CHAPTER XXX


--She sat, and thought
Of what a sailor suffers.
COWPER557


'The intelligence that was the cause of old Sir Roger's death, who
might be said to be conducted from this world to the next by a
blessed euthanasia,558 (a kind of passing with a light and lofty step
from a narrow entry to a spacious and glorious apartment, without
ever feeling he trod the dark and rugged threshold that lies
between), was the signal and pledge to this ancient family of the
restitution of their faded honours, and fast-declining possessions.
Grants, reversals of fine, restoration of land and chattels and offer
of pensions, and provisions, and remunerations, and all that royal
gratitude, in the effervescence of its enthusiasm, could bestow, came
showering on the Mortimer family, as fast and faster than fines,
confiscations and sequestrations, had poured on them in the reign of
the usurper. In fact, the language of King Charles to the Mortimers
was like that of the Eastern monarchs to their favourites,--'Ask
what thou wilt, and it shall be granted to thee, even to the half of
my kingdom.'559 The Mortimers asked only for their own,--and being
thus more reasonable, both in their expectations and demands, than
most other applicants at that period, they succeeded in obtaining
what they required.

'Thus Mrs Margaret Mortimer (so unmarried females were named at
the date of the narrative) was again acknowledged as the wealthy
and noble heiress of the Castle. Numerous invitations were sent to
her to visit the court, which, though recommended by letters from
divers of the court-ladies, who had been acquainted, traditionally
at least, with her family, and enforced by a letter from Catherine
of Braganza,560 written by her own hand, in which she acknowledged
the obligations of the king to the house of Mortimer, were steadily
rejected by the high-minded heiress of its honours and its spirit.--
'From these towers,' said she to Mrs Ann, 'my grandfather led forth
his vassals and tenants in aid of his king,--to these towers he led
what was left of them back, when the royal cause seemed lost for
ever. Here he lived and died for his sovereign,--and here will I live
and die. And I feel that I shall do more effectual service to his
Majesty, by residing on my estates, and protecting my tenants, and
repairing,'--she added with a smile,--'even with my needle, the
rents made in the banners of our house by many a Puritan's bullet,
than if I flaunted it in Hyde-Park in my glass coach, or masqueraded
it all night in that of *St James's, even though I were sure to
encounter the Duchess of Cleveland on one side, and Louise de
Querouaille on the other,561--fitter place for them than me.'--And so
saying, Mrs Margaret Mortimer resumed her tapestry work. Mrs Ann
looked at her with an eye that spoke volumes,--and the tear that
trembled in it made the lines more legible.

'After the decided refusal of Mrs Margaret Mortimer to go to
London, the family resumed their former ancestorial habits of
stately regularity, and decorous grandeur, such as became a
magnificent and well-ordered household, of which a noble maiden
was the head and president. But this regularity was without rigour,
and this monotony without apathy--the minds of these highly fated
females were too familiar with trains of lofty thinking, and images
of noble deeds, to sink into vacancy, or feel depression from
solitude. I behold them,' said the stranger, 'as I once saw them,
seated in a vast irregularly shaped apartment, wainscotted with
oak richly and quaintly carved, and as black as ebony--Mrs Ann
Mortimer, in a recess which terminated in an ancient casement
window, the upper panes of which were gorgeously emblazoned
with the arms of the Mortimers, and some legendary atchievements
of the former heroes of the family. A book she valued much562 lay on
her knee, on which she fixed her eyes intently--the light that came
through the casement chequering its dark lettered pages with hues
of such glorious and fantastic colouring, that they resembled the
leaves of some splendidly-illuminated missal, with all its pomp of
gold, and azure and vermilion.

'At a little distance sat her two grand-nieces, employed in work,
and relieving their attention to it by conversation, for which they
had ample materials. They spoke of the poor whom they had visited
and assisted,--of the rewards they had distributed among the
industrious and orderly,--and of the books which they were
studying; and of which the well-filled shelves of the library
furnished them with copious and noble stores.

'Sir Roger had been a man of letters as well as of arms. He had
been often heard to say, that next to a well-stocked armoury in time
of war, was a well-stocked library in time of peace; and even in the
midst of his latter grievances and privations, he contrived every
year to make an addition to his own.

