I cared not for these. This was not my home. I saw the faces of Mrs. Linwood and Edith in the mirror of memory. I saw the purple hills, the smiling vale, the quiet churchyard, the white, broken shaft, gleaming through the willow boughs, and the moonbeams resting in solemn glory there.
Never shall I forget my emotions when, on quitting the city, I caught a glimpse of that gloomy and stupendous granite pile which looms up in the midst of grandeur and magnificence, an awful monitor to human depravity. Well does it become its chill, funereal name. Shadows deeper than the darkness of the grave hang within its huge Egyptian columns. Corruption more loathsome than the mouldering remains of mortality dwells in those lone and accursed cells. I gazed on the massy walls, as they frowned on the soft blue sky, till their shadow seemed to darken the heavens. I thought of the inmate of one lonely cell; of the sighs and tears, the curses and wailings that had gone up from that abode of shame, despair, and misery; and I wondered why the Almighty did not rend the heavens and come down and bare the red right arm of vengeance over a world so blackened by sin, so stained by crime, and so given up to the dominion of the spirit of evil.
Ernest drew me back from the window of the carriage, that I might not behold this grim fortification against the powers of darkness; but it was not till we had quitted the walls of the metropolis, and inhaled a purer atmosphere, that I began to breathe more freely. The tender green of the fields, the freshness of the atmosphere, the indescribable odor of spring that embalmed the gale, awakened softer, happier thoughts. The footsteps of divine love were visible on the landscape. The voice of God was heard, breathing of mercy, through the cool green boughs.
CHAPTER XLII.
Once more at Grandison Place! Once more on the breezy height which commanded the loveliest valley creation ever formed! Light, bloom, joy came back to eye, cheek, and heart, as I hailed again the scene where the day-spring of love dawned on my life.
"God made the country."
Yes! I felt this truth in every bounding vein. "God made the country,"—with its rich sweep of verdant plains, its blue winding streams, shedding freshness and murmuring music through the smiling fields; its silver dews, its golden sunsets, and all its luxuriance and greenness and bloom. The black shadow of the Tombs did not darken this Eden of my youth.
Mrs. Linwood and Edith—I was with them once more. Mrs. Linwood, in her soft twilight robe of silver grey; and Edith, with her wealth of golden locks, and eye of heaven's own azure.
"You must not leave us again," said Mrs. Linwood, as she clasped us both in her maternal arms. "There are but few of us, and we should not be separated. Absence is the shadow of death, and falls coldly on the heart."