declined the perilous errand; and when, on his return, Opdam the Dutch Admiral’s ship blew up, amid the crater of the explosion John Sandal plunged into the sea, to save the half-drowning, half-burning wretches who clung to the fragments that scorched them, or sunk in the boiling waves; and then,—dismissed on another fearful errand, flung himself between the Duke of York and the ball that struck at one blow the Earl of Falmouth, Lord Muskerry, and Mr Boyle, and when they all fell at the same moment, wiped, with unfaultering hand, and on bended knee, their brains and gore, with which the Duke of York was covered from head to foot. When this was read by Mrs Ann Mortimer, with many pauses, caused by sight dim with age, and diffused with tears,—and when at length, finishing the long and laborious read detail, Mrs Ann exclaimed—“He is a hero!” Elinor tremblingly whispered to herself—“He is a Christian.”

“The details of such an event forming a kind of era in a family so sequestered, imaginative, and heroic, as that of the Mortimers, the contents of the letter signed by the King’s own hand were read over and over again. They formed the theme of converse at their meals, and the subject of their study and comment when alone. Margaret dwelt much on the gallantry of the action, and half-imagined she saw the tremendous explosion of Opdam’s ship. Elinor repeated to herself, “And he plunged amid the burning wave to save the lives of the men he had conquered!” And some months elapsed before the brilliant vision of glory, and of grateful royalty, faded from their imagination; and when it did, like that of Micyllus, it left honey on the eye-lids of the dreamer.

“From the date of the arrival of this intelligence, a change had taken place in the habits and manners of Elinor, so striking as to become the object of notice to all but herself. Her health, her rest, and her imagination, became the prey of indefinable fantasies. The cherished images of the past,—the lovely visions of her golden childhood,—seemed fearfully and insanely contrasted in her imagination with the ideas of slaughter and blood,—of decks strewed with corses,—and of a young and terrible conqueror bestriding them amid showers of ball and clouds of fire. Her very senses reeled between these opposite impressions. Her reason could not brook the sudden transition from the smiling and Cupid-like companion of her childhood, to the hero of the embattled deep, and of nations and navies on fire,—garments rolled in blood,—the thunder of the battle and the shouting.

“She sat and tried, as well as her wandering fancy would allow her, to reconcile the images of that remembered eye, whose beam rested on her like the dark blue of a summer heaven swimming in dewy light,—with the flash that darted from the burning eye of the conqueror, whose light was as fatal where it fell as his sword. She saw him, as he had once sat beside her, smiling like the first morning in spring,—and smiled in return. The slender form, the soft and springy movements, the kiss of childhood that felt like velvet, and scented like balm,—was suddenly exchanged in her dream (for all her thoughts were dreams) for a fearful figure of one drenched in blood, and spattered with brains and gore. And Elinor, half-screaming, exclaimed, “Is this he whom I loved?” Thus her mind, vacillating between contrasts so strongly opposed, began to feel its moorings give way. She drifted from rock to rock, and on every rock she struck a wreck.

“Elinor relinquished her usual meetings with the family—she sat in her own apartment all the day, and most of the evening. It was a lonely turret projecting so far from the walls of the Castle, that there were windows, or rather casements, on three sides. There Elinor sat to catch the blast, let it blow as it would, and imagined she heard in its moanings the cries of drowning seamen. No music that her lute, or that which Margaret touched with a more powerful and brilliant finger, could wean her from this melancholy indulgence.

“Hush!” she would say to the females who attended her—“Hush! let me listen to the blast!—It waves many a banner spread for victory,—it sighs over many a head that has been laid low!”

“Her amazement that a being could be at once so gentle and so ferocious—her dread that the habits of his life must have converted the angel of her wilderness into a brave but brutal seaman, estranged from the feelings that had rendered the beautiful boy so indulgent to her errors,—so propitiatory between her and her proud relatives,—so aidant in all her amusements,—so necessary to her very existence.—The tones of this dreamy life harmonized, awfully for Elinor, with the sound of the blast as it shook the turrets of the Castle, or swept the woods that groaned and bowed beneath its awful visitings. And this secluded life, intense feeling, and profound and heart-rooted secret of her silent passion, held perhaps fearful and indescribable alliance with that aberration of mind, that prostration at once of the heart and the intellect, that have been found to bring forth, according as the agents were impelled, “the savour of life unto life, or of death unto death.” She had all the intensity of passion, combined with all the devotedness of religion; but she knew not which way to steer, or what gale to follow. She trembled and shrunk from her doubtful pilotage, and the rudder was left to the mercy of the winds and waves. Slender mercy do those experience who commit themselves to the tempests of the mental world—better if they had sunk at once amid the strife of the dark waters in their wild and wintry rage; there they would soon have arrived at the haven where they would be secure.

“Such was the state of Elinor, when the arrival of one who had been long a stranger in the vicinity of the Castle caused a strong sensation in its inhabitants.

“The widow Sandal, the mother of the young seaman, who had hitherto lived in obscurity on the interest of the small fortune bequeathed her by Sir Roger, (under the rigid injunction of never visiting the Castle), suddenly arrived in Shrewsbury, which was scarce a mile from it, and declared her intention of fixing her residence there.

“The affection of her son had showered on her, with the profusion of a sailor, and the fondness of a child, all the rewards of his services—but their glory;—and in comparative affluence, and honoured and pointed to as the mother of the young hero who stood high in royal favour, the widow of many sorrows took up her abode once more near the seat of her ancestors.

“At this period, every step taken by the member of a family was a subject of anxious and solemn consultation to those who considered themselves its heads, and there was a kind of chapter held in Mortimer Castle on this singular movement of the widow Sandal. Elinor’s heart beat hard during the debate—it subsided, however, at the determination, that the severe sentence of Sir Roger was not to be extended beyond his death, and that a descendant of the house of Mortimer should never live neglected while almost under the shadow of its walls.

“The visit was accordingly solemnly paid, and gratefully received,—there was much stately courtesy on the part of Mrs Ann towards her niece, (whom she called cousin after the old English fashion), and a due degree of retrospective humility and decorous dejection on that of the widow. They parted mutually softened towards, if not pleased with each other, and the intercourse thus opened was unremittingly sustained by Elinor, whose weekly visits of ceremony soon became the daily visits of interest and of habit. The object of the thoughts of both was the theme of the tongue of but one; and, as is not uncommon, she who said nothing felt the most. The details of his exploits, the description of his person, the fond enumeration of the promises of his childhood, and the graces and goodliness of his youth, were dangerous topics for the listener, to whom the bare mention of his name caused an intoxication of the heart, from which it scarce recovered for hours.

“The frequency of these visits was not observed to be diminished by a faint rumour, which the widow seemed to believe, rather from hope than probability, that Captain Sandal was about to visit the neighbourhood of the Castle. It was one evening in autumn, that Elinor, who had been prevented during the day from visiting her aunt, set out attended only by her maid and her usher. There was a private path through the park, that opened by a small door on the verge of the suburbs where the widow lived. Elinor, on her arrival, found her aunt from home, and was informed she had gone to pass the evening with a friend in Shrewsbury. Elinor hesitated for a moment, and then recollecting that this friend was a grave staid widow of one of Oliver’s knights, wealthy, however, and well respected, and a common acquaintance, she resolved to follow her thither. As she entered the room, which was spacious, but dimly lit by an old-fashioned casement window, she was surprised to see it filled with an unusual number of persons, some of whom were seated, but the greater number were collected in the ample recess of the window, and among them Elinor saw a figure, remarkable rather for its height, than its attitude or pretension,—it was that of a tall slender boy, about eighteen, with a beautiful infant in his arms, whom he was caressing with a tenderness that seemed rather associated with the retrospective fondness of brotherhood, than the anticipated hope of paternity. The mother of the infant, proud of the notice bestowed on her child, made, however, the usual incredulous apology for its troubling him.

“Troubling me!” said the boy, in tones that made Elinor think it was the first time she had heard music. “Oh, no—if you knew how fond I am of children,—how long it is since I had the delight of pressing one to my breast—how long it may be again before”—— and averting his head, he bowed it over the babe. The room was very dark, from the increasing shades of evening, deepened by the effect of the heavy wainscotting of its walls; but at this moment, the last bright light of an autumnal evening, in all its rich and fading glory, burst on the casement, powering on every object a golden and purpureal light. That end of the apartment in which Elinor sat remained in the deepest shade. She then distinctly beheld the figure which her heart seemed to recognize before her senses. His luxuriant hair, of the richest brown, (its feathery summits tinged by the light resembling the halo round some glorified head), hung, according to the fashion of the day, in clusters on his bosom, and half-concealed the face of the infant, as it lay like a nestling among them.

“His dress was that of a naval officer,—it was splendidly adorned with lace, and the superb insignia of a foreign order, the guerdon of some daring deed; and as the infant played with these, and then looked upward, as if to repose its dazzled sight on the smile of its young protector, Elinor thought she had never beheld association and contrast so touchingly united,—it was like a finely coloured painting, where the tints are so mellowed and mingled into each other, that the eye feels no transition in passing from one brilliant hue to another, with such exquisite imperceptibility are they graduated,—it was like a fine piece of music, where the art of the modulator prevents your knowing that you pass from one key to another; so softly are the intermediate tones of harmony touched, that the ear knows not where it wanders, but wherever it wanders, feels its path is pleasant. The young loveliness of the infant, almost assimilated to the beauty of the youthful caresser, and yet contrasted with the high and heroic air of his figure, and the adornments of his dress, (splendid as they were), all emblematic of deeds of peril and of death, seemed to the imagination of Elinor like the cherub-angel of peace reposing on the breast of valour, and whispering that his toils were done. She was awoke from her vision by the voice of the widow.—“Niece, this is your cousin John Sandal.” Elinor started, and received the salute of her kinsman, thus abruptly introduced, with an emotion, which, if it deprived her of those courtly graces which ought to have embellished her reception of the distinguished stranger, gave her, at least, the more touching ones of diffidence.

“The forms of the day admitted of, and even sanctioned, a mode of salutation since exploded; and as Elinor felt the pressure of a lip as vermeil as her own, she trembled to think that that lip had often given the war-word to beings athirst for human blood, and that the arm that enfolded her so tenderly had pointed the weapons of death with resistless and terrible aim against bosoms that beat with all the cords of human affection. She loved her young kinsman, but she trembled in the arms of the hero.

“John Sandal sat down by her, and in a few moments the melody of his tones, the gentle facility of his manner, the eyes that smiled when the lips were closed, and the lips whose smile was more eloquent in silence than the language of the brightest eyes, made her gradually feel at ease with herself—she attempted to converse, but paused to listen—she tried to look up, but felt like the worshippers of the sun, sickening under the blaze she gazed on,—and averted her eyes that she might see. There was a mild, inoppressive, but most seductive light in the dark-blue eyes that fell so softly on hers, like moon-light floating over a fine landscape. And there was a young and eloquent tenderness in the tones of that voice, which she expected to have spoken in thunder, that disarmed and dulcified speech almost to luxury. Elinor sat, and imbibed poison at every inlet of the senses, ear, and eye, and touch, for her kinsman, with a venial, and to her imperceptible licence, had taken her hand as he spoke. And he spoke much, but not of war and blood, of the scenes where he had been so eminent, and of the events to which his simple allusion would have given interest and dignity,—but of his return to his family, of the delight he felt at again beholding his mother, and of the hopes that he indulged of being not an unwelcome visitor at the Castle. He inquired after Margaret with affectionate earnestness, and after Mrs Ann with reverential regard; and in mentioning the names of these relatives, he spoke like one whose heart was at home before his steps, and whose heart could make every spot where it rested a home to itself and to others. Elinor could have listened for ever. The names of the relatives she loved and revered sounded in her ears like music, but the advancing night warned her of the necessity of returning to the Castle, where the hours were scrupulously observed; and when John Sandal offered to attend her home, she had no longer a motive to delay her departure.

“It had appeared dark in the room where they were sitting, but it was still rich and purple twilight in the sky, when they set out for the Castle.

“Elinor took the path through the park, and, absorbed in new feelings, was for the first time insensible of its woodland beauty, at once gloomy and resplendent, mellowed by the tints of autumnal colouring, and glorious with the light of an autumnal evening,—till she was roused to attention by the exclamations of her companion, who appeared rapt into delight at what he beheld. This sensibility of nature, this fresh and unworn feeling, in one whom she had believed hardened by scenes of toil and terror against the perception of beauty,—whom her imagination had painted to her as fitter to cross the Alps, than to luxuriate in Campania,—touched her deeply. She attempted to reply, but was unable,—she remembered how her quick susceptibility of nature had enabled her to sympathize with and improve on the admiration expressed by others, and she wondered at her silence, for she knew not its cause.

“As they approached the Castle, the scene became glorious beyond the imagination of a painter, whose eye has dreamed of sun-set in foreign climes. The vast edifice lay buried in shade,—all its varied and strongly charactered features of tower and pinnacle, bartizan and battlement, were melted into one dense and sombrous mass. The distant hills, with their conical summits, were still clearly defined in the dark-blue heaven, and their peaks still retained a hue of purple so brilliant and lovely, that it seemed as if the light had loved to linger there, and, parting, had left that tint as the promise of a glorious morning. The woods that surrounded the Castle stood as dark, and apparently as solid as itself. Sometimes a gleam like gold trembled over the tufted foliage of their summits, and at length, through a glade which opened among the dark and massive boles of the ancient trees, one last rich and gorgeous flood of light burst in, turned every blade of grass it touched into emerald for a moment,—paused on its lovely work—and parted. The effect was so instantaneous, brilliant, and evanishing, that Elinor had scarce time for a half uttered exclamation, as she extended her arm in the direction where the light had fallen so brightly and so briefly. She raised her eyes to her companion, in that full consciousness of perfect sympathy that make words seem like counters, compared to the sterling gold of a heart-minted look. Her companion had turned towards it too. He neither uttered exclamation, nor pointed with finger,—he smiled, and his countenance was as that of an angel. It seemed to reflect and answer the last bright farewell of day, as if friends had parted smiling at each other. It was not alone the lips that smiled,—the eyes, the cheeks, every feature had its share in that effulgent light that was diffused over his aspect, and all combined to make that harmony to the eye, which is often as deliciously perceptible, as the combination of the most exquisite voices with the most perfect modulation, is to the ear. To the last hour of her mortal existence, that smile, and the scene where it was uttered, were engraved on the heart of Elinor. It announced at once a spirit, that, like the ancient statue, answered every ray of light that fell on it with a voice of melody, and blended the triumph of the glories of nature with the profound and tender felicities of the heart. They spoke no more during the remainder of their walk, but there was more eloquence in their silence than in many words. * * * * * *

“It was almost night before they arrived at the Castle. Mrs Ann received her distinguished kinsman with stately cordiality, and affection mingled with pride. Margaret welcomed him rather as the hero than the relative; and John, after the ceremonies of introduction, turned to repose himself on the smile of Elinor. They had arrived just at the time when the chaplain was about to read the evening prayers,—a form so strictly adhered to at the Castle, that not even the arrival of a stranger was permitted to interfere with its observance. Elinor watched this moment with peculiar solicitude;—her religious feelings were profound, and amid all the young hero’s vivid display of the gentlest affections, and purest sensibilities by which our wretched existence can be enhanced or beautified, she still dreaded that religion, the companion of deep thought and solemn habits, might wander far for an abode before it settled in the heart of a sailor. The last doubt passed from her mind, as she beheld the intense but silent devotion with which John mingled in the family rite. There is something very ennobling in the sight of male piety. To see that lofty form, that never bowed to man, bowed to the earth to God,—to behold the knee, whose joints would be as adamant under the influence of mortal force or threat, as flexible as those of infancy in the presence of the Almighty,—to see the locked and lifted hands, to hear the fervent aspiration, to feel the sound of the mortal weapon as it drags on the floor beside the kneeling warrior,—these are things that touch the senses and the heart at once, and suggest the awful and affecting image of all physical energy prostrate before the power of the Divinity. Elinor watched him even to the forgetfulness of her own devotions;—and when his white hands, that seemed never formed to grasp a weapon of destruction, were clasped in devotion, and one of them slightly and occasionally raised to part the redundant curls that shaded his face as he knelt, she thought that she beheld at once angelic strength and angelic purity.

“When the service concluded, Mrs Ann, after repeating her solemn welcome to her nephew, could not help expressing her satisfaction at the devotion he had showed; but she mingled with that expression a kind of incredulity, that men accustomed to toil and peril could ever have devotional feelings. John Sandal bowed to the congratulatory part of Mrs Ann’s speech, and, resting one hand on his short sword, and with the other removing the thick ringlets of his luxuriant hair, he stood before them a hero in deed, and a boy in form. A blush overspread his young features, as he said, in accents at once emphatic and tremulous, “Dear Aunt, why should you accuse those of neglecting the protection of the Almighty who need it most. They who “go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in the great waters,” have the best right to feel, in their hour of peril, “it is but the wind and the storm fulfilling his word.” A seaman without a belief and hope in God, is worse off than a seaman without chart or pilot.”

“As he spoke with that trembling eloquence that makes conviction be felt almost before it is heard, Mrs Ann held out to him her withered but still snow-white hand to kiss. Margaret presented hers also, like a heroine to a feudal knight; and Elinor turned aside, and wept in delicious agony. * * * * * * * *

“When we set ourselves resolutely to discover perfection in a character, we are always sure to find it. But Elinor needed little aid from the pencil of imagination to colour the object that had been stamped by an ineffaceable touch upon her heart. Her kinsman’s character and temper developed themselves slowly, or rather were developed by external and accidental causes; for a diffidence almost feminine prevented his ever saying much,—and when he did, himself was the last theme he touched on. He unfolded himself like a blowing flower,—the soft and silken leaves expanded imperceptibly to the eye, and every day the tints were deepening, and the scent becoming richer, till Elinor was dazzled by their lustre, and inebriated with the fragrance.

“This wish to discover excellencies in the object we love, and to identify esteem and passion by seeking the union of moral beauty and physical grace, is a proof that love is of a very ennobling character,—that, however the stream may be troubled by many things, the source at least is pure,—and that the heart capable of feeling it intensely, proves it possesses an energy that may one day be rewarded by a brighter object, and a holier flame, than earth ever afforded, or nature ever could kindle. * * * * * * * * *

“Since her son’s arrival, the widow Sandal had betrayed a marked degree of anxiety, and a kind of restless precaution against some invisible evil. She was now frequently at the Castle. She could not be blind to the increasing attachment of John and Elinor,—and her only thought was how to prevent the possibility of their union, by which the interest of the former and her own importance would be materially affected.

