Ellen Middleton—A Tale

by Georgiana Fullerton

We went down into the drawing-room together; and when Henry appeared, I watched his countenance to try and gather from it, if he too had received the letter which his sister had been desired to write to him; but he puzzled me completely. He was absent and pre-occupied, but did not seem the least depressed; on the contrary, there was a kind of excitement about him, that gave him the appearance of being in high spirits. When Mrs. Brandon spoke of my summons to Elmsley, and the rest of the company were, in their different ways, making civil speeches to me, he said nothing, but in his turn watched me narrowly.

He did not sit next to me at dinner, which I thought, with a little contrivance, he might have done; nor did he come near me during the first part of the evening, but seemed entirely engrossed by a long eager whispering conversation which he kept up with Mrs. Brandon.

At tea-time, she came up to Lady Wyndham and Mrs. Ernsley, and asked if it would suit them to make a party the next day to the sea-side. There was a beautiful little bay about twenty miles off, which would make an excellent object for an expedition, and which she would like to show me, before I left Dorsetshire. It so happened that I had never in my life seen the sea, except from a distance, and this made the idea of this excursion particularly agreeable to me. Everybody approved of it; for once everybody was like Mrs. Hatton, and liked nothing so much as an expedition, and more especially one to the sea-side, so it was settled that we were to be off at eight the following morning. Except in general conversation, Henry did not speak to me that evening, till, as he was lighting a candle for me, near the refreshment table, he said in a low voice, "Have you ever been so interested in a book that you have been obliged to shut it up, and to pause before you opened it again?"

"No," (I answered,) "I always look at the last page."

"I dare not look at my last page," he said, and his voice trembled. At that moment I thought I liked him.

At six o'clock the next morning, in my dressing-gown and shawl, I was at the window of my bedroom anxiously examining the state of the weather, and trying to stretch my head beyond the comer of the house, in order to find out whether there might not be a very little bit of blue sky visible behind an ominous mass of gray clouds; but either my head would not go far enough, or else there was no blue sky to be seen, and each survey only tending to discourage me more thoroughly, I laid down again, and tried to go to sleep. At seven my maid came in, and informed me that it was a dull morning, but the carriages were to come round all the same, and the ladies were getting up. We met in the breakfast-room, with the weary, cross, sick-looking faces, which early rising, especially on a gloomy day, is apt to produce. In the first carriage went Lady Wyndham, Mrs. Brandon, Mr. Ernsley, and Mr. Moore. In the second, Mrs. Ernsley, the two Miss Farnley's, and Sir Edmund Ardern; Rosa Moore and myself had a pony-chaise to ourselves, and the rest of the men rode. By the time we had reached the gates of the park, the clouds began to break, and to sail across the sky, in white fleecy shapes. Soon the sun himself appeared after a desperate struggle with the clouds that hung about him. Then the birds began to sing in the hedges, and every leaf to glitter in the sunshine, while Rosa, who had been yawning most unmercifully, and, in the intervals, holding her pocket-handkerchief fast upon her mouth to keep the fog out of it, brightened up, and began talking and laughing, as if she had not been forced out of her bed at an unusual hour. We drove through lanes, such lanes as Miss Mitford loves and describes; through villages, each of which might have been her village, in which the cottages had gardens full of cabbages and sun-flowers, and the grass plots had geese and pigs and rosy children; through which little girls were walking to school in their straw bonnets and blue checked aprons, and stopped to stare and to curtsey to the grand people that were driving by; in which boys were swinging on gates, and urchins were dabbling in ponds in company with ducks that seemed hardly more amphibious than themselves, and then we drove by parks and lawns,—parks sloping, wooded, wild; lawns studded with beds of flowers, the red geranium or the glowing carnation, forming rich masses of dazzling brilliancy on the smooth surface of the soft green grass. How beautiful they were on that day, that July day, "the ancestral homes of England," as Mrs. Hemans calls them; streams of sunshine gilding their tall elms, their spreading oaks and stately beeches. How that bright sunshine danced among their leaves, and upon the grass amidst their roots, and how the berries of the mountain ash glowed in its light,—the mountain ash, that child of the north, which with its sturdy shape, its coral fruit, and the gray rock from which it springs, looks almost like a stranger in the midst of the more luxuriant foliage of the south. But scarcely two hours had elapsed, when we turned a comer in the road, and for the first time the sea lay stretched before my eyes. It was rough; the waves were crested with foam; and already I heard them break with that sullen roar, with that voice of the ocean, in which, as in the thunder of Heaven, we instinctively recognise the voice of God. We drove up to the little inn where the horses were to be put up; I could hardly wait for the step of the carriage to be let down, and hastened alone to the beach; the sea was not, as I have seen it since, blue and calm, glittering with a thousand sparks of light; not like some quiet lake which ripples on the shore, and murmurs gently, as it bathes the shining pebbles in its limpid wave; no, it was as I would have chosen to see it for the first time, stormy, wild, restless, colourless from the everlasting fluctuation of colour, brown, purple, white, yellow, green, in turns; billows over billows chased each other to the shore, each wave gathering itself in silence, swelling, heaving, and then bursting with that roar of triumph, with that torrent of foam, that cloud of spray, that mixture of fury and of joy, which nothing in nature, but chafed waters combine.* [* See Coleridge's beautiful lines on the Avalanches.] O God, I have suffered much; terror, remorse, agony, have wrung my heart, have shattered my nerves; I have been guilty; I have been wretched; I dare not thank thee for the tumultuous joys of passion, for the feverish cup of pleasure, hastily snatched, and as suddenly dashed to earth; but I will thank thee, for the swelling of the heart, for the lifting up of the soul, for the tears I have shed, for the ecstacy I have known on the sea-shore, in the forest, on the mountain. The heart knoweth its own bitterness; but there is also a joy with which the stranger intermeddles not.

We wandered for some time on the beach, and then began scrambling among the cliffs, and clambering up to the various rocky points from whence the little bay and its wooded coast were seen to most advantage. In doing so, we gradually separated into different parties, and Mrs. Brandon, Rosa, Henry, and myself, went to explore a small cavern, where there were some curious sands of various colours, which Mr. Brandon had described to us the day before.

Rosa was on her knees upon the ground, collecting specimens of each; I was looking at the sea through a natural window in the rock; when Mrs. Brandon asked her if she had got all she wanted, and begged her, if she had, to walk back with her to the inn, as she wished to order luncheon, and speak to Mr. Brandon about the arrangements for our return.

I was preparing to follow them, when Henry laid his hand on my arm, and said in so serious a voice that it quite startled me, "For my sister's sake, Ellen, stay with me here a few moments; we will walk back by the downs; I have much to say to you, and this is my last opportunity."

I stopped immediately, and leant against the entrance of the cavern.