'His grand-daughters, well instructed by him in the French and
Latin languages, had read Mezeray, Thuanus and Sully. In English,
they had Froissart in the black-letter translation of Pynson,
imprinted 1525.563 Their poetry, exclusive of the classics, consisted
chiefly of Waller, Donne and that constellation of writers that
illuminated the drama in the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth,
and the commencement of that of James,--Marlow, and Massinger,
and Shirley, and Ford--cum multis aliis.564 Fairfax's565 translations
had made them familiar with the continental poets; and Sir Roger had
consented to admit, among his modern collection, the Latin poems
(the only ones then published) of Milton, for the sake of that in
Quintum Novembris,566--for Sir Roger, next to the fanatics, held
the Catholics in utter abomination.'

'Then he will be damned to all eternity,' said Aliaga,567 'and that's
some satisfaction.'

'Thus, their retirement was not inelegant, nor unaccompanied with
those delights at once soothing and elating, which arise from a
judicious mixture of useful occupation and literary tastes.

'On all they read or conversed of, Mrs Ann Mortimer was a living
comment. Her conversation, rich in anecdote, and accurate to min-
uteness, sometimes rising to the loftiest strains of eloquence, as
she related 'deeds of the days of old,' and often borrowing the
sublimity of inspiration, as the reminiscences of religion softened
and solemnized the spirit with which she spake,--like the influence
of time on fine paintings, that consecrates the tints it mellows, and
makes the colours it has half obscured more precious to the eye of
feeling and of taste, than they were in the glow of their early
beauty,--her conversation was to her grand-nieces at once history
and poetry.

'The events of English history then not recorded, had a kind of
traditional history more vivid, if not so faithful as the records
of modern historians, in the memories of those who had been agents
and sufferers (the terms are probably synonimous) in those mem-
orable periods.

'There was an entertainment then, banished by modern dissipation
now, but alluded to by the great poet of that nation, whom your
orthodox and undeniable creed justly devotes to eternal damnation.

'In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire,

*

--and tell the tales
Of woful ages long ago betid;

*
And send the hearers weeping to their beds.568
We cited up a thousand heavy times.'569

*

When memory thus becomes the dispository of grief, how faithfully
is the charge kept!--and how much superior are the touches of one
who paints from the life, and the heart, and the senses,--to those of
one who dips his pen in his ink-stand, and casts his eye on a heap of
musty parchments, to glean his facts or his feelings from them! Mrs
Ann Mortimer had much to tell,--and she told it well. If history was
the subject, she could relate the events of the civil wars--events
which resembled indeed those of all civil wars, but which derived a
peculiar strength of character, and brilliancy of colouring, from the
hand by which they were sketched. She told of the time when she
rode behind her brother, Sir Roger, to meet the King at Shrewsbury;
and she almost echoed the shout uttered in the streets of that loyal
city, when the University of Oxford sent in its plate to be coined
for the exigences of the royal cause. She told also, with grave
humour, the anecdote of Queen Henrietta making her escape with
some difficulty from a house on fire,--and, when her life was scarce
secure from the flames that consumed it, rushing back among them
--to save her lapdog!