“She had obtained, by indirect means, a knowledge of the contents of Sir Roger’s will; and the whole force of a mind which possessed more of art than of power, and of a temper which had more passion than energy, was strained to realize the hopes it suggested. Sir Roger’s will was singular. Alienated as he was from his daughter Sandal, and his younger son the father of Elinor, by the connexions they had adopted, it seemed to be the strongest object of his wishes to unite their descendants, and invest the wealth and rank of the house of Mortimer in the last of its representatives. He had therefore bequeathed his immense estates to his grand-daughter Margaret, in the event of her marrying her kinsman John Sandal;—in the case of his marrying Elinor, he was entitled to no more than her fortune of £.5000;—and the bequest of the greater part of the property to a distant relative who bore the name of Mortimer, was to be the consequence of the non-intermarriage of Sandal with either of his cousins.

“Mrs Ann Mortimer, anticipating the effect that this opposition of interest to affection might produce in the family, had kept the contents of the will a secret,—but Mrs Sandal had discovered it by means of the domestics at the Castle, and her mind wrought intensely on the discovery. She was a woman too long familiar with want and privation to dread any evil but their continuance, and too ambitious of the remembered distinctions of her early life, not to risk any thing that might enable her to recover them. She felt a personal feminine jealousy of the high-minded Mrs Ann, and the noble-hearted beautiful Margaret, which was unappeasable; and she hovered round the walls of the Castle like a departed spirit groaning for its re-admission to the place from which it had been driven, and feeling and giving no peace till its restoration was accomplished.

“When with these feelings was united the anxiety of maternal ambition for her son, who might be raised to a noble inheritance, or sunk to comparative mediocrity by his choice, the result may be easily guessed; and the widow Sandal, once determined on the end, felt little scruple about the means. Want and envy had given her an unslakeable appetite for the restored splendours of her former state; and false religion had taught her every shade and penumbra of hypocrisy, every meanness of artifice, every obliquity of insinuation. In her varied life she had known the good, and chosen the evil. The widow Sandal was now determined to interpose an insurmountable obstruction to their union. * * * * * * * *

“Mrs Ann still flattered herself that the secret of Sir Roger’s will was suppressed. She saw the intense and disruptable feeling that seemed to mark John and Elinor for each other; and, with a feeling half-borrowed from magnanimity, half from romance, (for Mrs Ann had been fond of the high-toned romances of her day), she looked forward to the felicity of their union as being little disturbed by the loss of land and lordship,—of the immense revenues,—and the far-descended titles of the Mortimer family.

“Highly as she prized these distinctions, dear to every noble mind, she prized still more highly the union of devoted hearts and congenial spirits, who, trampling on the golden apples that were flung in their path, pressed forward with unremitting ardour for the prize of felicity.

“The wedding-day of John and Elinor was fixed,—the bridal clothes were made,—the noble and numerous friends summoned,—the Castle hall decorated, the bells of the parish church ringing out a loud and merry peal, and the blue-coated serving men adorned with favours, and employed in garnishing the wassail bowl, which was doomed by many a thirsty eye to be often drained and often replenished. Mrs Ann herself took with her own hands, from an ample chest of ebony, a robe of velvet and satin, which she had worn at the court of James the First, on the marriage of the princess Elizabeth with the prince palatine, of whom the former, to borrow the language of a contemporary writer, had “brided and bridled it so well, and indeed became herself so handsomely,” that Mrs Ann, as she arrayed herself, thought she saw the splendid vision of the royal bridal float before her faded eyes in dim but gorgeous pageantry once more. The heiress, too, attired herself splendidly, but it was observed, that her beautiful cheek was paler than even that of the bride, and the smile which held a fixed unjoyous station on her features all that morning, seemed more like the effort of resolution than the expression of felicity. The widow Sandal had betrayed considerable agitation, and quitted the Castle at an early hour. The bridegroom had not yet appeared, and the company, after having in vain for some time awaited his arrival, set out for the church, where they supposed he was impatiently expecting them.

“The cavalcade was magnificent and numerous—the dignity and consequence of the Mortimer family had assembled all who had aspired to the distinction of their acquaintance, and such was then the feudal grandeur attendant on the nuptials of a high-descended family, that relatives, however remote in blood or in local distance, collected for sixty miles in every direction around the Castle, and presented a “host of friends, gorgeously arrayed and attended on that eventful morning.”

“Most of the company, even including the females, were mounted on horseback, and this, by apparently increasing the number of the procession, added to its tumultuous magnificence. There were some cumbrous vehicles, misnomed carriages, of a fashion indescribably inconvenient, but gorgeously gilded and painted,—and the Cupids on the pannels had been re-touched for the occasion. The bride was lifted on her palfrey by two peers,—Margaret rode beside her gallantly attended,—and Mrs Ann, who once more saw nobles contending for her withered hand, and adjusting her silken rein, felt the long-faded glories of her family revive, and led the van of the pompous procession with as much dignity of demeanour, and as much glow of faded beauty, once eminent and resistless, as if she still followed the gorgeous nuptial progress of the princess palatine. They arrived at the church,—the bride, the relatives, the splendid company, the minister—all but the bridegroom, were there. There was a long painful silence. Several gentlemen of the bridal party rode rapidly out in every direction in which it was thought probable to meet him,—the clergyman stood at the altar, till, weary of standing, he retired. The crowd from the neighbouring villages, combined with the numerous attendants, filled the church-yard. Their acclamations were incessant,—the heat and distraction became intolerable, and Elinor begged for a few moments to be allowed to retire to the vestry.

“There was a casement window which opened on the road, and Mrs Ann supported the bride as she tottered towards it, attempting to loose her wimple, and veil of costly lace. As Elinor approached the casement, the thundering hoofs of a horse at full speed shook the road. Elinor looked up mechanically,—the rider was John Sandal,—he cast a look of horror at the pale bride, and plunging his desperate spurs deeper, disappeared in a moment. * * * * *

“A year after this event, two figures were seen to walk, or rather wander, almost every evening, in the neighbourhood of a small hamlet in a remote part of Yorkshire. The vicinage was picturesque and attractive, but these figures seemed to move amid the scenery like beings, who, if they still retained eyes for nature, had lost all heart for it. That wan and attenuated form, so young, yet so withered, whose dark eyes emit a fearful light amid features chill and white as those of a statue, and the young graces of whose form seem to have been nipt like those of a lily that bloomed too soon in spring, and was destroyed by the frost of the treacherous season, whose whispers had first invited it to bud,—that is Elinor Mortimer,—and that figure that walks beside her, so stiff and rectangular, that it seems as its motion was regulated by mechanism, whose sharp eyes are directed so straight forward, that they see neither tree on the right hand, or glade on the left, or heaven above, or earth beneath, or any thing but a dim vision of mystic theology for ever before them, which is aptly reflected in their cold contemplative light, that is the Puritan maiden sister of her mother, with whom Elinor had fixed her residence. Her dress is arranged with as much precision as if a mathematician had calculated the angles of every fold,—every pin’s point knows its place, and does its duty—the plaits of her round-eared cap do not permit one hair to appear on her narrow forehead, and her large hood, adjusted after the fashion in which it was worn by the godly sisters, who rode out to meet Prynne on his return from the pillory, lends a deeper shade to her rigid features,—a wretched-looking lacquey is carrying a huge clasped bible after her, in the mode in which she remembered to have seen Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough march to prayer, attended by their pages, while she proudly followed in their train, distinguished as the sister of that godly man and powerful preacher of the word, Sandal. From the day of her disappointed nuptials, Elinor, with that insulted feeling of maiden pride, which not even the anguish of her broken heart could suppress, had felt an unappeaseable anxiety to quit the scene of her disgrace and her misfortune. It was vainly opposed by her aunt and Margaret, who, horror-struck at the event of those disastrous nuptials, and wholly unconscious of the cause, had implored her, with all the energy of affection, to fix her residence at the Castle, within whose walls they pledged themselves he who had abandoned her should never be permitted to place his foot. Elinor answered the impassioned importunities, only by eager and clinging pressures of her cold hands, and by tears which trembled on her eye-lids, without the power to fall.—“Nay, stay with us,” said the kind and noble-hearted Margaret, “you shall not leave us!” And she pressed the hands of her kinswoman, with that cordial touch that gives a welcome as much to the heart as to the home of the inviter.—“Dearest cousin,” said Elinor, answering, for the first time, this affectionate appeal with a faint and ghastly smile—“I have so many enemies within these walls, that I can no longer encounter them with safety to my life.”—“Enemies!” repeated Margaret.—“Yes, dearest cousin—there is not a spot where he trod—not a prospect on which he has gazed—not an echo which has repeated the sound of his voice,—that does not send daggers through my heart, which those who wish me to live would not willingly see infixed any longer.” To the emphatic agony with which these words were uttered, Margaret had nothing to reply but with tears; and Elinor set out on her journey to the relative of her mother, a rigid Puritan, who resided in Yorkshire.

“As the carriage was ordered for her departure, Mrs Ann, supported by her female attendants, stood on the draw-bridge to take leave of her niece, with solemn and affectionate courtesy. Margaret wept bitterly, and aloud, as she stood at a casement, and waved her hand to Elinor. Her aunt never shed a tear, till out of the presence of the domestics,—but when all was over,—“she entered into her chamber, and wept there.”

“When her carriage had driven some miles from the Castle, a servant on a fleet horse followed it at full speed with Elinor’s lute, which had been forgotten,—it was offered to her, and after viewing it for some moments with a look in which memory struggled with grief, she ordered its strings to be broken on the spot, and proceeded on her journey.

“The retreat to which Elinor had retired, did not afford her the tranquillity she expected. Thus, change of place always deceives us with the tantalizing hope of relief, as we toss on the feverish bed of life.

“She went in a faint expectation of the revival of her religious feelings—she went to wed, amid the solitude and desert where she had first known him, the immortal bridegroom, who would never desert her as the mortal one had done,—but she did not find him there—the voice of God was no longer heard in the garden—either her religious sensibility had abated, or those from whom she first received the impression, had no longer power to renew it, or perhaps the heart which has exhausted itself on a mortal object, does not find its powers soon recruited to meet the image of celestial beneficence, and exchange at once the visible for the invisible,—the felt and present, for the future and the unknown.

“Elinor returned to the residence of her mother’s family in the hope of renewing former images, but she found only the words that had conveyed those ideas, and she looked around in vain for the impressions they had once suggested. When we thus come to feel that all has been illusion, even on the most solemn subjects,—that the future world seems to be deserting us along with the present, and that our own hearts, with all their treachery, have done us no more wrong than the false impressions which we have received from our religious instructors, we are like the deity in the painting of the great Italian artist, extending one hand to the sun, and the other to the moon, but touching neither. Elinor had imagined or hoped, that the language of her aunt would have revived her habitual associations—she was disappointed. It is true no pains were spared—when Elinor wished to read, she was furnished amply with the Westminster Confession, or Prynne’s Histriomastrix; or if she wished for lighter pages, for the Belles Lettres of Puritanism, there were John Bunyan’s Holy War, or the life of Mr Badman. If she closed the book in despair at the insensibility of her untouched heart, she was invited to a godly conference, where the non-conformist ministers, who had been, in the language of the day, extinguished under the Bartholomew bushel[(8)], met to give the precious word in season to the scattered fold of the Lord. Elinor knelt and wept too at these meetings; but, while her form was prostrated before the Deity, her tears fell for one whom she dared not name. When, in incontroulable agony, she sought, like Joseph, where she might weep unobserved and unrestrained, and rushed into the narrow garden that skirted the cottage of her aunt, and wept there, she was followed by the quiet, sedate figure, moving at the rate of an inch in a minute, who offered her for her consolation, the newly published and difficultly obtained work of Marshall on Sanctification.

“Elinor, accustomed too much to that fatal excitement of the heart, which renders all other excitement as faint and feeble as the air of heaven to one who has been inhaling the potent inebriation of the strongest perfumes, wondered how this being, so abstracted, cold, and unearthly, could tolerate her motionless existence. She rose at a fixed hour,—at a fixed hour she prayed,—at a fixed hour received the godly friends who visited her, and whose existence was as monotonous and apathetic as her own,—at a fixed hour she dined,—and at a fixed hour she prayed again, and then retired,—yet she prayed without unction, and fed without appetite, and retired to rest without the least inclination to sleep. Her life was mere mechanism, but the machine was so well wound up, that it appeared to have some quiet consciousness and sullen satisfaction in its movements.

“Elinor struggled in vain for the renewal of this life of cold mediocrity,—she thirsted for it as one who, in the deserts of Afric, expiring for want of water, would wish for the moment to be an inmate of Lapland, to drink of their eternal snows,—yet at that moment wonders how its inhabitants can live among SNOW. She saw a being far inferior to herself in mental power,—of feelings that hardly deserved the name—tranquil, and wondered that she herself was wretched.—Alas! she did not know, that the heartless and unimaginative are those alone who entitle themselves to the comforts of life, and who can alone enjoy them. A cold and sluggish mediocrity in their occupations or their amusements, is all they require—pleasure has with them no meaning but the exemption from actual suffering, nor do they annex any idea to pain but the immediate infliction of corporeal suffering, or of external calamity—the source of pain or pleasure is never found in their hearts—while those who have profound feelings scarce ever look elsewhere for either. So much the worse for them,—the being reduced to providing for the necessities of human life, and being satisfied when that provision is made, is perhaps the best condition of human life—beyond that, all is the dream of insanity, or the agony of disappointment. Far better the dull and dusky winter’s day, whose gloom, if it never abates, never increases,—(and to which we lift up an eye of listlessness, in which there is no apprehension of future and added terrors),—to the glorious fierceness of the summer’s day, whose sun sets amid purple and gold,—while, panting under its parting beams, we see the clouds collecting in the darkening East, and view the armies of heaven on their march, whose thunders are to break our rest, and whose lightnings may crumble us to ashes. * * * * *

“Elinor strove hard with her fate,—the strength of her intellect had been much developed since her residence at Mortimer Castle, and there also the energies of her heart had been developed fatally. How dreadful is the conflict of superior intellect and a burning heart, with the perfect mediocrity of the characters and circumstances they are generally doomed to live with! The battering-rams play against wool-bags,—the lightnings glance on ice, hiss, and are extinguished. The greater strength we exhibit, we feel we are more and more paralyzed by the weakness of our enemies,—our very energy becomes our bitterest enemy, as it fights in vain against the impregnable fortress of total vacuity! It is in vain we assail a foe who neither knows our language or uses our weapons. Elinor gave it up,—yet still she struggled with her own feelings; and perhaps the conflict which she now undertook was the hardest of all. She had received her first religious impressions under the roof of her Puritanic aunt, and, true or false, they had been so vivid, that she was anxious to revive them. When the heart is robbed of its first-born, there is nothing it will not try to adopt. Elinor remembered a very affecting scene that had occurred in her childhood, beneath the roof where she now resided.

“An old non-conformist minister, a very Saint John for sanctity of life, and simplicity of manners, had been seized by a magistrate while giving the word of consolation to a few of his flock who had met at the cottage of her aunt.

“The old man had supplicated for a moment’s delay on the part of the civil power, and its officers, by an unusual effort of toleration or of humanity, complied. Turning to his congregation, who, amid the tumult of the arrest, had never risen from their knees, and only changed the voice of supplication from praying with their pastor, to praying for him,—he quoted to them that beautiful passage from the prophet Malachi, which appears to give such delightful encouragement to the spiritual intercourse of Christians,—“Then they that feared the Lord, spoke often to one another, and the Lord heard it,” &c. As he spoke, the old man was dragged away by some rougher hands, and died soon after in confinement.

“On the young imagination of Elinor, this scene was indelibly written. Amid the magnificence of Mortimer Castle, it had never been effaced or obscured, and now she tried to make herself in love with the sounds and the scene that had so deeply touched her infant heart.

“Resolute in her purposes, she spared no pains to excite this reminiscence of religion,—it was her last resource. Like the wife of Phineas, she struggled to bear an heir of the soul, even while she named him Ichabod,—and felt the glory was departed. She went to the narrow apartment,—she seated herself in the very chair that venerable man occupied when he was torn from it, and his departure appeared to her like that of an ascending prophet. She would then have caught the folds of his mantle, and mounted with him, even though his flight had led to prison and to death. She tried, by repeating his last words, to produce the same effect they had once had on her heart, and wept in indescribable agony at feeling those words had no meaning now for her. When life and passion have thus rejected us, the backward steps we are compelled to tread towards the path we have wandered from, are ten thousand times more torturing and arduous than those we have exhausted in their pursuit. Hope then supported our hands every step we took. Remorse and disappointment scourge us back, and every step is tinged with tears or with blood; and well it is for the pilgrim if that blood is drained from his heart, for then—his pilgrimage will be sooner terminated. * * * * * *

“At times Elinor, who had forgotten neither the language or habits of her former existence, would speak in a manner that gave her Puritanic relative hopes that, according to the language of the times, “the root of the matter was in her,”—and when the old lady, in confidence of her returning orthodoxy, discussed long and learnedly on the election and perseverance of the saints, the listener would startle her by a burst of feeling, that seemed to her aunt more like the ravings of a demoniac, than the language of a human being,—especially one who had from her youth known the Scriptures. She would say, “Dearest aunt, I am not insensible of what you say; from a child, (thanks to your care), I have known the holy scriptures. I have felt the power of religion. At a latter period I have experienced all the enjoyments of an intellectual existence. Surrounded by splendour, I have conversed with enlarged minds,—I have seen all that life can shew me,—I have lived with the mean and the rich,—the spiritual in their poverty, and the worldly-minded in their grandeur,—I have deeply drank of the cup which both modes of existence held to my lip,—and at this moment I swear to you,—one moment of heart,—one dream such as once I dreamed, (and thought I should never awake from), is worth all the existence that the earthly-minded lavish on this world, and those who mystify expend on the next!”—“Unfortunate wretch! and undone for everlasting!” cried the terrified Calvinist, lifting up her hands,—“Cease, cease,” said Elinor with that dignity which grief alone can give,—“If I have indeed devoted to an earthly love that which is due to God alone, is not my punishment certain in a future state? Has it not already commenced here? May not then all reproaches be spared when we are suffering more than human enmity can wish us,—when our very existence is a bitterer reproach to us than malignity can utter?”—As she spoke, she added, wiping a cold tear from her wasted cheek, “My stroke is heavier than my groaning!”

“At other times she appeared to listen to the language of the Puritan preachers (for all were preachers who frequented the house) with some appearance of attention, and then, rushing from them without any conviction but that of despair, exclaimed in her haste, “All men are liars!” Thus it fares with those who wish to make an instant transition from one world to another,—it is impossible,—the cold wave interposes—for ever interposes, between the wilderness and the land of promise—and we may as soon expect to tread the threshold which parts life and death without pain, as to cross the interval which separates two modes of existence so distinct as those of passion and religion, without struggles of the soul inexpressible—without groanings which cannot be uttered.

