Elinor stood upon the cliff near Craig Allen Bay, when her father’s corpse was carried to the grave. She heard the knell and the melancholy dirge: she saw the procession as it passed: she stopped its progress, and was told that her father in his last hour had left her his malediction. Many were near her, and flattered her at the time; but she heard them not.
Elinor stood on the barren cliff, to feel, as she said, the morning dew and fresh mountain air on her parched forehead. “My brain beats as if to madden me:—the fires of hell consume me:—it is a father’s curse,” she cried; and her voice, in one loud and dreadful shriek, rent the air. “Oh it is a father’s curse:” then pausing with a fixed and horrid eye: “Bear it, winds of heaven, and dews of earth,” she cried: “bear it to false Glenarvon:—hear it, fallen angel, in the dull night, when the hollow wind shakes your battlements and your towers, and shrieks as it passes by, till it affrights your slumbers:—hear it in the morn, when the sun breaks through the clouds, and gilds with its beams of gold the eastern heavens:—hear it when the warbling skylark, soaring to the skies, thrills with its pipe, and every note of joy sound in thy ear as the cry of woe. The old man is dead, and gone: he will be laid low in the sepulchre: his bones shall be whiter than his grey hairs. He left his malediction upon his child. May it rest with thee, false Glenarvon. Angel of beauty, light, and delight of the soul, thou paradise of joys unutterable from which my heart is banished, thou God whom I have worshipped with sacrilegious incense, hear it and tremble. Amidst revels and feastings, in the hour of love, when passion beats in every pulse, when flatterers kneel, and tell thee thou art great, when a servile world bowing before thee weaves the laurel wreath of glory around thy brows, when old men forget their age and dignity to worship thee, and kings and princes tremble before the scourge of thy wit—think on the cry of the afflicted—the last piercing cry of agonizing and desperate despair. Hear it, as it shrieks in the voice of the tempest, or bellows from the vast fathomless ocean; and when they tell thee thou art great, when they tell thee thou art good, remember thy falsehood, thy treachery. Oh remember it and shudder, and say to thyself thou art worthless, and laugh at the flatterers that would deny it.”
CHAPTER LXXXV.
Nothing is more mistaken than to suppose that unkindness and severity are the means of reclaiming an offender. There is no moment in which we are more insensible to our own errors than when we smart under apparent injustice. Calantha saw Glenarvon triumphant, and herself deserted. The world, it is true, still befriended her; but her nearest relatives and friends supported him. Taunted with her errors, betrayed, scorned, and trampled upon, the high spirit of her character arose in proportion as every hope was cut off. She became violent, overbearing, untractable even to her attendants, demanding a more than ordinary degree of respect, from the suspicion that it might no longer be paid. Every error of her life was now canvassed, and brought forth against her. Follies and absurdities long forgotten, were produced to view, to aggravate her present disgrace; and the severity which an offended world forbore to shew, Sophia, Frances, the Princess of Madagascar, Lady Mandeville, and Lord Glenarvon, were eager to evince.
But, even at this hour, Calantha had reason to acknowledge the kindness and generosity of some; and the poor remembered her in their prayers. Those whom she had once protected, flew forward to support her; and even strangers addressed her with looks, if not words of consolation. It was not the gay, the professing, the vain that shewed compassion in a moment of need—it was not the imprudent and vicious whom Calantha had stood firm by and defended: these were the first to desert her. But it was the good, the pious, the benevolent, who came to her, and even courted an acquaintance they once had shunned; for their hope was now to reclaim.
Humbled, not yet sufficiently, but miserable, her fair name blasted, the jest of fools, the theme of triumphant malice, Calantha still gave vent to every furious passion, and openly rebelled against those who had abandoned her. She refused to see any one, to hear any admonitions, and, sickening at every contradiction to her authority, insisted upon doing things the most ill judged and unreasonable, to shew her power, or her indignation. Struck with horror at her conduct, every one now wrote to inform Lord Avondale of the absolute necessity of his parting from her. Hints were not only given, but facts were held up to view, and a life of folly, concluding in crime, was painted with every aggravation. Calantha knew not at this time the eager zeal that some had shewn, to hurl just vengeance upon a self-devoted victim. She was informed therefore of Lord Avondale’s expected return, and prepared to receive him with hardened and desperate indifference.
She feared not pain, nor death: the harshest words occasioned her no humiliation: the scorn, the abhorrence of companions and friends, excited no other sentiment in her mind than disgust. Menaced by every one, she still forbore to yield, and boldly imploring if she were guilty, to be tried by the laws of her country—laws, which though she had transgressed, she revered, and would submit to, she defied the insolence, and malice of private interference.
From this state, Calantha was at length aroused by the return of Lord Avondale. It has been said, that the severest pang to one not wholly hardened, is the unsuspicious confidence of the friend whom we have betrayed, the look of radiant health and joy which we never more must share, that eye of unclouded virtue, that smile of a heart at rest, and, worse than all perhaps, the soft confiding words and fond caresses offered after long absence. Cruel is such suffering. Such a pang Calantha had already once endured, when last she had parted from her lord; and for such meeting she was again prepared. She had been ill, and no one had read the secret of her soul. She had been lonely, and no one comforted her in her hours of solitude: she had once loved Lord Avondale, but absence and neglect had entirely changed her. She prepared therefore for the interview with cold indifference, and her pride disdained to crave his forgiveness, or to acknowledge itself undeserving in his presence. “He is no longer my husband,” she repeated daily to herself. “My heart and his are at variance—severed by inclination, though unhappily for both united by circumstances. Let him send me from him: I am desperate and care not.”
None sufficiently consider, when they describe the hateful picture of crime, how every step taken in its mazy road, perverts, and petrifies the feeling. Calantha, in long retrospect over her former life, thought only of the neglect and severity of him she had abandoned. She dwelt with pleasure upon the remembrance of every momentary act of violence, and thought of his gaiety and merriment, as of a sure testimony that he was not injured by her ill conduct. “He left me first,” she said. “He loves me not; he is happy; I alone suffer.” And the consolation she derived from such reflections steeled her against every kindlier sentiment.
Lord Avondale returned. There was no look of joy in his countenance—no radiant heartfelt smile which bounding spirits and youthful ardour once had raised. His hollow eye betokened deep anxiety; his wasted form, the suffering he had endured. Oh, can it be said that the greatest pang to a heart, not yet entirely hardened, is unsuspicious confidence? Oh, can the momentary selfish pang a cold dissembling hypocrite may feel, be compared to the unutterable agony of such a meeting? Conscience itself must shrink beneath the torture of every glance. There is the record of crime—there, in every altered lineament of that well known face. How pale the withered cheek—how faint the smile that tries to make light and conceal the evil under which the soul is writhing.