There has been much written on this crisis of the national existence, and there is room, we fancy, for still more. These contradictions that meet us as we venture into the depths—this wayward, changeful, human mood, which seems to make it impossible to have great principles brought into immediate contact without those strange anomalies—he would do well, who should treat of those on a broader ground than that of vindication or reproach of the actors on either side. We ourselves, at this day, are producing contradictions and paradoxes as strange as these; and many combining circumstances point us back to the days of the Stuarts, the climax of the old world—the seed-time of the new.
For the little story subjoined, the Author has nothing to say, unless it were to beg for it that gentle consideration which the lovers of art do sometimes extend to those sketches, which the artist intends only as studies for a larger painting.
CALEB FIELD.
CHAPTER I.
“Behold
Beneath our feet a little lowly vale.
A lowly vale, and yet uplifted high
Among the mountains; even as if the spot
Had been from eldest time, by wish of theirs,
So placed to be shut out from all the world!
Urnlike it was in shape, deep as an urn
With rocks encompassed, save that, to the south,
Was one small opening, where a heath-clad ridge
Supplied a boundary less abrupt and close—
A quiet, treeless nook, with two green fields,
A liquid pool that glittered in the sun,
And one bare dwelling, one abode, no more!
It seemed the home of poverty and toil,
Though not of want: the little fields made green
By husbandry of many thrifty years,
Paid cheerful tribute to the moorland house.
The small birds find in spring no thicket there
To shroud them—only from the neighboring vales,
The cuckoo, straggling up to the hill-tops,
Shouteth faint tidings of a gladder place.”
Wordsworth.
The May sun shone hopefully over the fair heights of Cumberland. Wide slopes of far-stretching hills, with that indescribable soft blue mist hovering about them, which one can fancy the subdued and silent breathing of those great inhabitants who dwell upon the northern border, lay many-tinted below the wayward sky of spring—breaking out into soft verdure here and there, while tracts of dry heather, with the wintry spell not yet departed from them, made the swelling hill-sides piebald. Far up in a lone valley of those hills stood a herdsman’s cottage—a rude and homely hut, with mossy thatch and walls of rough red stone, scarcely distinguishable from the background of dark heather, on which it appeared an uncouth bas-relief. Surrounding it, on the sunniest slope of the little glen, was a garden of tolerable dimensions, in which the homely vegetables which supplied the shepherd’s family were diversified with here and there a hardy flower or stunted bush. A narrow, winding thread of pathway ran from the entrance of the glen, down the hill-side, to the low country; it seemed the only trace of communication with the mighty world without.
A troublous world in those days! Over the Border the demon of persecution was abroad in Scotland. Within this merry England—sadly misnamed, alas! at that time—was oppression also, cruel and fierce, if shedding less blood than in the sister country. Enmity and contention were in the land—worse than that, and more fatal, foul pollution and sin; for the second Charles reigned over a distracted and unhappy empire, in which the rival forces of good and evil, light and darkness, had measured their strength already on various fields of battle, and had yet intervening, before there could be any peace, a time of bitterest and hottest strife.
Very still, below the changeful sky, the cot-house of the Cumberland shepherd stood secure in the fastness of its solitude. Some half-dozen miles away, far down in the low country, the farmer whose flocks he managed had his substantial dwelling. In the extreme distance were visible the towers and spires of Carlisle; and saving the occasional descent of Ralph Dutton to his employer’s house, or the half-yearly pilgrimage of his good dame for the few household stores which she needed to purchase, there were few footsteps trod the lonely pathway over the hills.
At this time, however, while Dame Dutton hobbled busily about her earthen-floored apartment preparing her good-man’s dinner, a slight young figure hovered on the watch about the entrance of the glen. Woman-grown and grave, as girls become in times of trial, this watcher wore the soberest of Puritan dresses, dark, plain, and simple as of some youthful nun. Her face had an earnest, devout simplicity about it, the product of such times; for the Puritan maidens of those days, with fathers and brothers in constant peril, holding by their faith at the risk of all things else, had need to be prompt and clear of eye, as they were single-minded, and strong of faith. She was looking anxiously down the winding foot-road, the lines of her soft, girlish forehead curved with graver care than is wont to sit upon such brows. It was no gay wooer’s visit she looked for—it was the coming of an imperiled, banished man, the expelled minister of antique Hampstead, a wanderer now, having no certain home. He had found a refuge for his daughter here, in the house of the leal old Presbyterian shepherd, while he himself followed his high vocation, in peril and fears, as he could. On the previous morning his daughter had received a message from him, that this day at noon he would visit her.