“To these struggles there was soon to be an addition. Letters at this period circulated very slowly, and were written only on important occasions. Within a very short period, Elinor received two letters by express from Mortimer Castle, written by her cousin Margaret. The first announced the arrival of John Sandal at the Castle,—the second, the death of Mrs Ann,—the postscriptums of both contained certain mysterious hints relative to the interruption of the marriage,—intimations that the cause was known only to the writer, to Sandal and to his mother,—and entreaties that Elinor would return to the Castle, and partake of the sisterly love with which Margaret and John Sandal would be glad to receive her. The letters dropt from her hand as she received them,—of John Sandal she had never ceased to think, but she had never ceased to wish not to think,—and his name even now gave her a pang which she could neither utter or suppress, and which burst forth in an involuntary shriek, that seemed like the last string that breaks in the exquisite and too-highly strung instrument of the human heart.

“Over the account of Mrs Ann’s death, she lingered with that fearful feeling that a young adventurer experiences, who sees a noble vessel set out before him on a voyage of discovery, and wishes, while lingering in harbour himself, that he was already at the shore where it has arrived, and tasted of its repose, and participated in its treasures.

“Mrs Ann’s death had not been unworthy of that life of magnanimity and high heroic feeling which had marked every hour of her mortal existence—she had espoused the cause of the rejected Elinor, and sworn in the chapel of Mortimer Castle, while Margaret knelt beside, never to admit within its walls the deserter of his betrothed bride.

“On a dim autumnal evening, when Mrs Ann, with fading sight but undiminished feeling, was poring over some of Lady Russel’s letters in manuscript, and, to relieve her eyes, sometimes glanced on the manuscript of Nelson’s Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England,—it was announced to her that a Cavalier (the servants well knew the charm of that name to the ear of the ancient loyalist) had crossed the draw-bridge, entered the hall, and was advancing to the apartment where she sat. “Let him be admitted,” was her answer, and rising from her chair, which was so lofty and so spacious, that as she lifted herself from it to greet the stranger with a courtly reception, her form appeared like a spectre rising from an ancient monument,—she stood facing the entrance—at that entrance appeared John Sandal. She bent forwards for a moment, but her eyes, bright and piercing, still recognized him in a moment.

“Back!—back!”—exclaimed the stately ancestress, waving him off with her withered hand—“Back!—profane not this floor with another step!”—“Hear me, madam, for one moment—suffer me to address you, even on my knees—I pay the homage to your rank and relationship—misunderstand it not as an acknowledgement of guilt on my part!”

“Mrs Ann’s features at this action underwent a slight contraction—a short spasmodic affection. “Rise, Sir—rise,” she said—“and say what you have to say—but utter it, Sir, at the door whose threshold you are unworthy to tread.”

“John Sandal rose from his knees, and pointed instinctively as he rose to the portrait of Sir Roger Mortimer, to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Mrs Ann acknowledged the appeal—she advanced a few steps on the oaken floor—she stood erect for a moment, and then, pointing with a dignity of action which no pencil could embody to the portrait, seemed to consider her attitude as a valid and eloquent answer—it said—he to whose resemblance you point, and claim protection from, never like you dishonoured these walls by an act of baseness—of heartless treachery! Betrayer!—look to his portrait! Her expression had in it something of the sublime—the next moment a strong spasm contracted her features—she attempted to speak, but her lips no longer obeyed her—she seemed to speak, but was not heard even by herself. She stood for a moment before John Sandal in that rigid immoveable attitude that says, “Advance not another step at your peril—insult not the portraits of your ancestors—insult not their living representative, by another step of intrusion!” As she spoke thus, (for her attitude spoke), a stronger spasm contracted her features. She attempted to move—the same rigid constriction extended to her limbs; and, waving her prohibitory arm still, as if in defiance at once of the approach of death and of her rejected kinsman, she dropt at his feet. * * * * * *

“She did not long survive the interview, nor did she ever recover the use of speech. Her powerful intellect was, however, unimpaired; and to the last she expressed herself most intelligibly by action, as determined not to hear a word explanatory of Sandal’s conduct. This explanation was therefore made to Margaret, who, though much shocked and agitated at the first disclosure, seemed afterwards perfectly reconciled to it. * * * * * * * *

“Shortly after the receipt of these letters, Elinor took a sudden, but perhaps not singular resolution,—she determined to set out immediately for Mortimer Castle. It was not her weariness of the withering life, the αβιωτος βιος she lived at her Puritanic aunt’s—it was not the wish to enjoy again the stately and splendid ceremonial of Mortimer Castle, contrasted with the frugal fare and monastic rigour of the cottage in Yorkshire—it was not even the wish for that change of place that always flatters us with change of circumstance, as if we did not carry our own hearts with us wherever we go, and might not therefore be sure that an innate and eroding ulcer must be our companion from the Pole to the Equator—it was not this, but a whisper half unheard, yet believed, (just in proportion as it was inaudible and incredible), that murmured from the bottom of her credulous heart, ‘Go—and perhaps’—

“Elinor set out on her journey, and after having performed it with fewer difficulties than can be imagined, considering the state of the roads, and the modes of travelling in the year 1667 or thereabouts, she arrived in the vicinity of Mortimer Castle. It was a scene of reminiscence to her,—her heart throbbed audibly as the carriage stopped at a Gothic gate, through which there was a walk between two rows of lofty elms. She alighted, and to the request of the servant who followed her, that he might be permitted to shew her the way through a path entangled by the intersecting roots of the trees, and dim with twilight, she answered only by her tears. She waved him off, and advanced on foot and alone. She remembered, from the bottom of her soul, how she had once wandered amid that very grove with John Sandal—how his smile had shed a richer light on the landscape, than even the purple smile of the dying day-light. She thought of that smile, and lingered to catch it amid the rich and burning hues flung by the fading light on the many-tinted boles of the ancient trees. The trees were there—and the light was there—but his smile, that once eclipsed the sun-light, was there no longer!

“She advanced alone—the lofty avenue of trees still retained its magnificent depth of shade, and gorgeous colouring of trunk and leaf. She sought among them for that which she had once felt—and God and nature alone are conscious of the agony with which we demand from them the object which we are conscious was once consecrated to our hearts, and which we now require of both in vain! God withholds,—and Nature denies them!

“As Elinor with trembling steps advanced towards the Castle, she saw the funeral scutcheon which Mrs Margaret, in honour of her grand-aunt, had caused to be affixed over the principal tower since her decease, with the same heraldric decorum as if the last male of the Mortimer family were extinct. Elinor looked up, and many thoughts rushed on her heart.—“There is one departed,” she thought, “whose mind was always fixed on glorious thoughts—the most exalted actions of humanity, or the sublime associations of eternity! Her noble heart had room but for two illustrious guests—the love of God, and the love of her country. They tarried with her to the last, for they found the abode worthy of them; and when they parted, the inmate found the mansion untenantable any longer—the soul fled with its glorious visitors to heaven! My treacherous heart welcomed another inmate, and how has he repaid its hospitality?—By leaving the mansion in ruins!” As she spoke thus, she approached the entrance of the Castle.

“In the spacious hall she was received by Margaret Mortimer with the embrace of rooted affection, and by John Sandal, who advanced after the first enthusiasm of meeting was over, with that calm and brother-like good-will, from which there was—nothing to be hoped. There was the same heavenly smile, the same clasp of the hand, the same tender and almost feminine expression of anxiety for her safety—even Margaret herself, who must have felt, and who did feel the perils of the long journey, did not enter into them with that circumstantiality, or appear to sympathize with them so vividly, or, when the tale of toil and travel was told, appear to urge the necessity of speedy retirement, with such solicitude as did John Sandal. Elinor, faint and gasping, grasped the hands of both, and by an involuntary motion locked both together. The widow Sandal was present—she shewed much agitation at the appearance of Elinor; but when she saw this extraordinary and spontaneous movement, it was observed she smiled.

“Soon after, Elinor retired to the apartment she had formerly occupied. By the affectionate and delicate prevoyance of Margaret, the furniture had all been changed—there was nothing to remind her of former days, except her heart. She sat for some time reflecting on her reception, and hope died within her heart as she thought of it. The strongest expression of aversion or disdain would not have been so withering.

“It is certain that the fiercest passions may be exchanged for their widest extremes in a time incredibly short, and by means the most incalculable. Within the narrow circle of a day, enemies may embrace, and lovers may hate,—but, in the course of centuries, pure complacency and cordial good-will never can be exalted into passion. The wretched Elinor felt this,—and feeling it, knew that all was lost.

“She had now, for many days, to undergo the torture of complacent and fraternal affection from the man she loved,—and perhaps a keener torture was never endured. To feel hands that we long to press to our burning hearts, touch ours with cool and pulseless tranquillity—to see eyes in whose light we live, throw on us a cold but smiling beam, that gives light, but not fertility, to the parched and thirsting soil of the heart—to hear the ordinary language of affectionate civility addressed to us in tones of the most delicious suavity—to seek in these expressions an ulterior meaning, and to find it not—— This—this is an agony which only those who have felt can conceive!

“Elinor, with an effort that cost her heart many a pang, mingled in the habits of the house, which had been greatly changed since the death of Mrs Ann. The numerous suitors of the wealthy and noble heiress, now crowded to the Castle; and, according to the custom of the times, they were sumptuously entertained, and invited to prolong their stay by numerous banquets.

“On these occasions, John Sandal was the first to pay distinguished attention to Elinor. They danced together; and though her Puritanic education had taught her an abhorrence of those “devil’s measures,” as her family was accustomed to term them, she tried to adapt herself to the gay steps of the Canaries[(9)], and the stately movements of the Measures—(for the newer dances had not, even in report, reached Mortimer Castle)—and her slender and graceful form needed no other inspiration than the support of John Sandal’s arms, (who was himself an exquisite dancer), to assume all the graces of that delightful exercise. Even the practised courtiers applauded her. But, when it was over, Elinor felt, that had John Sandal been dancing with a being the most indifferent to him on earth, his manner would have been exactly the same. No one could point with more smiling grace to her slight deviations from the figure,—no one could attend her to her seat with more tender and anxious politeness, and wave the vast fan of those days over her with more graceful and assiduous courtesy. But Elinor felt that these attentions, however flattering, were offered not by a lover. * * * * * * * * *

“Sandal was absent on a visit to some neighbouring nobleman, and Margaret and Elinor were one evening completely alone. Each seemed equally anxious for an explanation, which neither appeared willing to begin. Elinor had lingered till twilight at the casement, from which she had seen him ride, and lingered still when to see him was no longer possible. Her sight was strained to catch a glimpse of him through the gathering clouds, as her imagination still toiled to catch a gleam of that light of the heart, which now struggled dimly amid clouds of gloomy and unpierceable mystery. “Elinor,” said Margaret emphatically, “look for him no longer,—he never can be yours!”

“The sudden address, and the imperative tone of conviction, had upon Elinor the effect of being addressed by a supernatural monitor. She was unable even to ask how the terrible intelligence that burst on her so decisively, was obtained.

“There is a state of mind in which we listen thus to a human voice as if it were an oracle,—and instead of asking an explanation of the destiny it announces, we wait submissively for what yet remains to be told. In this mood, Elinor slowly advanced from the casement, and asked in a voice of fearful calmness, “Has he explained himself perfectly to you?”—“Perfectly.”—“And there is nothing to expect?”—“Nothing.”—“And you have heard this from himself—his very self?”—“I have; and, dear Elinor, let us never again speak on the subject.”—“Never!” answered Elinor,—“Never!”

“The veracity and dignity of Margaret’s character, were inviolable securities for the truth of what she uttered; and perhaps that was the very reason why Elinor tried to shrink most from the conviction. In a morbid state of heart, we cannot bear truth—the falsehood that intoxicates us for a moment, is worth more than the truth that would disenchant us for life.—I hate him because he tells me the truth, is the language natural to the human mind, from the slave of power to the slave of passion. * * * * * * * *

“Other symptoms that could not escape the notice of the most shallow, struck her every hour. That devotion of the eye and heart,—of the language and the look, that cannot be mistaken,—were all obviously directed to Margaret. Still Elinor lingered in the Castle, and said to herself, while every day she saw and felt what was passing, “Perhaps.” That is the last word that quits the lips of those who love. * * * * * *

“She saw with all her eyes,—she felt to the bottom of her soul,—the obviously increasing attachment of John Sandal and Margaret; yet still she dreamed of interposing obstacles,—of an explanation. When passion is deprived of its proper aliment, there is no telling the food on which it will prey,—the impossibilities to which, like a famished garrison, it will look for its wretched sustenance.

“Elinor had ceased to demand the heart of the being she was devoted to. She now lived on his looks. She said to herself, Let him smile, though not on me, and I am happy still—wherever the sun-light falls, the earth must be blessed. Then she sunk to lower claims. She said, Let me but be in his presence, and that is enough—let his smiles and his soul be devoted to another, one wandering ray may reach me, and that will be enough!

“Love is a very noble and exalting sentiment in its first germ and principle. We never loved without arraying the object in all the glories of moral as well as physical perfection, and deriving a kind of dignity to ourselves from our capacity of admiring a creature so excellent and dignified; but this lavish and magnificent prodigality of the imagination often leaves the heart a bankrupt. Love in its iron age of disappointment, becomes very degraded—it submits to be satisfied with merely exterior indulgences—a look, a touch of the hand, though occurring by accident—a kind word, though uttered almost unconsciously, suffices for its humble existence. In its first state, it is like man before the fall, inhaling the odours of paradise, and enjoying the communion of the Deity; in the latter, it is like the same being toiling amid the briar and the thistle, barely to maintain a squalid existence without enjoyment, utility, or loveliness. * * * * * *

“About this time, her Puritan aunt made a strong effort to recover Elinor out of the snare of the enemy. She wrote a long letter (a great exertion for a woman far advanced in years, and never in the habits of epistolary composition) adjuring her apostate niece to return to the guide of her youth, and the covenant of her God,—to take shelter in the everlasting arms while they were still held out to her,—and to flee to the city of refuge while its gates were yet open to receive her. She urged on her the truth, power, and blessedness of the system of Calvin, which she termed the gospel.—She supported and defended it with all the metaphysical skill, and all the scriptural knowledge she possessed,—and the latter was not scanty.—And she affectingly reminded her, that the hand that traced these lines, would be unable ever to repeat the admonition, and would probably be mouldering into dust while she was employed in their perusal.

“Elinor wept while she read, but that was all. She wept from physical emotion, not from mental conviction; nor is there such an induration of heart caused by any other power, as by that of the passion which seems to soften it most. She answered the letter, however, and the effort scarce cost her less than it did her decrepid and dying relative. She acknowledged her dereliction of all religious feeling, and bewailed it—the more, she added with painful sincerity, because I feel my grief is not sincere. “Oh, my God!” she continued, “you who have clothed my heart with such burning energies—you who have given to it a power of loving so intense, so devoted, so concentrated—you have not given it in vain;—no, in some happier world, or perhaps even in this, when this “tyranny is overpast,” you will fill my heart with an image worthier than him whom I once believed your image on earth. The stars, though their light appears so dim and distant to us, were not lit by the Almighty hand in vain. Their glorious light burns for remote and happier worlds; and the beam of religion that glows so feebly to eyes almost blind with earthly tears, may be rekindled when a broken heart has been my passport to a place of rest. * * * * * * * *

“Do not think me, dear aunt, deserted by all hope of religion, even though I have lost the sense of it. Was it not said by unerring lips to a sinner, that her transgressions were forgiven because she loved much? And does not this capacity of love prove that it will one day be more worthily filled, and more happily employed. * * * * * *

“Miserable wretch that I am! At this moment, a voice from the bottom of my heart asks me “Whom hast thou loved so much? Was it man or God, that thou darest to compare thyself with her who knelt and wept—not before a mortal idol, but at the feet of an incarnate divinity?” * * * * * *

“It may yet befall, that the ark which has floated through the waste of waters may find its resting-place, and the trembling inmate debark on the shores of an unknown but purer world.” * * * * * * * *

CHAPTER XXXI.

There is an oak beside the froth-clad pool,

Where in old time, as I have often heard,

A woman desperate, a wretch like me,

Ended her woes!—Her woes were not like mine!

*   *   *   *

————————Ronan will know;

When he beholds me floating on the stream,

His heart will tell him why Rivine died!

Home’s Fatal Discovery.

“The increasing decline of Elinor’s health was marked by all the family; the very servant who stood behind her chair looked sadder every day—even Margaret began to repent of the invitation she had given her to the Castle.

“Elinor felt this, and would have spared her what pain she could; but it was not possible for herself to be insensible of the fast-fading remains of her withering youth and blighted beauty. The place—the place itself, was the principal cause of that mortal disease that was consuming her; yet from that place she felt she had less resolution to tear herself every day. So she lived, like those sufferers in eastern prisons, who are not allowed to taste food unless mixed with poison, and who must perish alike whether they eat or forbear.

“Once, urged by intolerable pain of heart, (tortured by living in the placid light of John Sandal’s sunny smile), she confessed this to Margaret. She said, “It is impossible for me to support this existence—impossible! To tread the floor which those steps have trod—to listen for their approach, and when they come, feel they do not bear him we seek—to see every object around me reflect his image, but never—never to see the reality—to see the door open which once disclosed his figure, and when it opens, not to see him, and when he does appear, to see him not what he was—to feel he is the same and not the same,—the same to the eye, but not to the heart—to struggle thus between the dream of imagination and the cruel awaking of reality—Oh! Margaret—that undeception plants a dagger in the heart, whose point no human hand can extract, and whose venom no human hand can heal!” Margaret wept as Elinor spoke thus, and slowly, very slowly, expressed her consent that Elinor should quit the Castle, if it was necessary for her peace.

“It was the very evening after this conversation, that Elinor, whose habit was to wander among the woods that surrounded the Castle unattended, met with John Sandal. It was a glorious autumnal evening, just like that on which they had first met,—the associations of nature were the same, those of the heart alone had suffered change. There is that light in an autumnal sky,—that shade in autumnal woods,—that dim and hallowed glory in the evening of the year, which is indefinably combined with recollections. Sandal, as they met, had spoken to her in the same voice of melody, and with the same heart-thrilling tenderness of manner, that had never ceased to visit her ear since their first meeting, like music in dreams. She imagined there was more than usual feeling in his manner; and the spot where they were, and which memory made populous and eloquent with the imagery and speech of other days, flattered this illusion. A vague hope trembled at the bottom of her heart,—she thought of what she dared not to utter, and yet dared to believe. They walked on together,—together they watched the last light on the purple hills, the deep repose of the woods, whose summits were still like “feathers of gold,”—together they once more tasted the confidence of nature, and, amid the most perfect silence, there was a mutual and unutterable eloquence in their hearts. The thoughts of other days rushed on Elinor,—she ventured to raise her eyes to that countenance which she once more saw “as it had been that of an angel.” The glow and the smile, that made it appear like a reflexion of heaven, were there still,—but that glow was borrowed from the bright flush of the glorious west, and that smile was for nature,—not for her. She lingered till she felt it fade with the fading light,—and a last conviction striking her heart, she burst into an agony of tears. To his words of affectionate surprise, and gentle consolation, she answered only by fixing her appealing eyes on him, and agonizingly invoking his name. She had trusted to nature, and to this scene of their first meeting, to act as an interpreter between them,—and still even in despair she trusted to it.

