She beckoned Peverell to her, and taking his hand, she again placed it on her heart. A sad, melancholy smile played for a moment across her pale wrinkled face, and her glazed eyes kindled into a fleeting expressing of frightful gladness, as she feebly exclaimed, "Do you feel? One!—one!—one! —and hardly that—I breathe only from here," she continued, pointing to her throat. "Feel!—feel!—one!—one!—another!—how I gasp—see!—see—"
She ceased to speak; the hand which retained Peverell's relaxed its hold—her head dropped—one long-drawn sigh was heaved—and poor Madge resigned a being touched with sympathies and feelings not often found in natures of nobler quality, in the world's catalogue of nobility. If, among the thousand doors which death holds open for mortal man to pass through, ere he puts on immortality, there be one, the rarest of them all, for broken hearts, this hapless creature found it. A self accusing spirit bowed her to the earth, with the sharpest of all griefs—a mother's anguish for an only child—lost to her, as gamesters lose fortunes—thrown away by her own hand.
FITZMAURICE THE MAGICIAN.
"I have lived three hundred years! In that time—in all that time, I have never seen the glorious sun descend, but followed still its rolling course through the regions of illimitable space. I have shivered on the frozen mountains of the icy north, and fainted beneath the sultry skies of the blazing east: the swift winds have been my viewless chariot, and on their careering wings I have been hurried from clime to clime. But, nor light, nor air, nor heat, nor cold, have been to me as to the rest of my species; for I was doomed to find in their extremes a perpetual torment. I howled, under the sharp, pinching pangs of the icy north; I panted with agony, in the scorching fervour of the blazing east; and when mine eyes have ached, with vain efforts, to pierce the darkness of the earth's centre, they have been suddenly blasted with excessive and intolerable delight.
"All the currents of human affection—all that makes the past delightful, the present lovely, and the future coveted, were dried up within me. My heart was like the sands of the desert, parched and barren. No living stream of hope, of gladness, or of desire, quickened it with human sympathies. It was a bleak and withered region, the fit abode of ever-during sorrow and comfortless despair. I was as a blighted tree, that perishes not at the root, but is withered in all its branches. Tears, I had none. One gracious drop, falling from my seared orbs, would have been the blessed channel of pent-up griefs that seemed to crush my almost frenzied brain. Sighs, I breathed not. They would have heaved from my bursting heart some of that misery, which loaded it to anguish. Sleep never came. I was denied the common luxury of the common wretched, to lose, in its sweet oblivion, its brief forgetfulness, the sense of what I was. Death, natural death, closed his many doors against me. All that lived, except myself—the persecuted, the weary, and the heavily laden of man's race—could find a grave! I, alone, looked upon the earth, and felt that it had no resting place for me! God! God! what a forlorn and miserable creature is man, when, in his affliction, he cannot say to the worm, I shall be yours! I might have cast away, indeed, the YENARKON—the Giver of Life—the elixir of the Sibyl—but that would have been to subject myself to a power of darkness, in whose fell wrath I should have suffered the casting away of mine eternal soul!
"Thus the stream of time rolled on, burying beneath its dark waves, our little span of present, in the huge ocean of a perpetual past, and devouring, as the food of both, our swift decaying future. But I floated on its surface, and beheld whole generations flourish and fade away, while age and silver hairs, growing infirmities, and the closing sigh that ends them all, mocked me with a horrible exemption. I remained, and might have remained, for ages yet to come, the fixed and unaltered image of what I was, when in Mauritania I encountered the potent Amaimon, the damned magician of the den, but for that—woman's faith, and man's fidelity—which have made me what I AM!
"This was my destiny. Now mark, how I became enthralled to it; and how it befell, that at last I shook it off, and found redemption.
"In my middle manhood, when scarcely forty summers had glowed within my veins, I left my native Italy, and journeyed to the Holy Land, upon the strict vow of a self-imposed penance. It was for no sin committed in my days of youth, but for the satisfaction of an ardent piety, and the growing spirit of a long enkindled devotion. I had patrimonial wealth in Apulia; I had kindred; I had friends. I renounced them all, to dedicate myself, thenceforth, to the service of THE CROSS. My purpose was blessed, by a virtuous mother's prayers, that I might approve myself a worthy soldier of Christ; and it was sanctified by a holy priest at the altar.
"Even now, the recollection is strong within me, of the feelings with which, as the rising sun illumined the tops of the surrounding hills, I approached the once glorious, and still sacred, city of Jerusalem—that chosen seat of the Godhead—that Queen among the nations. Eclipsed, though it was, and its majestic head trodden into the dust, by the foot of the infidel, my gladdened eyes dwelt upon what was imperishable, and my wrapt imagination pictured what was destroyed. The valleys of Jehosaphat and Gehinnon, Mount Calvary, Mount Zion, and Mount Acre, stretched before me. The palace of King Herod, with its sumptuous halls of marble and of gold—the gorgeous Temple of Solomon—the lofty towers of Phaseolus and Mariamne—the palace of the Maccabees—the Hippodrome—the houses of many of the prophets—grew into existence again, beneath the creative force of fancy. I stood and wept. I knelt, and kissed the consecrated earth which once a Saviour trod."