“Perhaps there is not a more agonizing moment than that in which we feel the aspect of nature give a perfect vitality to the associations of our hearts, while they lie buried in those in which we try in vain to revive them.

“She was soon undeceived. With that benignity which, while it speaks of consolation, forbids hope—with that smile which angels may be supposed to give on the last conflict of a sufferer who is casting off the garments of mortality in pain and hope—with such an expression he whom she loved regarded her. From another world he might have cast such a glance on her,—and it sealed her doom in this for ever. * * * * * * *

“As, unable to witness the agony of the wound he had inflicted but could not heal, he turned from her, the last light of day faded from the hills—the sun of both worlds set on her eye and soul—she sunk on the earth, and notes of faint music that seemed designed to echo the words—“No—no—no—never—never more!” trembled in her ears. They were as simple and monotonous as the words themselves, and were played accidentally by a peasant boy who was wandering in the woods. But to the unfortunate, every thing seems prophetic; and amid the shades of evening, and accompanied by the sound of his departing footsteps, the breaking heart of Elinor accepted the augury of these melancholy notes[(10)]. * * * * * * * * *

“A few days after this final meeting, Elinor wrote to her aunt in York to announce, that if she still lived, and was not unwilling to admit her, she would reside with her for life; and she could not help intimating, that her life would probably not outlast that of her hostess. She did not tell what the widow Sandal had whispered to her at her first arrival at the Castle, and what she now ventured to repeat with a tone that struggled between the imperative and the persuasive,—the conciliating and the intimidative. Elinor yielded,—and the indelicacy of this representation, had only the effect to make her shrink from its repetition.

“On her departure, Margaret wept, and Sandal shewed as much tender officiousness about her journey, as if it were to terminate in their renewed bridal. To escape from this, Elinor hastened her preparations for departure.

“When she arrived at a certain distance from the Castle, she dismissed the family carriage, and said she would go on foot with her female servant to the farmhouse where horses were awaiting her. She went there, but remained concealed, for the report of the approaching bridal resounded in her ears. * * * * * * *

“The day arrived—Elinor rose very early—the bells rung out a merry peal—(as she had once heard them do on another occasion)—the troops of friends arrived in greater numbers, and with equal gaiety as they had once assembled to escort her—she saw their equipages gleaming along—she heard the joyous shouts of half the county—she imagined to herself the timid smile of Margaret, and the irradiated countenance of him who had been her bridegroom.

“Suddenly there was a pause. She felt that the ceremony was going on—was finished—that the irrevocable words were spoken—the indissoluble tie was knit! Again the shout and wild joyance burst forth as the sumptuous cavalcade returned to the Castle. The glare of the equipages,—the splendid habits of the riders,—the cheerful groupe of shouting tenantry,——she saw it all! * * * * * * * * * *

“When all was over, Elinor glanced accidentally at her dress—it was white like her bridal habit;—shuddering she exchanged it for a mourning habit, and set out, as she hoped, on her last journey.

CHAPTER XXXII.

Fuimus, non sumus.

“When Elinor arrived in Yorkshire, she found her aunt was dead. Elinor went to visit her grave. It was, in compliance with her last request, placed near the window of the independent meeting-house, and bore for inscription her favourite text, “Those whom he foreknew, he also predestinated,” &c. &c. Elinor stood by the grave some time, but could not shed a tear. This contrast of a life so rigid, and a death so hopeful,—this silence of humanity, and eloquence of the grave,—pierced through her heart, as it will through every heart that has indulged in the inebriation of human passion, and feels that the draught has been drawn from broken cisterns.

“Her aunt’s death made Elinor’s life, if possible, more secluded, and her habits more monotonous than they would otherwise have been. She was very charitable to the cottagers in her neighbourhood; but except to visit their habitations, she never quitted her own. * * * * * * * *

“Often she contemplated a small stream that flowed at the end of her garden. As she had lost all her sensibility of nature, another motive was assigned for this mute and dark contemplation; and her servant, much attached to her, watched her closely. * * * * * * * * *

“She was roused from this fearful state of stupefaction and despair, which those who have felt shudder at the attempt to describe, by a letter from Margaret. She had received several from her which lay unanswered, (no unusual thing in those days), but this she tore open, read with interest inconceivable, and prepared instantly to answer by action.

“Margaret’s high spirits seemed to have sunk in her hour of danger. She hinted that that hour was rapidly approaching, and that she earnestly implored the presence of her affectionate kinswoman to soothe and sustain in the moment of her approaching peril. She added, that the manly and affectionate tenderness of John Sandal at this period, had touched her heart more deeply, if possible, than all the former testimonies of his affection—but that she could not bear his resignation of all his usual habits of rural amusement, and of the neighbouring society—that she in vain had chided him from her couch, where she lingered in pain and hope, and hoped that Elinor’s presence might induce him to yield to her request, as he must feel, on her arrival, the dearest companion of her youth was present—and that, at such a moment, a female companion was more suitable than even the gentlest and most affectionate of the other sex. * * * * * * *

“Elinor set out directly. The purity of her feelings had formed an impenetrable barrier between her heart and its object,—and she apprehended no more danger from the presence of one who was wedded, and wedded to her relative, than from that of her own brother.

“She arrived at the Castle—Margaret’s hour of danger had begun—she had been very ill during the preceding period. The natural consequences of her situation had been aggravated by a feeling of dignified responsibility on the birth of an heir to the house of Mortimer—and this feeling had not contributed to render that situation more supportable.

“Elinor bent over the bed of pain—pressed her cold lips to the burning lips of the sufferer—and prayed for her.

“The first medical assistance in the country (then very rarely employed on such occasions) had been obtained at a vast expence. The widow Sandal, declining all attendance on the sufferer, paced through the adjacent apartments in agony unutterable and unuttered.

“Two days and nights went on in hope and terror—the bell-ringers sat up in every church within ten miles round—the tenantry crowded round the Castle with honest heartfelt solicitude—the neighbouring nobility sent their messages of inquiry every hour. An accouchement in a noble family was then an event of importance.

“The hour came—twins were born dead—and the young mother was fated to follow them within a few hours! While life yet remained, Margaret shewed the remains of the lofty spirit of the Mortimers. She sought with her cold hand that of her wretched husband and of the weeping Elinor. She joined them in an embrace which one of them at least understood, and prayed that their union might be eternal. She then begged to see the bodies of her infant sons—they were produced; and it was said that she uttered expressions, intimating that, had they not been the heirs of the Mortimer family—had not expectation been wound so high, and supported by all the hopes that life and youth could flatter her with,—she and they might yet have existed.

“As she spoke, her voice grew feebler, and her eyes dim—their last light was turned on him she loved; and when sight was gone, she still felt his arms enfold her. The next moment they enfolded—nothing!

“In the terrible spasms of masculine agony—the more intensely felt as they are more rarely indulged—the young widower dashed himself on the bed, which shook with his convulsive grief; and Elinor, losing all sense but that of a calamity so sudden and so terrible, echoed his deep and suffocating sobs, as if she whom they deplored had not been the only obstacle to her happiness. * * * * * * * *

“Amid the voice of mourning that rung through the Castle from vault to tower in that day of trouble, none was loud like that of the widow Sandal—her wailings were shrieks, her grief was despair. Rushing through the rooms like one distracted, she tore her hair out by the roots, and imprecated the most fearful curses on her head. At length she approached the apartment where the corse lay. The servants, shocked at her distraction, would have withheld her from entering it, but could not. She burst into the room, cast one wild look on its inmates—the still corse and the dumb mourners—and then, flinging herself on her knees before her son, confessed the secret of her guilt, and developed to its foul base the foundation of that pile of iniquity and sorrow which had now reached its summit.

“Her son listened to this horrible confession with fixed eye and features unmoved; and at its conclusion, when the wretched penitent implored the assistance of her son to raise her from her knees, he repelled her outstretched hands, and with a weak wild laugh, sunk back on the bed. He never could be removed from it till the corse to which he clung was borne away, and then the mourners hardly knew which to deplore—her who was deprived of the light of life, or him in whom the light of reason was extinguished for ever! * * * * *

“The wretched, guilty mother, (but for her fate no one can be solicitous), a few months after, on her dying bed, declared the secret of her crime to a minister of an independent congregation, who was induced, by the report of her despair, to visit her. She confessed that, being instigated by avarice, and still more by the desire of regaining her lost consequence in the family, and knowing the wealth and dignity her son would acquire, and in which she must participate, by his marriage with Margaret, she had, after using all the means of persuasion and intreaty, been driven, in despair at her disappointment, to fabricate a tale as false as it was horrible, which she related to her deluded son on the evening before his intended nuptials with Elinor. She had assured him he was not her son, but the offspring of the illicit commerce of her husband the preacher with the Puritan mother of Elinor, who had formerly been one of his congregation, and whose well-known and strongly-expressed admiration of his preaching had been once supposed extended to his person,—had caused her much jealous anxiety in the early years of their marriage, and was now made the basis of this horrible fiction. She added, that Margaret’s obvious attachment to her cousin had, in some degree, palliated her guilt to herself; but that, when she saw him quit her house in despair on the morning of his intended marriage, and rush he knew not whither, she was half tempted to recall him, and confess the truth. Her mind again became hardened, and she reflected that her secret was safe, as she had bound him by an oath, from respect to his father’s memory, and compassion to the guilty mother of Elinor, never to disclose the truth to her daughter.

“The event had succeeded to her guilty wishes.—Sandal beheld Elinor with the eyes of a brother, and the image of Margaret easily found a place in his unoccupied affections. But, as often befals to the dealers in falsehood and obliquity, the apparent accomplishment of her hopes proved her ruin. In the event of the marriage of John and Margaret proving issueless, the estates and title went to the distant relative named in the will; and her son, deprived of reason by the calamities in which her arts had involved him, was by them also deprived of the wealth and rank to which they were meant to raise him, and reduced to the small pension obtained by his former services,—the poverty of the King, then himself a pensioner of Lewis XIV., forbidding the possibility of added remuneration. When the minister heard to the last the terrible confession of the dying penitent, in the awful language ascribed to Bishop Burnet when consulted by another criminal,—he bid her “almost despair,” and departed. * * * * * * *

“Elinor has retired, with the helpless object of her unfading love and unceasing care, to her cottage in Yorkshire. There, in the language of that divine and blind old man, the fame of whose poetry has not yet reached this country, it is

“Her delight to see him sitting in the house,”

and watch, like the father of the Jewish champion, the growth of that “God-given strength,” that intellectual power, which, unlike Samson’s, will never return.

“After an interval of two years, during which she had expended a large part of the capital of her fortune in obtaining the first medical advice for the patient, and “suffered many things of many physicians,” she gave up all hope,—and, reflecting that the interest of her fortune thus diminished would be but sufficient to procure the comforts of life for herself and him whom she has resolved never to forsake, she sat down in patient misery with her melancholy companion, and added one more to the many proofs of woman’s heart, “unwearied in well-doing,” without the intoxication of passion, the excitement of applause, or even the gratitude of the unconscious object.

“Were this a life of calm privation, and pulseless apathy, her efforts would scarce have merit, and her sufferings hardly demand compassion; but it is one of pain incessant and immitigable. The first-born of her heart lies dead within it; but that heart is still alive with all its keenest sensibilities, its most vivid hopes, and its most exquisite sense of grief. * * * * * * *

“She sits beside him all day—she watches that eye whose light was life, and sees it fixed on her in glassy and unmeaning complacency—she dreams of that smile which burst on her soul like the morning sun over a landscape in spring, and sees that smile of vacancy which tries to convey satisfaction, but cannot give it the language of expression. Averting her head, she thinks of other days. A vision passes before her.—Lovely and glorious things, the hues of whose colouring are not of this world, and whose web is too fine to be woven in the loom of life,—rise to her eye like the illusions of enchantment. A strain of rich remembered music floats in her hearing—she dreams of the hero, the lover, the beloved,—him in whom were united all that could dazzle the eye, inebriate the imagination, and melt the heart. She sees him as he first appeared to her,—and the mirage of the desert present not a vision more delicious and deceptive—she bends to drink of that false fountain, and the stream disappears—she starts from her reverie, and hears the weak laugh of the sufferer, as he moves a little water in a shell, and imagines he sees the ocean in a storm! * * * * * * * * *

“She has one consolation. When a short interval of recollection returns,—when his speech becomes articulate,—he utters her name, not that of Margaret, and a beam of early hope dances on her heart as she hears it, but fades away as fast as the rare and wandering ray of intellect from the lost mind of the sufferer! * * * * * *

“Unceasingly attentive to his health and his comforts, she walked out with him every evening, but led him through the most sequestered paths, to avoid those whose mockful persecution, or whose vacant pity, might be equally torturing to her feelings, or harassing to her still gentle and smiling companion.

“It was at this period,” said the stranger to Aliaga, “I first became acquainted with—— I mean—at this time a stranger, who had taken up his abode near the hamlet where Elinor resided, was seen to watch the two figures as they passed slowly on their retired walk. Evening after evening he watched them. He knew the history of these two unhappy beings, and prepared himself to take advantage of it. It was impossible, considering their secluded mode of existence, to obtain an introduction. He tried to recommend himself by his occasional attentions to the invalid—he sometimes picked up the flowers that an unconscious hand flung into the stream, and listened, with a gracious smile, to the indistinct sounds in which the sufferer, who still retained all the graciousness of his perished mind, attempted to thank him.

“Elinor felt grateful for these occasional attentions; but she was somewhat alarmed at the assiduity with which the stranger attended their melancholy walk every evening,—and, whether encouraged, neglected, or even repelled, still found the means of insinuating himself into companionship. Even the mournful dignity of Elinor’s demeanour,—her deep dejection,—her bows or brief replies,—were unavailing against the gentle but indefatigable importunity of the intruder.

“By degrees he ventured to speak to her of her misfortunes,—and that topic is a sure key to the confidence of the unhappy. Elinor began to listen to him;—and, though somewhat amazed at the knowledge he displayed of every circumstance of her life, she could not but feel soothed by the tone of sympathy in which he spoke, and excited by the mysterious hints of hope which he sometimes suffered to escape him as if involuntarily. It was observed soon by the inmates of the hamlet, whom idleness and the want of any object of excitement had made curious, that Elinor and the stranger were inseparable in their evening walks. * * * * * * *

“It was about a fortnight after this observation was first made, that Elinor, unattended, drenched with rain, and her head uncovered, loudly and eagerly demanded admittance, at a late hour, at the house of a neighbouring clergyman. She was admitted,—and the surprise of her reverend host at this visit, equally unseasonable and unexpected, was exchanged for a deeper feeling of wonder and terror as she related the cause of it. He at first imagined (knowing her unhappy situation) that the constant presence of an insane person might have a contagious effect on the intellects of one so perseveringly exposed to that presence.

“As Elinor, however, proceeded to disclose the awful proposal, and the scarcely less awful name of the unholy intruder, the clergyman betrayed considerable emotion; and, after a long pause, desired permission to accompany her on their next meeting. This was to be the following evening, for the stranger was unremitting in his attendance on her lonely walks.

“It is necessary to mention, that this clergyman had been for some years abroad—that events had occurred to him in foreign countries, of which strange reports were spread, but on the subject of which he had been always profoundly silent—and that having but lately fixed his residence in the neighbourhood, he was equally a stranger to Elinor, and to the circumstances of her past life, and of her present situation. * * * * * * * * *

“It was now autumn,—the evenings were growing short,—and the brief twilight was rapidly succeeded by night. On the dubious verge of both, the clergyman quitted his house, and went in the direction where Elinor told him she was accustomed to meet the stranger.

“They were there before him; and in the shuddering and averted form of Elinor, and the stern but calm importunity of her companion, he read the terrible secret of their conference. Suddenly he advanced and stood before the stranger. They immediately recognised each other. An expression that was never before beheld there—an expression of fear—wandered over the features of the stranger! He paused for a moment, and then departed without uttering a word—nor was Elinor ever again molested by his presence. * * * * *

“It was some days before the clergyman recovered from the shock of this singular encounter sufficiently to see Elinor, and explain to her the cause of his deep and painful agitation.

“He sent to announce to her when he was able to receive her, and appointed the night for the time of meeting, for he knew that during the day she never forsook the helpless object of her unalienated heart. The night arrived—imagine them seated in the antique study of the clergyman, whose shelves were filled with the ponderous volumes of ancient learning—the embers of a peat fire shed a dim and fitful light through the room, and the single candle that burned on a distant oaken stand, seemed to shed its light on that alone—not a ray fell on the figures of Elinor and her companion, as they sat in their massive chairs of carved-like figures in the richly-wrought nitches of some Catholic place of worship——”

“That is a most profane and abominable comparison,” said Aliaga, starting from the doze in which he had frequently indulged during this long narrative.

“But hear the result,” said the pertinacious narrator. “The clergyman confessed to Elinor that he had been acquainted with an Irishman of the name of Melmoth, whose various erudition, profound intellect, and intense appetency for information, had interested him so deeply as to lead to a perfect intimacy between them. At the breaking out of the troubles in England, the clergyman had been compelled, with his father’s family, to seek refuge in Holland. There again he met Melmoth, who proposed to him a journey to Poland—the offer was accepted, and to Poland they went. The clergyman here told many extraordinary tales of Dr Dee, and of Albert Alasco, the Polish adventurer, who were their companions both in England and Poland—and he added, that he felt his companion Melmoth was irrevocably attached to the study of that art which is held in just abomination by all “who name the name of Christ.” The power of the intellectual vessel was too great for the narrow seas where it was coasting—it longed to set out on a voyage of discovery—in other words, Melmoth attached himself to those impostors, or worse, who promised him the knowledge and the power of the future world—on conditions that are unutterable.” A strange expression crossed his face as he spoke. He recovered himself, and added, “From that hour our intercourse ceased. I conceived of him as of one given up to diabolical delusions—to the power of the enemy.

“I had not seen Melmoth for some years. I was preparing to quit Germany, when, on the eve of my departure, I received a message from a person who announced himself as my friend, and who, believing himself dying, wished for the attendance of a Protestant minister. We were then in the territories of a Catholic electoral bishop. I lost no time in attending the sick person. As I entered his room, conducted by a servant, who immediately closed the door and retired, I was astonished to see the room filled with an astrological apparatus, books and implements of a science I did not understand; in a corner there was a bed, near which there was neither priest or physician, relative or friend—on it lay extended the form of Melmoth. I approached, and attempted to address to him some words of consolation. He waved his hand to me to be silent—and I was so. The recollection of his former habits and pursuits, and the view of his present situation, had an effect that appalled more than it amazed me. “Come near,” said Melmoth, speaking very faintly—“nearer. I am dying—how my life has been passed you know but too well. Mine was the great angelic sin—pride and intellectual glorying! It was the first mortal sin—a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge! I am now dying. I ask for no forms of religion—I wish not to hear words that have to me no meaning, or that I wish had none! Spare your look of horror. I sent for you to exact your solemn promise that you will conceal from every human being the fact of my death—let no man know that I died, or when, or where.”

“He spoke with a distinctness of tone, and energy of manner, that convinced me he could not be in the state he described himself to be, and I said, “But I cannot believe you are dying—your intellects are clear, your voice is strong, your language is coherent, and but for the paleness of your face, and your lying extended on that bed, I could not even imagine you were ill.” He answered, “Have you patience and courage to abide by the proof that what I say is true?” I replied, that I doubtless had patience, and for the courage, I looked to that Being for whose name I had too much reverence to utter in his hearing. He acknowledged my forbearance by a ghastly smile which I understood too well, and pointed to a clock that stood at the foot of his bed. “Observe,” said he, “the hour-hand is on eleven, and I am now sane, clear of speech, and apparently healthful—tarry but an hour, and you yourself will behold me dead!”

“I remained by his bed-side—the eyes of both were fixed intently on the slow motion of the clock. From time to time he spoke, but his strength now appeared obviously declining. He repeatedly urged on me the necessity of profound secresy, its importance to myself, and yet he hinted at the possibility of our future meeting. I asked why he thought proper to confide to me a secret whose divulgement was so perilous, and which might have been so easily concealed? Unknowing whether he existed, or where, I must have been equally ignorant of the mode and place of his death. To this he returned no answer. As the hand of the clock approached the hour of twelve, his countenance changed—his eyes became dim—his speech inarticulate—his jaw dropped—his respiration ceased. I applied a glass to his lips—but there was not a breath to stain it. I felt his wrist—but there was no pulse. I placed my hand on his heart—there was not the slightest vibration. In a few minutes the body was perfectly cold. I did not quit the room till nearly an hour after—the body gave no signs of returning animation.

“Unhappy circumstances detained me long abroad. I was in various parts of the Continent, and every where I was haunted with the report of Melmoth being still alive. To these reports I gave no credit, and returned to England in the full conviction of his being dead. Yet it was Melmoth who walked and spoke with you the last night of our meeting. My eyes never more faithfully attested the presence of living being. It was Melmoth himself, such as I beheld him many years ago, when my hairs were dark and my steps were firm. I am changed, but he is the same—time seems to have forborne to touch him from terror. By what means or power he is thus enabled to continue his posthumous and preternatural existence, it is impossible to conceive, unless the fearful report that every where followed his steps on the Continent, be indeed true.”

“Elinor, impelled by terror and wild curiosity, inquired into that report which dreadful experience had anticipated the meaning of. “Seek no farther,” said the minister, “you know already more than should ever have reached the human ear, or entered into the conception of the human mind. Enough that you have been enabled by Divine Power to repel the assaults of the evil one—the trial was terrible, but the result will be glorious. Should the foe persevere in his attempts, remember that he has been already repelled amid the horrors of the dungeon and of the scaffold, the screams of Bedlam and the flames of the Inquisition—he is yet to be subdued by a foe that he deemed of all others the least invincible—the withered energies of a broken heart. He has traversed the earth in search of victims, “Seeking whom he might devour,”—and has found no prey, even where he might seek for it with all the cupidity of infernal expectation. Let it be your glory and crown of rejoicing, that even the feeblest of his adversaries has repulsed him with a power that will always annihilate his.” * * * * * * * *

“Who is that faded form that supports with difficulty an emaciated invalid, and seems at every step to need the support she gives?—It is still Elinor tending John. Their path is the same, but the season is changed—and that change seems to her to have passed alike on the mental and physical world. It is a dreary evening in Autumn—the stream flows dark and turbid beside their path—the blast is groaning among the trees, and the dry discoloured leaves are sounding under their feet—their walk is uncheered by human converse, for one of them no longer thinks, and seldom speaks!

“Suddenly he gives a sign that he wishes to be seated—it is complied with, and she sits beside him on the felled trunk of a tree. He declines his head on her bosom, and she feels with delighted amazement, a few tears streaming on it for the first time for years—a soft but conscious pressure of her hand, seems to her like the signal of reviving intelligence—with breathless hope she watches him as he slowly raises his head, and fixes his eyes—God of all consolation, there is intelligence in his glance! He thanks her with an unutterable look for all her care, her long and painful labour of love! His lips are open, but long unaccustomed to utter human sounds, the effort is made with difficulty—again that effort is repeated and fails—his strength is exhausted—his eyes close—his last gentle sigh is breathed on the bosom of faith and love—and Elinor soon after said to those who surrounded her bed, that she died happy, since he knew her once more! She gave one parting awful sign to the minister, which was understood and answered!

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Cum mihi non tantum furesque feræque suëtæ,

Hunc vexare locum, curæ sunt atque labori;

Quantum carminibus quæ versant atque venenis,

Humanos animos.

Horace.

“It is inconceivable to me,” said Don Aliaga to himself, as he pursued his journey the next day—“it is inconceivable to me how this person forces himself on my company, harasses me with tales that have no more application to me than the legend of the Cid, and may be as apocryphal as the ballad of Roncesvalles—and now he has ridden by my side all day, and, as if to make amends for his former uninvited and unwelcome communicativeness, he has never once opened his lips.”

“Senhor,” said the stranger, then speaking for the first time, as if he read Aliaga’s thoughts—“I acknowledge myself in error for relating to you a narrative in which you must have felt there was little to interest you. Permit me to atone for it, by recounting to you a very brief one, in which I flatter myself you will be disposed to feel a very peculiar interest.”—“You assure me it will be brief,” said Aliaga. “Not only so, but the last I shall obtrude on your patience,” replied the stranger. “On that condition,” said Aliaga, “in God’s name, brother, proceed. And look you handle the matter discreetly, as you have said.”

“There was,” said the stranger, “a certain Spanish merchant, who set out prosperously in business; but, after a few years, finding his affairs assume an unfavourable aspect, and being tempted by an offer of partnership with a relative who was settled in the East Indies, had embarked for those countries with his wife and son, leaving behind him an infant daughter in Spain.”—“That was exactly my case,” said Aliaga, wholly unsuspicious of the tendency of this tale.

“Two years of successful occupation restored him to opulence, and to the hope of vast and future accumulation. Thus encouraged, our Spanish merchant entertained ideas of settling in the East Indies, and sent over for his young daughter with her nurse, who embarked for the East Indies with the first opportunity, which was then very rare.”—“This reminds me exactly of what occurred to myself,” said Aliaga, whose faculties were somewhat obtuse.

“The nurse and infant were supposed to have perished in a storm which wrecked the vessel on an isle near the mouth of a river, and in which the crew and passengers perished. It was said that the nurse and child alone escaped; that by some extraordinary chance they arrived at this isle, where the nurse died from fatigue and want of nourishment, and the child survived, and grew up a wild and beautiful daughter of nature, feeding on fruits,—and sleeping amid roses,—and drinking the pure element,—and inhaling the harmonies of heaven,—and repeating to herself the few Christian words her nurse had taught her, in answer to the melody of the birds that sung to her, and of the stream whose waves murmured in accordance to the pure and holy music of her unearthly heart.”—“I never heard a word of this before,” muttered Aliaga to himself. The stranger went on.

“It was said that some vessel in distress arrived at the isle,—that the captain had rescued this lovely lonely being from the brutality of the sailors,—and, discovering from some remains of the Spanish tongue which she still spoke, and which he supposed must have been cultivated during the visits of some other wanderer to the isle, he undertook, like a man of honour, to conduct her to her parents, whose names she could tell, though not their residence, so acute and tenacious is the memory of infancy. He fulfilled his promise, and the pure and innocent being was restored to her family, who were then residing in the city of Benares.” Aliaga, at these words, stared with a look of intelligence somewhat ghastly. He could not interrupt the stranger—he drew in his breath, and closed his teeth.

“I have since heard,” said the stranger, “that the family has returned to Spain,—that the beautiful inhabitant of the foreign isle is become the idol of your cavaliers of Madrid,—your loungers of the Prado,—your sacravienses,—your—by what other name of contempt shall I call them? But listen to me,—there is an eye fixed on her, and its fascination is more deadly than that fabled of the snake!—There is an arm extended to seize her, in whose grasp humanity withers!—That arm even now relaxes for a moment,—its fibres thrill with pity and horror,—it releases the victim for a moment,—it even beckons her father to her aid!—Don Francisco, do you understand me now?—Has this tale interest or application for you?”

“He paused, but Aliaga, chilled with horror, was unable to answer him but by a feeble exclamation. “If it has,” resumed the stranger, “lose not a moment to save your daughter!” and, clapping spurs to his mule, he disappeared through a narrow passage among the rocks, apparently never intended to be trod by earthly traveller. Aliaga was not a man susceptible of strong impressions from nature; but, if he had been, the scene amid which this mysterious warning was uttered would have powerfully ministered to its effect. The time was evening,—a grey and misty twilight hung over every object;—the way lay through a rocky road, that wound among mountains, or rather stony hills, bleak and bare as those which the weary traveller through the [(11)]western isle sees rising amid the moors, to which they form a contrast without giving a relief. Heavy rains had made deep gullies amid the hills, and here and there a mountain-stream brawled amid its stony channel, like a proud and noisy upstart, while the vast chasms that had been the beds of torrents which once swept through them in thunder, now stood gaping and ghastly like the deserted abodes of ruined nobility. Not a sound broke on the stillness, except the monotonous echo of the hoofs of the mules answered from the hollows of the hill, and the screams of the birds, which, after a few short circles in the damp and cloudy air, fled back to their retreats amid the cliffs. * * * * * * * * *

“It is almost incredible, that after this warning, enforced as it was by the perfect acquaintance which the stranger displayed of Aliaga’s former life and family-circumstances, it should not have had the effect of making him hurry homewards immediately, particularly as it seems he thought it of sufficient importance to make it the subject of correspondence with his wife. So it was however.

“At the moment of the stranger’s departure, it was his resolution not to lose a moment in hastening homewards; but at the next stage he arrived at, there were letters of business awaiting him. A mercantile correspondent gave him the information of the probable failure of a house in a distant part of Spain, where his speedy presence might be of vital consequence. There were also letters from Montilla, his intended son-in-law, informing him that the state of his father’s health was so precarious, it was impossible to leave him till his fate was decided. As the decisions of fate involved equally the wealth of the son, and the life of the father, Aliaga could not help thinking there was as much prudence as affection in this resolution.

“After reading these letters, Aliaga’s mind began to flow in its usual channel. There is no breaking through the inveterate habitudes of a thorough-paced mercantile mind, “though one rose from the dead.” Besides, by this time the mysterious image of the stranger’s presence and communications were fading fast from a mind not at all habituated to visionary impressions. He shook off the terrors of this visitation by the aid of time, and gave his courage the credit due to that aid. Thus we all deal with the illusions of the imagination,—with this difference only, that the impassioned recal them with the tear of regret, and the unimaginative with the blush of shame. Aliaga set out for the distant part of Spain where his presence was to save this tottering house in which he had an extensive concern, and wrote to Donna Clara, that it might be some months before he returned to the neighbourhood of Madrid.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Husband, husband, I’ve the ring

Thou gavest to-day to me;

And thou to me art ever wed,

As I am wed to thee!

Little’s Poems.

“The remainder of that dreadful night when Isidora disappeared, had been passed almost in despair by Donna Clara, who, amid all her rigour and chilling mediocrity, had still the feelings of a mother—and by Fra Jose, who, with all his selfish luxury and love of domination, had a heart where distress never knocked for admittance, that she did not find pity ready to open the door.

“The distress of Donna Clara was aggravated by her fear of her husband, of whom she stood in great awe, and who, she dreaded, might reproach her with unpardonable negligence of her maternal authority.

“In this night of distress, she was often tempted to call on her son for advice and assistance; but the recollection of his violent passions deterred her, and she sat in passive despair till day. Then, with an unaccountable impulse, she rose from her seat, and hurried to her daughter’s apartment, as if she imagined that the events of the preceding night were only a fearful and false illusion that would be dispersed by the approach of day.

“It seemed, indeed, as if they were, for on the bed lay Isidora in a profound sleep, with the same pure and placid smile as when she was lulled into slumber by the melodies of nature, and the sound was prolonged in her dream by the whispered songs of the spirits of the Indian Ocean. Donna Clara uttered a shriek of surprise, that had the singular effect of rousing Fra Jose from a deep sleep into which he had fallen at the approach of day. Starting at the sound, the good-natured, pampered priest, tottered into the room, and saw, with incredulity that slowly yielded to frequent application to his obstinate and adhesive eye-lids, the form of Isidora extended in profound slumber.

“Oh what an exquisite enjoyment!” said the yawning priest, as he looked on the sleeping beauty without another emotion than that of the delight of an uninterrupted repose.—“Pray, don’t disturb her,” he said, yawning himself out of the room—“after such a night as we all have had, sleep must be a very refreshing and laudable exercise; and so I commend you to the protection of the holy saints!”—“Oh reverend Father!—Oh holy Father!” cried Donna Clara clinging to him, “desert me not in this extremity—this has been the work of magic—of infernal spirits. See how profoundly she sleeps, though we are speaking, and it is now day-light.”—“Daughter, you are much mistaken,” answered the drowsy priest; “people can sleep soundly even in the day-time; and for proof send me, as I am now retiring to rest, a bottle of Foncarral or Valdepenas—not that I value the richest vintage of Spain from the Chacoli of Biscay to the Mataro of Catalonia,[(12)] but I would never have it said that I slept in the day-time, but for sufficient reason.”——“Holy Father!” answered Donna Clara, “do you not think my daughter’s disappearance and intense slumber are the result of preternatural causes?”—“Daughter,” answered the priest, contracting his brows, “let me have some wine to slake the intolerable thirst caused by my anxiety for the welfare of your family, and let me meditate some hours afterwards on the measures best to be adopted, and then—when I awake, I will give you my opinion.”——“Holy Father, you shall judge for me in every thing.”—“It were not amiss, daughter,” said the priest retiring, “if a few slices of ham, or some poignant sausages, accompanied the wine—it might, as it were, abate the deleterious effects of that abominable liquor, which I never drink but on emergencies like these.”—“Holy Father, they shall be ordered,” said the anxious mother—“but do you not think my daughter’s sleep is supernatural?”—“Follow me to mine apartment, daughter,” answered the priest, exchanging his cowl for a night-cap, which one of the numerous household obsequiously presented him, “and you will soon see that sleep is a natural effect of a natural cause. Your daughter has doubtless passed a very fatiguing night, and so have you, and so have I, though perhaps from very different causes; but all those causes dispose us to a profound repose.—I have no doubt of mine—fetch up the wine and sausages—I am very weary—Oh I am weak and worn with fasts and watching, and the labours of exhortation. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and my jaws cling together,—perhaps a draught or two might dissolve their parching adhesion. But I do so hate wine——why the devil don’t you fetch up the bottle?”

“The attendant domestic, terrified by the tone of wrath in which the last words were uttered, hurried on with submissive expedition, and Fra Jose sat down at length in his apartment to ruminate on the calamities and perplexities of the family, till he was actually overcome by the subject, and exclaimed in a tone of despair, “Both bottles empty! Then it is useless to meditate further on this subject.” * * * * *

“He was roused at an earlier hour than he wished, by a message from Donna Clara, who, in the distress of a weak mind, accustomed always to factitious and external support, now felt as if every step she took without it, must lead to actual and instant perdition. Her fear of her husband, next to her superstitious fears, held the strongest power over her mind, and that morning she called Fra Jose to an early consultation of terror and inquietude.—Her great object was to conceal, if possible, the absence of her daughter on that eventful night; and finding that none of the domestics appeared conscious of it, and that amid the numerous household, only one aged servant was absent, of whose absence no one took notice amid the superfluous multitude of a Spanish establishment, her courage began to revive. It was raised still higher by a letter from Aliaga, announcing the necessity of his visiting a distant part of Spain, and of the marriage of his daughter with Montilla being deferred for some months——this sounded like reprieve in the ears of Donna Clara—she consulted with the priest, who answered in words of comfort, that if Donna Isidora’s short absence were known, it was but a slight evil, and if it were not known, it was none at all,—and he recommended to her, to ensure the secresy of the servants by means that he swore by his habit were infallible, as he had known them operate effectively among the servants of a far more powerful and extensive establishment.—“Reverend Father,” said Donna Clara, “I know of no establishment among the grandees of Spain more splendid than ours.”—“But I do, daughter,” said the priest, “and the head of that establishment is—the Pope;—but go now, and awake your daughter, who deserves to sleep till dooms-day, as she seems totally to have forgotten the hour of breakfast. It is not for myself I speak, daughter, but I cannot bear to see the regularity of a magnificent household thus interrupted; for myself, a basin of chocolate, and a cluster of grapes, will be sufficient; and to allay the crudity of the grapes, a glass of Malaga.—Your glasses, by the bye, are the shallowest I ever drank out of—could you not find some means to get from Ildefonso[(13)] glasses of the right make, with short shanks and ample bodies? Yours resemble those of Quichotte, all limbs and no trunk. I like one that resembles his squire, a spacious body and a shank that may be measured by my little finger.”—“I will send to St Ildefonso this day,” answered Donna Clara.—“Go and awake your daughter first,” said the priest.

“As he spoke, Isidora entered the room—the mother and the priest both stood amazed. Her countenance was as serene, her step as equal, and her mein as composed, as if she were totally unconscious of the terror and distress her disappearance the preceding night had caused. To the first short silence of amazement, succeeded a storm of interrogations from Donna Clara and Fra Jose in concert—why—where—wherefore—and what, and with whom and how—that was all they could articulate. They might as well have spared themselves the trouble, for neither that day nor many following, could the remonstrances, intreaties, or menaces of her mother, aided by the spiritual authority and more powerful anxiety of the priest, extort from her a word of explanation on the cause of her absence that awful night. When closely and sternly pressed, Isidora’s mind seemed to assume something of the wild but potent spirit of independence, which her early habits and feelings might have communicated to her. She had been her own teacher and mistress for seventeen years, and though naturally gentle and tractable, when imperious mediocrity attempted to tyrannize over her, she felt a sense of disdain which she expressed only by profound silence.

“Fra Jose, incensed at her obstinacy, and trembling for the loss of his power over the family, threatened to exclude her from confession, unless she disclosed to him the secret of that night—“Then I will confess to God!” said Isidora. Her mother’s importunity she found it more difficult to resist, for her feminine heart loved all that was feminine even in its most unattractive shape, and the persecution from that quarter was alike monotonous and unremitting.

“There was a weak but harassing tenacity about Donna Clara, that is the general adjunct to the female character when it combines intellectual mediocrity with rigid principle. When she laid siege to a secret, the garrison might as well capitulate at once.—What she wanted in vigour and ability, she supplied by a minute and gnawing assiduity. She never ventured to carry the fort by storm, but her obstinacy blockaded it till it was forced to surrender. But here even her importunity failed.—Isidora remained respectfully, but resolutely silent; finding matters thus desperate, Donna Clara, who had a fine talent for keeping as well as discovering a secret, agreed with Fra Jose not to utter a syllable of the business to her father and brother.—“We will show,” said Donna Clara, with a sagacious and self-approving nod, “that we can keep a secret as well as she.”—“Right, daughter,” said Fra Jose, “imitate her in the only point in which you can flatter yourself with the hope of resemblance. * * * * * * * *

“The secret was, however, soon disclosed. Some months had elapsed, and the visits of her husband began to give an habitual calm and confidence to the mind of Isidora. He imperceptibly was exchanging his ferocious misanthropy for a kind of pensive gloom.—It was like the dark, cold, but unterrific and comparatively soothing night, that succeeds to a day of storm and earthquake. The sufferers remember the terrors of the day, and the still darkness of the night feels to them like a shelter. Isidora gazed on her espoused with delight, when she saw no longer his withering frown, or more withering smile; and she felt the hope that the calm purity of female hearts always suggests, that its influence will one day float over the formless and the void, like the spirit that moved upon the face of the waters; and that the unbelieving husband may yet be saved by the believing wife.

“These thoughts were her comfort, and it was well she had thoughts to comfort her, for facts are miserable allies when imagination fights its battle with despair. On one of those nights that she expected Melmoth, he found her employed in her usual hymn to the Virgin, which she accompanied on her lute. “Is it not rather late to sing your vesper hymn to the Virgin after midnight?” said Melmoth with a ghastly smile. “Her ear is open at all times, I have been told,” answered Isidora.—“If it is, then, love,” said Melmoth, vaulting as usual through the casement, “add a stanza to your hymn in favour of me.”—“Alas!” said Isidora, dropping her lute, “you do not believe, love, in what the Holy Church requires.”—“Yes, I do believe, when I listen to you.”—“And only then?”—“Sing again your hymn to the Virgin.”

“Isidora complied, and watched the effect on the listener. He seemed affected—he motioned to her to repeat it. “My love,” said Isidora, “is not this more like the repetition of a theatrical song called for by an audience, than a hymn which he who listens to loves his wife better for, because she loves her God.”—“It is a shrewd question,” said Melmoth, “but why am I in your imagination excluded from the love of God?”—“Do you ever visit the church,” answered the anxious Isidora. A profound silence.—“Do you ever receive the Holy Sacrament?”—Melmoth did not utter a word.—“Have you ever, at my earnest solicitation, enabled me to announce to my anxious family the tie that united us?”—No answer.—“And now—that—perhaps—I dare not utter what I feel! Oh! how shall I appear before eyes that watch me even now so closely?—what shall I say?—a wife without a husband—a mother without a father for her child, or one whom a fearful oath has bound her never to declare! Oh! Melmoth, pity me,—deliver me from this life of constraint, falsehood, and dissimulation. Claim me as your wedded wife in the face of my family, and in the face of ruin your wedded wife will follow—will cling to—will perish with you!” Her arms clung round him, her cold but heart-wrung tears fell fast on his cheek, and the imploring arms of woman supplicating for deliverance in her hour of shame and terror, seldom are twined round us in vain. Melmoth felt the appeal—it was but for a moment. He caught the white arms extended towards him—he fixed an eager and fearful look of inquiry on his victim-consort, as he asked—“And is it so?” The pale and shuddering wife shrunk from his arms at the question—her silence answered him. The agonies of nature throbbed audibly in his heart. He said to himself—it is mine—the fruit of affection—the first-born of the heart and of nature—mine—mine,—and whatever becomes of me, there shall yet be a human being on earth who traces me in its external form, and who will be taught to pray for its father, even when its prayer falls parched and hissing on the fires that burn for ever, like a wandering drop of dew on the burning sands of the desert! * * * * * * * * *

“From the period of this communication, Melmoth’s tenderness for his wife visibly increased.

“Heaven only knows the source of that wild fondness with which he contemplated her, and in which was still mingled something of ferocity. His warm look seemed like the glow of a sultry summer day, whose heat announces a storm, and compels us by its burning oppression, to look to the storm almost for relief.

“It is not impossible that he looked to some future object of his fearful experiment—and a being so perfectly in his power as his own child, might have appeared to him fatally fitted for his purpose—the quantum of misery, too, necessary to qualify the probationer, it was always in his own power to inflict. Whatever was his motive, he assumed as much tenderness as it was possible for him to assume, and spoke of the approaching event with the anxious interest of a human father.

“Soothed by his altered manner, Isidora bore with silent sufferance the burden of her situation, with all its painful accompaniments of indisposition and dejection, aggravated by hourly fear and mysterious secresy. She hoped he would at length reward her by an open and honourable declaration, but this hope was expressed only in her patient smiles. The hour approached fast, and fearful and indefinite apprehensions began to overshadow her mind, relative to the fate of the infant about to be born under circumstances so mysterious.

“At his next nightly visit, Melmoth found her in tears.

“Alas!” said she in answer to his abrupt inquiry, and brief attempt at consolation, “How many causes have I for tears—and how few have I shed? If you would have them wiped away, be assured it is only your hand can do it. I feel,” she added, “that this event will be fatal to me—I know I shall not live to see my child—I demand from you the only promise that can support me even under this conviction”—Melmoth interrupted her by the assurance, that these apprehensions were the inseparable concomitants of her situation, and that many mothers, surrounded by a numerous offspring, smiled as they recollected their fears that the birth of each would be fatal to them.

“Isidora shook her head. “The presages,” said she, “that visit me, are such as never visited mortality in vain. I have always believed, that as we approach the invisible world, its voice becomes more audible to us, and grief and pain are very eloquent interpreters between us and eternity—quite distinct from all corporeal suffering, even from all mental terror, is that deep and unutterable impression which is alike incommunicable and ineffaceable—it is as if heaven spoke to us alone, and told us to keep its secret, or divulge it on the condition of never being believed. Oh! Melmoth, do not give that fearful smile when I speak of heaven—soon I may be your only intercessor there.” “My dear saint,” said Melmoth, laughing and kneeling to her in mockery, “let me make early interest for your mediation—how many ducats will it cost me to get you canonized?—you will furnish me, I hope, with an authentic account of legitimate miracles—one is ashamed of the nonsense that is sent monthly to the Vatican.” “Let your conversion be the first miracle on the list,” said Isidora, with an energy that made Melmoth tremble—it was dark—but she felt that he trembled—she pursued her imagined triumph—“Melmoth,” she exclaimed, “I have a right to demand one promise from you—for you I have sacrificed every thing—never was woman more devoted—never did woman give proofs of devotion like mine. I might have been the noble, honoured wife of one who would have laid his wealth and titles at my feet. In this my hour of danger and suffering, the first families in Spain would have been waiting round my door. Alone, unaided, unsustained, unconsoled, I must undergo the terrible struggle of nature—terrible to those whose beds are smoothed by the hands of affection, whose agonies are soothed by the presence of a mother—who hears the first feeble cry of her infant echoed by the joy of exulting noble relatives. Oh Melmoth! what must be mine! I must suffer in secresy and in silence! I must see my babe torn from me before I have even kissed it,—and the chrism-mantle will be one of that mysterious darkness which your fingers have woven! Yet grant me one thing—one thing!” continued the suppliant, growing earnest in her prayer even to agony; “swear to me that my child shall be baptised according to the forms of the Catholic church,—that it shall be a Christian as far as those forms can make it,—and I shall feel that, if all my fearful presages are fulfilled, I shall leave behind me one who will pray for his father, and whose prayer may be accepted. Promise me,—swear to me,” she added, in intenser agony, “that my child shall be a Christian! Alas! if my voice be not worthy to be heard in heaven, that of a cherub may! Christ himself suffered children to come unto him while on earth, and will he repel them in heaven?—Oh! no,—no! he will not repel yours!”

“Melmoth listened to her with feelings that it is better to suppress than explain or expatiate on. Thus solemnly adjured, however, he promised that the child should be baptised; and added, with an expression which Isidora’s delight at this concession did not give her time to understand, that it should be a Christian as far as the rites and ceremonies of the Catholic church could make it one. While he added many a bitter hint of the inefficacy of any external rites—and the impotentiality of any hierarchy—and of the deadly and desperate impositions of priests under every dispensation—and exposed them with a spirit at once ludicrous and Satanic,—a spirit that mingled ridicule with horror, and seemed like a Harlequin in the infernal regions, flirting with the furies, Isidora still repeated her solemn request that her child, if it survived her, should be baptised. To this he assented; and added, with a sarcastic and appalling levity,—“And a Mahometan, if you should change your mind,—or any other mythology you please to adopt;—only send me word,—priests are easily obtained, and ceremonies cheaply purchased! Only let me know your future intentions,—when you know them yourself.”—“I shall not be here to tell you,” said Isidora, replying with profound conviction to this withering levity, like a cold winter day to the glow of a capricious summer one, that blends the sunshine and the lightning;—“Melmoth, I shall not be here then!” And this energy of despair in a creature so young, so inexperienced, except in the vicissitudes of the heart, formed a strong contrast to the stony apathy of one who had traversed life from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren, or—made it so.

“At this moment, while Isidora wept the cold tears of despair, without daring to ask the hand of him she loved to dry them, the bells of a neighbouring convent, where they were performing a mass for the soul of a departed brother, suddenly rung out. Isidora seized that moment, when the very air was eloquent with the voice of religion, to impress its power on that mysterious being whose presence inspired her equally with terror and with love. “Listen,—listen!” she cried. The sounds came slowly and stilly on, as if it was an involuntary expression of that profound sentiment that night always inspires,—the reverberating watch-word from sentinel to sentinel, when wakeful and reflecting minds have become the “watchers of the night[(14)].” The effect of these sounds was increased, by their catching from time to time the deep and thrilling chorus of the voices,—these voices more than harmonized, they were coincident with the toll of the bell, and seemed like them set in involuntary motion,—music played by invisible hands.

“Listen,” repeated Isidora, “is there no truth in the voice that speaks to you in tones like these? Alas! if there be no truth in religion, there is none on earth! Passion itself evanishes into an illusion, unless it is hallowed by the consciousness of a God and of futurity. That sterility of the heart that forbids the growth of divine feeling, must be hostile also to every tender and generous sentiment. He who is without a God must be without a heart! Oh, my love, will you not, as you bend over my grave, wish my last slumbers to have been soothed by sounds like these,—wish that they may whisper peace to your own? Promise me, at least, that you will lead your child to my tomb-stone,—that you will suffer it to read the inscription that tells I died in the faith of Christ, and the hope of immortality. Its tears will be powerful pleaders to you not to deny it the consolation that faith has given me in hours of suffering, and the hopes with which it will illuminate my parting hour. Oh promise me this at least, that you will suffer your child to visit my grave—that is all. Do not interrupt or distract the impression by sophistry or levity, or by that wild and withering eloquence that flashes from your lips, not to enlighten but to blast. You will not weep, but you will be silent,—leave Heaven and nature free to their work. The voice of God will speak to its heart, and my spirit, as it witnesses the conflict, will tremble though in paradise,—and, even in heaven, will feel an added joy, when it beholds the victory won. Promise me, then,—swear to me!” she added, with agonizing energy of tone and gesture. “Your child shall be a Christian!” said Melmoth.

CHAPTER XXXV.

———————Oh, spare me, Grimbald!

I will tempt hermits for thee in their cells,

And virgins in their dreams.

Dryden’s King Arthur.

It is a singular, but well-attested fact, that women who are compelled to undergo all the inconveniences and uneasiness of clandestine pregnancy, often fare better than those whose situation is watched over by tender and anxious relatives; and that concealed or illegitimate births are actually attended with less danger and suffering than those which have all the aid that skill and affection can give. So it appeared likely to fare with Isidora. The retirement in which her family lived—the temper of Donna Clara, as slow to suspect from want of penetration, as she was eager in pursuing an object once discovered, from the natural cupidity of a vacant mind—these circumstances, combined with the dress of the day, the enormous and enveloping fardingale, gave safety to her secret, at least till the arrival of its crisis. As this crisis approached, one may easily imagine the secret and trembling preparation—the important nurse, proud of the trust reposed in her—the confidential maid—the faithful and discreet medical attendant—to obtain all these Melmoth supplied her amply with money—a circumstance that would have surprised Isidora, as his appearance was always remarkably plain and private, if, at this moment of anxiety, any thought but that of the hour could have found room in her mind. * * * * * * *

“On the evening supposed to be that preceding the dreaded event, Melmoth had thrown an unusual degree of tenderness into his manner—he gazed on her frequently with anxious and silent fondness—he seemed to have something to communicate which he had not courage to disclose. Isidora, well versed in the language of the countenance, which is often, more than that of words, the language of the heart, intreated him to tell her what he looked. “Your father is returning,” said Melmoth reluctantly. “He will certainly be here in a few days, perhaps in a few hours.” Isidora heard him in silent horror. “My father!” she cried—“I have never seen my father.—Oh, how shall I meet him now! And is my mother ignorant of this?—would she not have apprized me?”—“She is ignorant at present; but she will not long be so.”—“And from whence could you have obtained intelligence that she is ignorant of?” Melmoth paused some time,—his features assumed a more contracted and gloomy character than they had done laterally—he answered with slow and stern reluctance—“Never again ask me that question—the intelligence that I can give you must be of more importance to you than the means by which I obtain it—enough for you that it is true.”—“Pardon me, love,” said Isidora; “it is probable that I may never again offend you—will you not, then, forgive my last offence?”

“Melmoth seemed too intently occupied with his own thoughts to answer even her tears. He added, after a short and sullen pause, “Your betrothed bridegroom is coming with your father—Montilla’s father is dead—the arrangements are all concluded for your nuptials—your bridegroom is coming to wed the wife of another—with him comes your fiery, foolish brother, who has set out to meet his father and his future relative. There will be a feast prepared in the house on the occasion of your future nuptials—you may hear of a strange guest appearing at your festival—I will be there!”

“Isidora stood stupified with horror. “Festival!” she repeated—“a bridal festival!—and I already wedded to you, and about to become a mother!”

*   *   *   *

“At this moment the trampling of many horsemen was heard as they approached the villa—the tumult of the domestics hurrying to admit and receive them, resounded through the apartments—and Melmoth, with a gesture that seemed to Isidora rather like a menace than a farewell, instantly disappeared; and within an hour, Isidora knelt to the father she had never till then beheld—suffered herself to be saluted by Montilla—and accepted the embrace of her brother, who, in the petulance of his spirit, half rejected the chill and altered form that advanced to greet him.

*   *   *   *

“Every thing at the family meeting was conducted in true Spanish formality. Aliaga kissed the cold hand of his withered wife—the numerous domestics exhibited a grave joy at the return of their master—Fra Jose assumed increased importance, and called for dinner in a louder tone. Montilla, the lover, a cold and quiet character, took things as they occurred.

“Every thing lay hushed under a brief and treacherous calm. Isidora, who trembled at the approaching danger, felt her terrors on a sudden suspended. It was not so very near as she apprehended—and she bore with tolerable patience the daily mention of her approaching nuptials, while she was momently harassed by her confidential servants with hints of the impossibility of the event of which they were in expectation, being much longer delayed. Isidora heard, felt, endured all with courage—the grave congratulation of her father and mother—the self-complacent attentions of Montilla, sure of the bride and of her dower—the sullen compliance of the brother, who, unable to refuse his consent, was for ever hinting that his sister might have formed a higher connection. All these passed over her mind like a dream—the reality of her existence seemed internal, and she said to herself,—“Were I at the altar, were my hand locked in that of Montilla, Melmoth would rend me from him.” A wild but deeply-fixed conviction—a wandering image of preternatural power, overshadowed her mind while she thought of Melmoth;—and this image, which had caused her so much terror and inquietude in her early hours of love, now formed her only resource against the hour of inconceivable suffering; as those unfortunate females in the Eastern Tales, whose beauty has attracted the fearful passion of some evil genie, are supposed to depend, at their nuptial hour, on the presence of the seducing spirit, to tear from the arms of the agonised parent, and the distracted bridegroom, the victim whom he has reserved for himself, and whose wild devotion to him gives a dignity to the union so unhallowed and unnatural[(15)]. * * * * * *

“Aliaga’s heart expanded amid the approaching completion of the felicitous plans he had formed, and with his heart, his purse, which was its depositary, opened also, and he resolved to give a splendid fete in honour of his daughter’s nuptials. Isidora remembered Melmoth’s prediction of a fatal festival; and his words, “I will be there,” gave her for a time a kind of trembling confidence. But as the preparations were carried on under her very eye,—as she was hourly consulted about the disposal of the ornaments, and the decorations of the apartments,—her resolution failed, and while she uttered a few incoherent words, her eye was glazed with horror.

“The entertainment was to be a masked ball; and Isidora, who imagined that this might suggest to Melmoth some auspicious expedient for her escape, watched in vain for some hint of hope,—some allusion to the probability of this event facilitating her extrication from those snares of death that seemed compassing her about. He never uttered a word, and her dependence on him was at one moment confirmed, at another shaken to its foundation, by this terrible silence. In one of these latter moments, the anguish of which was increased beyond expression by a conviction that her hour of danger was not far distant, she exclaimed to Melmoth—“Take me—take me from this place! My existence is nothing—it is a vapour that soon must be exhaled—but my reason is threatened every moment! I cannot sustain the horrors to which I am exposed! All this day I have been dragged through rooms decorated for my impossible nuptials!—Oh, Melmoth, if you no longer love me, at least commiserate me! Save me from a situation of horror unspeakable!—have mercy on your child, if not on me! I have hung on your looks,—I have watched for a word of hope—you have not uttered a sound—you have not cast a glance of hope on me! I am wild!—I am reckless of all but the imminent and present horrors of to-morrow—you have talked of your power to approach, to enter these walls without suspicion or discovery—you boasted of that cloud of mystery in which you could envelope yourself. Oh! in this last moment of my extremity, wrap me in its tremendous folds, and let me escape in them, though they prove my shroud!—Think of the terrible night of our marriage! I followed you then in fear and confidence—your touch dissolved every earthly barrier—your steps trod an unknown path, yet I followed you!—Oh! If you really possess that mysterious and inscrutable power, which I dare not either question or believe, exert it for me in this terrible emergency—aid my escape—and though I feel I shall never live to thank you, the silent suppliant will remind you by its smiles of the tears that I now shed; and if they are shed in vain, its smile will have a bitter eloquence as it plays with the flowers on its mother’s grave!”

“Melmoth, as she spoke, was profoundly silent, and deeply attentive. He said at last, “Do you then resign yourself to me?”—“Alas! have I not?”—“A question is not an answer. Will you, renouncing all other engagements, all other hopes, depend on me solely for your extrication from this fearful emergency?”—“I will—I do!”—“Will you promise, that if I render you the service you require, if I employ the power you say I have alluded to, you will be mine?”—“Yours!—Alas! am I not yours already?”—“You embrace my protection, then? You voluntarily seek the shelter of that power which I can promise? You yourself will me to employ that power in effecting your escape?—Speak—do I interpret your sentiments aright?—I am unable to exercise those powers you invest me with, unless you yourself require me to do so. I have waited—I have watched for the demand—it has been made—would that it never had!” An expression of the fiercest agony corrugated his stern features as he spoke.—“But it may yet be withdrawn—reflect!”—“And you will not then save me from shame and danger? Is this the proof of your love—is this the boast of your power?” said Isidora, half frantic at this delay. “If I adjure you to pause—if I myself hesitate and tremble—it is to give time for the salutary whisper of your better angel.”—“Oh! save me, and you shall be my angel!” said Isidora, falling at his feet. Melmoth shook through his whole frame as he heard these words. He raised and soothed her, however, with promises of safety, though in a voice that seemed to announce despair—and then turning from her, burst into a passionate soliloquy.—“Immortal Heaven! what is man?—A being with the ignorance, but not the instinct, of the feeblest animals!—They are like birds—when thy hand, O Thou whom I dare not call Father, is on them, they scream and quiver, though the gentle pressure is intended only to convey the wanderer back to his cage—while, to shun the light fear that scares their senses, they rush into the snare that is spread in their sight, and where their captivity is hopeless!” As he spoke, hastily traversing the room, his foot struck against a chair on which a gorgeous dress was spread. “What is this?” he exclaimed—“What ideot trumpery, what May-queen foolery is this?”—“It is the habit I am to wear at the feast to-night,” said Isidora—“My attendants are coming—I hear them at the door—oh, with what a throbbing heart I shall put on this glittering mockery!—But you will not desert me then?” she added, with wild and breathless anxiety. “Fear not,” said Melmoth, solemnly—“You have demanded my aid, and it shall be accorded. May your heart tremble no more when you throw off that habit, than now when you are about to put it on!”

“The hour approached, and the guests were arriving. Isidora, arrayed in a splendid and fanciful garb, and rejoicing in the shelter which her mask afforded to the expression of her pale features, mingled among the groupe. She walked one measure with Montilla, and then declined dancing on the pretence of assisting her mother in receiving and entertaining her guests.

“After a sumptuous banquet, dancing was renewed in the spacious hall, and Isidora followed the company thither with a beating heart. Twelve was the hour at which Melmoth had promised to meet her, and by the clock, which was placed over the door of the hall, she saw it wanted but a quarter to twelve. The hand moved on—it arrived at the hour—the clock struck! Isidora, whose eyes had been rivetted on its movements, now withdrew them in despair. At that moment she felt her arm gently touched, and one of the maskers, bending towards her, whispered, “I am here!” and he added the sign which Melmoth and she had agreed on as the signal of their meeting. Isidora, unable to reply, could only return the sign. “Make haste,” he added—“All is arranged for your flight—there is not a moment to be lost—I will leave you now, but meet me in a few moments in the western portico—the lamps are extinguished there, and the servants have neglected to relight them—be silent and be swift!” He disappeared as he spoke, and Isidora, after a few moments, followed him. Though the portico was dark, a faint gleam from the splendidly illuminated rooms disclosed to her the figure of Melmoth. He drew her arm under his in silence, and proceeded to hurry her from the spot. “Stop, villain, stop!” exclaimed the voice of her brother, who, followed by Montilla, sprung from the balcony—“Where do you drag my sister?—and you, degraded wretch, where are you about to fly, and with whom?” Melmoth attempted to pass him, supporting Isidora with one arm, while the other was extended to repel his approach; but Fernan, drawing his sword, placed himself directly in their way, at the same time calling on Montilla to raise the household, and tear Isidora from his arms. “Off, fool—off!” exclaimed Melmoth—“Rush not on destruction!—I seek not your life—one victim of your house is enough—let us pass ere you perish!”—“Boaster, prove your words!” said Fernan, making a desperate thrust at him, which Melmoth coolly put by with his hand. “Draw, coward!” cried Fernan, rendered furious by this action—“My next will be more successful!” Melmoth slowly drew his sword. “Boy!” said he in an awful voice—“If I turn this point against you, your life is not worth a moment’s purchase—be wise and let us pass.” Fernan made no answer but by a fierce attack, which was instantly met by his antagonist.

“The shrieks of Isidora had now reached the ears of the revellers, who rushed in crowds to the garden—the servants followed them with flambeaux snatched from the walls adorned for this ill-omened festival, and the scene of the combat was in a moment as light as day, and surrounded by a hundred spectators.

“Part them—part them—save them!” shrieked Isidora, writhing at the feet of her father and mother, who, with the rest, were gazing in stupid horror at the scene—“Save my brother—save my husband!” The whole dreadful truth rushed on Donna Clara’s mind at these words, and casting a conscious look at the terrified priest, she fell to the ground. The combat was short as it was unequal,—in two moments Melmoth passed his sword twice through the body of Fernan, who sunk beside Isidora, and expired! There was a universal pause of horror for some moments—at length a cry of—“Seize the murderer!” burst from every lip, and the crowd began to close around Melmoth. He attempted no defence. He retreated a few paces, and sheathing his sword, waved them back only with his arm; and this movement, that seemed to announce an internal power above all physical force, had the effect of nailing every spectator to the spot where he stood.

“The light of the torches, which the trembling servants held up to gaze on him, fell full on his countenance, and the voices of a few shuddering speakers exclaimed, “Melmoth the wanderer!”—“I am—I am!” said that unfortunate being—“and who now will oppose my passing—who will become my companion?—I seek not to injure now—but I will not be detained. Would that breathless fool had yielded to my bidding, not to my sword—there was but one human chord that vibrated in my heart—it is broken to-night, and for ever! I will never tempt woman more! Why should the whirlwind, that can shake mountains, and overwhelm cities with its breath, descend to scatter the leaves of the rose-bud?” As he spoke, his eyes fell on the form of Isidora, which lay at his feet extended beside that of Fernan. He bent over it for a moment—a pulsation like returning life agitated her frame. He bent nearer—he whispered, unheard by the rest,—“Isidora, will you fly with me—this is the moment—every arm is paralyzed—every mind is frozen to its centre!—Isidora, rise and fly with me—this is your hour of safety!” Isidora, who recognized the voice but not the speaker, raised herself for a moment—looked on Melmoth—cast a glance on the bleeding bosom of Fernan, and fell on it dyed in that blood. Melmoth started up—there was a slight movement of hostility among some of the guests—he turned one brief and withering glance on them—they stood every man his hand on his sword, without the power to draw them, and the very domestics held up the torches in their trembling hands, as if with involuntary awe they were lighting him out. So he passed on unmolested amid the groupe, till he reached the spot where Aliaga, stupified with horror, stood beside the bodies of his son and daughter. “Wretched old man!” he exclaimed, looking on him as the unhappy father strained his glazing and dilated eyes to see who spoke to him, and at length with difficulty recognized the form of the stranger—the companion of his fearful journey some months past—“Wretched old man—you were warned—but you neglected the warning—I adjured you to save your daughter—I best knew her danger—you saved your gold—now estimate the value of the dross you grasped, and the precious ore you dropt! I stood between myself and her—I warned—I menaced—it was not for me to intreat. Wretched old man—see the result!”—and he turned slowly to depart. An involuntary sound of execration and horror, half a howl and half a hiss, pursued his parting steps, and the priest, with a dignity that more became his profession than his character, exclaimed aloud, “Depart accursed, and trouble us not—go, cursing and to curse.”—“I go conquering and to conquer,” answered Melmoth with wild and fierce triumph—“wretches! your vices, your passions, and your weaknesses, make you my victims. Upbraid yourselves, and not me. Heroes in your guilt, but cowards in your despair, you would kneel at my feet for the terrible immunity with which I pass through you at this moment.—I go accursed of every human heart, yet untouched by one human hand!”—As he retired slowly, the murmur of suppressed but instinctive and irrepressible horror and hatred burst from the groupe. He past on scowling at them like a lion on a pack of bayed hounds, and departed unmolested—unassayed—no weapon was drawn—no arm was lifted—the mark was on his brow,—and those who could read it knew that all human power was alike forceless and needless,—and those who could not succumbed in passive horror. Every sword was in its sheath as Melmoth quitted the garden. “Leave him to God!”—was the universal exclamation. “You could not leave him in worse hands,” exclaimed Fra Jose—“He will certainly be damned—and—that is some comfort to this afflicted family.”

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Nunc animum pietas, et materna nomina frangunt.

“In less than half an hour, the superb apartments, the illuminated gardens of Aliaga, did not echo a footstep; all were gone, except a few who lingered, some from curiosity, some from humanity, to witness or condole with the sufferings of the wretched parents. The sumptuously decorated garden now presented a sight horrid from the contrasted figures and scenery. The domestics stood like statues, holding the torches still in their hands—Isidora lay beside the bloody corse of her brother, till an attempt was made to remove it, and then she clung to it with a strength that required strength to tear her from it—Aliaga, who had not uttered a word, and scarcely drawn a breath, sunk on his knees to curse his half-lifeless daughter—Donna Clara, who still retained a woman’s heart, lost all fear of her husband in this dreadful emergency, and, kneeling beside him, held his uplifted hands, and struggled hard for the suspension of the malediction—Fra Jose, the only one of the groupe who appeared to possess any power of recollection or of mental sanity, addressed repeatedly to Isidora the question, “Are you married,—and married to that fearful being?”—“I am married!” answered the victim, rising from beside the corse of her brother. “I am married!” she added, glancing a look at her splendid habit, and displaying it with a frantic laugh. A loud knocking at the garden gate was heard at this moment. “I am married!” shrieked Isidora, “and here comes the witness of my nuptials!”

“As she spoke, some peasants from the neighbourhood, assisted by the domestics of Don Aliaga, brought in a corse, so altered from the fearful change that passes on the mortal frame, that the nearest relative could not have known it. Isidora recognized it in a moment for the body of the old domestic who had disappeared so mysteriously on the night of her frightful nuptials. The body had been discovered but that evening by the peasants; it was lacerated as by a fall from rocks, and so disfigured and decayed as to retain no resemblance to humanity. It was recognizable only by the livery of Aliaga, which, though much defaced, was still distinguishable by some peculiarities in the dress, that announced that those defaced garments covered the mortal remains of the old domestic. “There!” cried Isidora with delirious energy—“There is the witness of my fatal marriage!”

“Fra Jose hung over the illegible fragments of that whereon nature had once written—‘This is a human being,’ and, turning his eyes on Isidora, with involuntary horror he exclaimed, “Your witness is dumb!” As the wretched Isidora was dragged away by those who surrounded her, she felt the first throes of maternal suffering, and exclaimed, “Oh! there will be a living witness—if you permit it to live!” Her words were soon realized; she was conveyed to her apartment, and in a few hours after, scarcely assisted and wholly unpitied by her attendants, gave birth to a daughter.

“This event excited a sentiment in the family at once ludicrous and horrible. Aliaga, who had remained in a state of stupefaction since his son’s death, uttered but one exclamation—“Let the wife of the sorcerer, and their accursed offspring, be delivered into the hands of the merciful and holy tribunal, the Inquisition.” He afterwards muttered something about his property being confiscated, but to this nobody paid attention. Donna Clara was almost distracted between compassion for her wretched daughter, and being grandmother to an infant demon, for such she deemed the child of “Melmoth the Wanderer” must be—and Fra Jose, while he baptized the infant with trembling hands, almost expected a fearful sponsor to appear and blast the rite with his horrible negative to the appeal made in the name of all that is holy among Christians. The baptismal ceremony was performed, however, with an omission which the good-natured priest overlooked—there was no sponsor—the lowest domestic in the house declined with horror the proposal of being sponsor for the child of that terrible union. The wretched mother heard them from her bed of pain, and loved her infant better for its utter destitution. * * * * * *

“A few hours put an end to the consternation of the family, on the score of religion at least. The officers of the Inquisition arrived, armed with all the powers of their tribunal, and strongly excited by the report, that the Wanderer of whom they had been long in search, had lately perpetrated an act that brought him within the sphere of their jurisdiction, by involving the life of the only being his solitary existence held alliance with. “We hold him by the cords of a man,” said the chief inquisitor, speaking more from what he read than what he felt—“if he burst these cords he is more than man. He has a wife and child, and if there be human elements in him, if there be any thing mortal clinging to his heart, we shall wind round the roots of it, and extract it.” * * * * *

“It was not till after some weeks, that Isidora recovered her perfect recollection. When she did, she was in a prison, a pallet of straw was her bed, a crucifix and a death’s head the only furniture of her cell; the light struggled through a narrow grate, and struggled in vain, to cast one gleam on the squalid apartment that it visited and shrunk from. Isidora looked round her—she had light enough to see her child—she clasped it to her bosom, from which it had unconsciously drawn its feverish nourishment, and wept in extasy. “It is my own,” she sobbed, “and only mine! It has no father—he is at the ends of the earth—he has left me alone—but I am not alone while you are left to me!”

“She was left in solitary confinement for many days, undisturbed and unvisited. The persons in whose hands she was had strong reasons for this mode of treatment. They were desirous that she should recover perfect sanity of intellect previous to her examination, and they also wished to give her time to form that profound attachment to the innocent companion of her solitude, that might be a powerful engine in their hands in discovering those circumstances relative to Melmoth that had hitherto baffled all the power and penetration of the Inquisition itself. All reports agreed that the Wanderer had never before been known to make a woman the object of his temptation, or to entrust her with the terrible secret of his destiny[(16)]; and the Inquisitors were heard to say to each other, “Now that we have got the Delilah in our hands, we shall soon have the Sampson.”

“It was on the night previous to her examination, (of which she was unapprized), that Isidora saw the door of her cell opened, and a figure appear at it, whom, amid the dreary obscurity that surrounded her, she recognized in a moment,—it was Fra Jose. After a long pause of mutual horror, she knelt in silence to receive his benediction, which he gave with feeling solemnity; and then the good monk, whose propensities, though somewhat “earthly and sensual,” were never “devilish,” after vainly drawing his cowl over his face to stifle his sobs, lifted up his voice and “wept bitterly.”

“Isidora was silent, but her silence was not that of sullen apathy, or of conscience-seared impenitence. At length Fra Jose seated himself on the foot of the pallet, at some distance from the prisoner, who was also sitting, and bending her cheek, down which a cold tear slowly flowed, over her infant. “Daughter,” said the monk, collecting himself, “it is to the indulgence of the holy office I owe this permission to visit you.”—“I thank them,” said Isidora, and her tears flowed fast and relievingly. “I am permitted also to tell you that your examination will take place to-morrow,—to adjure you to prepare for it,—and, if there be any thing which”—— “My examination!” repeated Isidora with surprise, but evidently without terror, “on what subject am I then to be examined?”—“On that of your inconceivable union with a being devoted and accursed.” His voice was choaked with horror, and he added, “Daughter, are you then indeed the wife of—of—that being, whose name makes the flesh creep, and the hair stand on end?”—“I am.”—“Who were the witnesses of your marriage, and what hand dared to bind yours with that unholy and unnatural bond?”—“There were no witnesses—we were wedded in darkness. I saw no form, but I thought I heard words uttered—I know I felt a hand place mine in Melmoth’s—its touch was as cold as that of the dead.”—“Oh complicated and mysterious horror!” said the priest, turning pale, and crossing himself with marks of unfeigned terror; he bowed his head on his arm for some time, and remained silent from unutterable emotion. “Father,” said Isidora at length, “you knew the hermit who lived amid the ruins of the monastery near our house,—he was a priest also,—he was a holy man, it was he who united us!” Her voice trembled.—— “Wretched victim!” groaned the priest, without raising his head, “you know not what you utter—that holy man is known to have died the very night preceding that of your dreadful union.”

“Another pause of mute horror followed, which the priest at length broke.—“Unhappy daughter,” said he in a composed and solemn voice, “I am indulged with permission to give you the benefit of the sacrament of confession, previous to your examination. I adjure you to unburden your soul to me,—will you?”—“I will, my father.”—“Will you answer me, as you would answer at the tribunal of God?”—“Yes,—as I would answer at the tribunal of God.” As she spake, she prostrated herself before the priest in the attitude of confession. * * * * * * *

“And you have now disclosed the whole burden of your spirit?”—“I have, my father.” The priest sat thoughtfully for a considerable time. He then put to her several singular questions relative to Melmoth, which she was wholly unable to answer. They seemed chiefly the result of those impressions of supernatural power and terror, which were every where associated with his image. “My father,” said Isidora, when he had ceased, in a faultering voice, “My father, may I inquire about my unhappy parents?” The priest shook his head, and remained silent. At length, affected by the agony with which she urged her inquiry, he reluctantly said she might guess the effect which the death of their son, and the imprisonment of their daughter in the Inquisition, must have on parents, who were no less eminent for their zeal for the Catholic faith, than for their parental affection. “Are they alive?” said Isidora.—“Spare yourself the pain of further inquiries, daughter,” said the priest, “and be assured, that if the answer was such as could give you comfort, it would not be withheld.”

“At this moment a bell was heard to sound in a distant part of the structure. “That bell,” said the priest, “announces that the hour of your examination approaches—farewell, and may the saints be with you.”—“Stay, father,—stay one moment,—but one moment!” cried Isidora, rushing franticly between him and the door. Fra Jose paused. Isidora sunk before him, and, hiding her face with her hands, exclaimed in a voice choaked with agony, “Father, do you think—that I am—lost for ever?”—“Daughter,” said the priest in heavy accents, and in a troubled and doubting spirit, “Daughter,—I have given you what comfort I could—press for no more, lest what I have given (with many struggles of conscience) may be withdrawn. Perhaps you are in a state on which I can form no judgment, and pronounce no sentence. May God be merciful to you, and may the holy tribunal judge you in its mercy also.”—“Yet stay, father—stay one moment—only one moment—only one question more.” As she spoke, she caught her pale and innocent companion from the pallet where it slept, and held it up to the priest. “Father, tell me, can this be the child of a demon?—can it be, this creature that smiles on me—that smiles on you, while you are mustering curses against it?—Oh, holy drops have sprinkled it from your own hand!—Father, you have spoke holy words over it. Father, let them tear me with their pincers, let them roast me on their flames, but will not my child escape—my innocent child, that smiles on you?—Holy father, dear father, look back on my child.” And she crawled after him on her knees, holding up the miserable infant in her arms, whose weak cry and wasted frame, pleaded against the dungeon-life to which its infancy had been doomed.

“Fra Jose melted at the appeal, and he was about to bestow many a kiss and many a prayer on the wretched babe, when the bell again was sounded, and hasting away, he had but time to exclaim, “My daughter, may God protect you!”—“God protect me,” said Isidora, clasping her infant to her bosom. The bell sounded again, and Isidora knew that the hour of her trial approached.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

Fear not now the fever’s fire,

Fear not now the death-bed groan;

Pangs that torture, pains that tire

Bed-rid age with feeble moan.

Mason.

“The first examination of Isidora was conducted with the circumspective formality that has always been known to mark the proceedings of that tribunal. The second and the third were alike strict, penetrating and inoperative, and the holy office began to feel its highest functionaries were no match for the extraordinary prisoner who stood before them, who, combining the extremes of simplicity and magnanimity, uttered every thing that might criminate herself, but evaded with skill that baffled all the arts of inquisitorial examination, every question that referred to Melmoth.

“In the course of the first examination, they hinted at the torture. Isidora, with something of the free and nature-taught dignity of her early existence, smiled as they spoke of it. An official whispered one of the inquisitors, as he observed the peculiar expression of her countenance, and the torture was mentioned no more.

“A second—a third examination followed at long intervals—but it was observed, that every time the mode of examination was less severe, and the treatment of the prisoner more and more indulgent—her youth, her beauty, her profound simplicity of character and language, developed strongly on this singular emergency, and the affecting circumstance of her always appearing with her child in her arms, whose feeble cries she tried to hush, while she bent forward to hear and answer the questions addressed to her—all these seemed to have wrought powerfully on the minds of men not accustomed to yield to external impressions. There was also a docility, a submission, about this beautiful and unfortunate being—a contrite and bending spirit—a sense of wretchedness for the misfortunes of her family—a consciousness of her own, that touched the hearts even of inquisitors.

“After repeated examinations, when nothing could be extorted from the prisoner, a skilful and profound artist in the school of mental anatomy, whispered to the inquisitor something about the infant whom she held in her arms. “She has defied the rack,” was the answer. “Try her on that rack,” was rejoined, and the hint was taken.

“After the usual formalities were gone through, Isidora’s sentence was read to her. She was condemned, as a suspected heretic, to perpetual confinement in the prison of the Inquisition—her child was to be taken from her, and brought up in a convent, in order to——

“Here the reading of the sentence was interrupted by the prisoner, who, uttering one dreadful shriek of maternal agony, louder than any other mode of torture had ever before extorted, fell prostrate on the floor. When she was restored to sensation, no authority or terror of the place or the judges, could prevent her pouring forth those wild and piercing supplications, which, from the energy with which they are uttered, appear to the speaker himself like commands,—that the latter part of her sentence might be remitted—the former appeared to make not the least impression on her—eternal solitude, passed in eternal darkness, seemed to give her neither fear or pain, but she wept, and pleaded, and raved, that she might not be separated from her infant.

“The judges listened with fortified hearts, and in unbroken silence. When she found all was over, she rose from her posture of humiliation and agony—and there was something even of dignity about her as she demanded, in a calm and altered voice, that her child might not be removed from her till the following day. She had also self-possession enough to enforce her petition by the remark, that its life might be the sacrifice if it was too suddenly deprived of the nourishment it was accustomed to receive from her. To this request the judges acceded, and she was remanded to her cell. * * * * * * *

“The time elapsed. The person who brought her food departed without uttering a word; nor did she utter a word to him. It was about midnight that the door of her cell was unlocked, and two persons in official habits appeared at it. They seemed to pause, like the heralds at the tent of Achilles, and then, like them, forced themselves to enter. These men had haggard and livid faces—their attitudes were perfectly stony and automaton-like—their movements appeared the result of mere mechanism—yet these men were touched. The miserable light within hardly shewed the pallet on which the prisoner was seated; but a strong red light from the torch the attendant held, flared broadly on the arch of the door under which the figures appeared. They approached with a motion that seemed simultaneous and involuntary—and uttered together, in accents that seemed to issue from one mouth, “Deliver your child to us.” In a voice as hoarse, dry, and natureless, the prisoner answered, “Take it!”

“The men looked about the cell—it seemed as if they knew not where to find the offspring of humanity amid the cells of the Inquisition. The prisoner was silent and motionless during their search. It was not long—the narrow apartment, the scanty furniture, afforded little room for the investigation. When it was concluded, however, the prisoner, bursting into a wild laugh, exclaimed, “Where would you search for a child but in its mother’s bosom? Here—here it is—take it—take it!” And she put it into their hands. “Oh what fools ye were to seek my child any where but on its mother’s bosom! It is your’s now!” she shrieked in a voice that froze the officials.—“Take it—take it from me!”

“The agents of the holy office advanced; and the technicality of their movements was somewhat suspended when Isidora placed in their hands the corse of her infant daughter. Around the throat of the miserable infant, born amid agony, and nursed in a dungeon, there was a black mark, which the officials made their use of in representing this extraordinary circumstance to the holy office. By some it was deemed as the sign impressed by the evil one at its birth—by others as the fearful effect of maternal despair.

“It was determined that the prisoner should appear before them within four-and-twenty hours, and account for the death of her child. * * * * * * * *

“Within less than half that number of hours, a mightier arm than that of the Inquisition was dealing with the prisoner—an arm that seemed to menace, but was indeed stretched out to save, and before whose touch the barriers of the dreaded Inquisition itself were as frail as the fortress of the spider who hung her web on its walls. Isidora was dying of a disease not the less mortal because it makes no appearance in an obituary—she was dying of that internal and incurable wound—a broken heart.

“When the inquisitors were at last convinced that there was nothing more to be obtained by torture, bodily or mental torture, they suffered her to die unmolested, and granted her last request, that Fra Jose might be permitted to visit her. * * * * * *

“It was midnight, but its approach was unknown in that place, where day and night are the same. A dim lamp was substituted for that weak and struggling beam that counterfeited day-light. The penitent was stretched on her bed of rest—the humane priest sat beside her; and if his presence gave no dignity to the scene, it at least softened it by the touches of humanity. * * * * * * * *

“My father,” said the dying Isidora, “you pronounced me forgiven.”—“Yes, my daughter,” said the priest, “you have assured me you are innocent of the death of your infant.”—“You never could have believed me guilty,” said Isidora, raising herself on her pallet at the appeal—“the consciousness of its existence alone would have kept me alive, even in my prison. Oh, my father, how was it possible it could live, buried with me in this dreadful place almost as soon as it respired? Even the morbid nourishment it received from me was dried up when my sentence was read. It moaned all night—towards morning its moans grew fainter, and I was glad—at last they ceased, and I was very—happy!” But, as she talked of this fearful happiness, she wept.

“My daughter, is your heart disengaged from that awful and disastrous tie that bound it to misfortune here, and to perdition hereafter?” It was long before she could answer; at length she said in a broken voice, “My father, I have not now strength to search or to struggle with my heart. Death must very soon break every tie that was twined with it, and it is useless to anticipate my liberation; the effort would be agony—fruitless agony, for, while I live, I must love my destroyer! Alas! in being the enemy of mankind, was not his hostility to me inevitable and fatal? In rejecting his last terrible temptation—in resigning him to his destiny, and preferring submission to my own, I feel my triumph complete, and my salvation assured.”—“Daughter, I do not comprehend you.”—“Melmoth,” said Isidora, with a strong effort, “Melmoth was here last night—within the walls of the Inquisition—within this very cell!” The priest crossed himself with marks of the profoundest horror, and, as the wind swept hollowly through the long passage, almost expected the shaken door would burst open, and disclose the figure of the Wanderer. * * * * * * *

“My father, I have had many dreams,” answered the penitent, shaking her head at a suggestion of the priest’s, “many—many wanderings, but this was no dream. I have dreamed of the garden-land where I beheld him first—I have dreamed of the nights when he stood at my casement, and trembled in sleep at the sound of my mother’s step—and I have had holy and hopeful visions, in which celestial forms appeared to me, and promised me his conversion—but this was no dream—I saw him last night. Father, he was here the whole night—he promised—he assured me—he adjured me to accept of liberation and safety, of life and of felicity. He told me, nor could I doubt him, that, by whatever means he effected his entrance, he could also effect my escape. He offered to live with me in that Indian isle—that paradise of ocean, far from human resort or human persecution. He offered to love me alone, and for ever—and then I listened to him. Oh, my father, I am very young, and life and love sounded sweetly in my ears, when I looked at my dungeon, and thought of dying on this floor of stone! But—when he whispered the terrible condition on which the fulfilment of his promise depended—when he told me that”——

“Her voice failed with her failing strength, and she could utter no more. “Daughter,” said the priest, bending over her bed, “daughter, I adjure you, by the image represented on this cross I hold to your dying lips—by your hopes of that salvation which depends on the truth you utter to me, your priest and your friend—the conditions proposed by your tempter!” “Promise me absolution for repeating the words, for I should wish that my last breath might not be exhaled in uttering—what I must.”—“Te absolvo,” &c. said the priest, and bent his ear to catch the sounds. The moment they were uttered, he started as from the sting of a serpent, and, seating himself at the extremity of the cell, rocked in dumb horror. “My father, you promised me absolution,” said the penitent. “Jam tibi dedi, moribunda,” answered the priest, in the confusion of thoughts using the language appropriated to the service of religion. “Moribunda indeed!” said the sufferer, falling back on her pallet, “Father, let me feel a human hand in mine as I part!”—“Call upon God, daughter!” said the priest, applying the crucifix to her cold lips. “I loved his religion,” said the penitent, kissing it devoutly, “I loved it before I knew it, and God must have been my teacher, for I had no other! Oh!” she exclaimed, with that deep conviction that must thrill every dying heart, and whose echo (would God) might pierce every living one—“Oh that I had loved none but God—how profound would have been my peace—how glorious my departure—now—his image pursues me even to the brink of the grave, into which I plunge to escape it!”

“My daughter,” said the priest, while the tears rolled fast down his cheeks—“my daughter, you are passing to bliss—the conflict was fierce and short, but the victory is sure—harps are tuned to a new song, even a song of welcome, and wreaths of palm are weaving for you in paradise!”

“Paradise!” uttered Isidora, with her last breath—“Will he be there!”

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Loud tolled the bell, the priests prayed well,

The tapers they all burned bright,

The monk her son, and her daughter the nun,

They told their beads all night!

*   *   *   *

The second night———

*   *   *   *

The monk and the nun they told their beads

As fast as they could tell,

And aye the louder grew the noise,

The faster went the bell!

*   *   *   *

The third night came———

*   *   *   *

The monk and the nun forgot their beads,

They fell to the ground dismayed,

There was not a single saint in heaven

Whom they did not call to their aid!

Southey.

Monçada here concluded the tale of the Indian,—the victim of Melmoth’s passion, no less than of his destiny, both alike unhallowed and unutterable. And he announced his intention of disclosing to him the fates of the other victims, whose skeletons were preserved in the vault of the Jew Adonijah in Madrid. He added, that the circumstances relating to them, were of a character still darker and more awful than those he had recited, as they were the result of impressions made on masculine minds, without any excitement but that of looking into futurity. He mentioned, too, that the circumstances of his residence in the house of the Jew, his escape from it, and the reasons of his subsequent arrival in Ireland, were scarcely less extraordinary than any thing he had hitherto related. Young Melmoth, (whose name perhaps the reader has forgot), did “seriously incline” to the purpose of having his dangerous curiosity further gratified, nor was he perhaps altogether without the wild hope of seeing the original of that portrait he had destroyed, burst from the walls and take up the fearful tale himself.

The narrative of the Spaniard had occupied many days; at their termination, young Melmoth signified to his guest that he was prepared to hear the sequel.

A night was fixed for the continuation of the recital. Young Melmoth and his guest met in the usual apartment—it was a dreary, stormy night—the rain that had fallen all day, seemed now to have yielded to the wind, that came in strong and sudden bursts, suddenly hushed, as if collecting strength for the tempest of the night. Monçada and Melmoth drew their chairs closer to the fire, looking at each other with the aspect of men who wish to inspire each other with courage to listen, and to tell, and are the more eager to inspire it, because neither feels it himself.

At length Monçada collected his voice and resolution to proceed, but as he went on, he perceived he could not fix his hearer’s attention, and he paused.

“I thought,” said Melmoth, answering his silence, “I thought I heard a noise—as of a person walking in the passage.” “Hush! and listen,” said Monçada, “I would not wish to be overheard.” They paused and held their breath—the sound was renewed—it was evidently that of steps approaching the door, and then retiring from it. “We are watched,” said Melmoth, half-rising from his chair, but at that moment the door opened, and a figure appeared at it, which Monçada recognized for the subject of his narrative, and his mysterious visitor in the prison of the Inquisition, and Melmoth for the original of the picture, and the being whose unaccountable appearance had filled him with consternation, as he sat beside his dying uncle’s bed.

The figure stood at the door for some time, and then advancing slowly till it gained the centre of the room, it remained there fixed for some time, but without looking at them. It then approached the table where they sat, in a slow but distinctly heard step, and stood before them as a living being. The profound horror that was equally felt by both, was differently expressed by each. Monçada crossed himself repeatedly, and attempted to utter many prayers. Melmoth, nailed to his chair, fixed his sightless eyes on the form that stood before him—it was indeed Melmoth the Wanderer—the same as he was in the past century—the same as he may be in centuries to come, should the fearful terms of his existence be renewed. His “natural force was not abated,” but “his eye was dim,”—that appalling and supernatural lustre of the visual organ, that beacon lit by an infernal fire, to tempt or to warn the adventurers of despair from that coast on which many struck, and some sunk—that portentous light was no longer visible—the form and figure were those of a living man, of the age indicated in the portrait which the young Melmoth had destroyed, but the eyes were as the eyes of the dead. * * * * * *

As the Wanderer advanced still nearer till his figure touched the table, Monçada and Melmoth started up in irrepressible horror, and stood in attitudes of defence, though conscious at the moment that all defence was hopeless against a being that withered and mocked at human power. The Wanderer waved his arm with an action that spoke defiance without hostility—and the strange and solemn accents of the only human voice that had respired mortal air beyond the period of mortal life, and never spoken but to the ear of guilt or suffering, and never uttered to that ear aught but despair, rolled slowly on their hearing like a peal of distant thunder.

“Mortals—you are here to talk of my destiny, and of the events which it has involved. That destiny is accomplished, I believe, and with it terminate those events that have stimulated your wild and wretched curiosity. I am here to tell you of both!—I—I—of whom you speak, am here!—Who can tell so well of Melmoth the Wanderer as himself, now that he is about to resign that existence which has been the object of terror and wonder to the world?—Melmoth, you behold your ancestor—the being on whose portrait is inscribed the date of a century and a half, is before you.—Monçada, you see an acquaintance of a later date.”—(A grim smile of recognition wandered over his features as he spoke).—“Fear nothing,” he added, observing the agony and terror of his involuntary hearers—“What have you to fear?” he continued, while a flash of derisive malignity once more lit up the sockets of his dead eyes—“You, Senhor, are armed with your beads—and you, Melmoth, are fortified by that vain and desperate inquisitiveness, which might, at a former period, have made you my victim,”—(and his features underwent a short but horrible convulsion)—“but now makes you only my mockery.

*   *   *   *

“Have you aught to quench my thirst?” he added, seating himself. The senses of Monçada and his companion reeled in delirious terror, and the former, in a kind of wild confidence, filled a glass of water, and offered it to the Wanderer with a hand as steady, but somewhat colder, as he would have presented it to one who sat beside him in human companionship. The Wanderer raised it to his lips, and tasted a few drops, then replacing it on the table, said with a laugh, wild indeed, but no longer ferocious—“Have you seen,” said he to Monçada and Melmoth, who gazed with dim and troubled sight on this vision, and wist not what to think—“Have you seen the fate of Don Juan, not as he is pantomimed on your paltry stage, but as he is represented in the real horrors of his destiny by the Spanish writer[(17)]? There the spectre returns the hospitality of his inviter, and summons him in turn to a feast.—The banquet-hall is a church—he arrives—it is illuminated with a mysterious light—invisible hands hold lamps fed by no earthly substance, to light the apostate to his doom!—He enters the church, and is greeted by a numerous company—the spirits of those whom he has wronged and murdered, uprisen from their charnel, and swathed in shrouds, stand there to welcome him!—As he passes among them, they call on him in hollow sounds to pledge them in goblets of blood which they present to him—and beneath the altar, by which stands the spirit of him whom the parricide has murdered, the gulph of perdition is yawning to receive him!—— Through such a band I must soon prepare to pass!—Isidora! thy form will be the last I must encounter—and—the most terrible! Now for the last drop I must taste of earth’s produce—the last that shall wet my mortal lips!” He slowly finished the draught of water. Neither of his companions had the power to speak. He sat down in a posture of heavy musing, and neither ventured to interrupt him.

They kept silence till the morning was dawning, and a faint light streamed through the closed shutters. Then the Wanderer raised his heavy eyes, and fixed them on Melmoth. “Your ancestor has come home,” he said; “his wanderings are over!—What has been told or believed of me is now of light avail to me. The secret of my destiny rests with myself. If all that fear has invented, and credulity believed of me be true, to what does it amount? That if my crimes have exceeded those of mortality, so will my punishment. I have been on earth a terror, but not an evil to its inhabitants. None can participate in my destiny but with his own consent—none have consented—none can be involved in its tremendous penalties, but by participation. I alone must sustain the penalty. If I have put forth my hand, and eaten of the fruit of the interdicted tree, am I not driven from the presence of God and the region of paradise, and sent to wander amid worlds of barrenness and curse for ever and ever?

“It has been reported of me, that I obtained from the enemy of souls a range of existence beyond the period allotted to mortality—a power to pass over space without disturbance or delay, and visit remote regions with the swiftness of thought—to encounter tempests without the hope of their blasting me, and penetrate into dungeons, whose bolts were as flax and tow at my touch. It has been said that this power was accorded to me, that I might be enabled to tempt wretches in their fearful hour of extremity, with the promise of deliverance and immunity, on condition of their exchanging situations with me. If this be true, it bears attestation to a truth uttered by the lips of one I may not name, and echoed by every human heart in the habitable world.

“No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer. I have traversed the world in the search, and no one, to gain that world, would lose his own soul!—Not Stanton in his cell—nor you, Monçada, in the prison of the Inquisition—nor Walberg, who saw his children perishing with want—nor—another”—

He paused, and though on the verge of his dark and doubtful voyage, he seemed to cast one look of bitter and retrospective anguish on the receding shore of life, and see, through the mists of memory, one form that stood there to bid him farewell. He rose—“Let me, if possible, obtain an hour’s repose. Aye, repose—sleep!” he repeated, answering the silent astonishment of his hearers’ looks, “my existence is still human!”—and a ghastly and derisive smile wandered over his features for the last time, as he spoke. How often had that smile frozen the blood of his victims! Melmoth and Monçada quitted the apartment; and the Wanderer, sinking back in his chair, slept profoundly. He slept, but what were the visions of his last earthly slumber?