'But of all her historical anecdotes, Mrs Ann valued most what
she had to relate of her own family. On the virtue and valour of her
brother Sir Roger, she dwelt with an unction whose balm imparted
itself to her hearers; and even Elinor, in spite of the Puritanism of
her early principles, wept as she listened. But when Mrs Ann told of
the King taking shelter for one night in the Castle, under the
protection only of her mother and herself, to whom he intrusted his
rank and his misfortunes, (arriving under a disguise),--(Sir Roger
being absent fighting his battles in Yorkshire)--when she added that
her aged mother, Lady Mortimer, then seventy-four, after spreading
her richest velvet mantle, lined with fur, as a quilt for the bed of
her persecuted sovereign, tottered into the armoury, and, presenting
the few servants that followed her with what arms could be found,
adjured them by brand and blade, by lady's love, and their hopes of
heaven, to defend her royal guest. When she related that a band of
fanatics, after robbing a church of all its silver-plate, and burning
the adjacent vicarage, drunk with their success, had invested the
Castle,570 and cried aloud for 'the man' to be brought unto them, that
he might be hewed to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal571--and Lady
Mortimer had called on a young French officer in Prince Rupert's
corps, who, with his men, had been billetted on the Castle for some
days--and that this youth, but seventeen years of age, had met two
desperate attacks of the assailants, and twice retired covered with
his own blood and that of the assailants, whom he had in vain
attempted to repel--and that Lady Mortimer, finding all was lost,
had counselled the royal fugitive to make his escape,--and furn-
ished him with the best horse left in Sir Roger's stables to effect
his flight, while she returned to the great hall, whose windows were
now shattered by the balls that hissed and flew round her head, and
whose doors were fast yielding to the crows572 and other instruments
which a Puritan smith, who was both chaplain and colonel of the
band, had lent them, and instructed them in the use of--and how
Lady Mortimer fell on her knees before the young Frenchman, and
adjured him to make good the defence till King Charles was safe,
and free, and far--and how the young Frenchman had done all that
man could do;--and finally, when the Castle, after an hour's
obstinate resistance, yielded to the assault of the fanatics, he had
staggered, covered with blood, to the foot of the great chair which
that ancient lady had immoveably occupied, (paralyzed by terror
and exhaustion), and dropping his sword, then for the first time,
exclaimed, 'J'ai fait mon devoir!'573 and expired at her feet--and
how her mother sat in the same rigour of attitude, while the fanatics
ravaged through the Castle,--drank half the wines in the cellar,--
thrust their bayonets through the family-pictures, which they called
the idols of the high-places,--fired bullets through the wainscot,
and converted half the female servants after their own way,--and
on finding their search after the King fruitless, in mere wantonness
of mischief, were about to discharge a piece of ordnance in the hall
that must have shattered it in pieces, while Lady Mortimer sat
torpidly looking on,--till, perceiving that the piece was accident-
ally pointed towards the very door through which King Charles had
passed from the hall, her recollection seemed suddenly to return,
and starting up and before the mouth of the piece, exclaimed, 'Not
there!--you shall not there!'--and as she spoke, dropt dead in the
hall. When Mrs Ann told these and other thrilling tales of the mag-
nanimity, the loyalty, and the sufferings of her high ancestry, in
a voice that alternately swelled with energy, and trembled with
emotion, and as she told them, pointed to the spot where each had
happened,--her young hearers felt a deep stirring of the heart,--a
proud yet mellowed elation that never yet was felt by the reader of
a written history, though its pages were as legitimate as any
sanctioned by the royal licenser at Madrid.

'Nor was Mrs Ann Mortimer less qualified to take an interesting
share in their lighter studies. When Waller's poetry was its subject,
she could tell of the charms of his Sacharissa,574 whom she knew
well,--the Lady Dorothea Sidney, daughter of the Earl of Leicester,
--and compare, with those of his Amoret, the Lady Sophia Murray.
And in balancing the claims of these poetical heroines, she gave so
accurate an account of their opposite styles of beauty,--entered so
minutely into the details of their dress and deportment,--and so
affectingly hinted, with a mysterious sigh, that there was one then
at court whom Lucius, Lord Falkland,575 the gallant, the learned, and
the polished, had whispered was far superior to both,--that her
auditors more than suspected she had herself been one of the most
brilliant stars in that galaxy whose faded glories were still reflect-
ed in her memory,--and that Mrs Ann, amid her piety and patriotism,
still blended a fond reminiscence of the gallantries of that court
where her youth had been spent,--and over which the beauty, the
magnificent taste, and national gaiété of the ill-fated Henrietta, had
once thrown a light as dazzling as it was transient. She was listened
to by Margaret and Elinor with equal interest, but with far different
feelings. Margaret, beautiful, vivacious, haughty and generous, and
resembling her grandfather and his sister alike in character and
person, could have listened for ever to narrations that, while they
confirmed her principles, gave a kind of holiness to the governing
feelings of her heart, and made her enthusiasm a kind of virtue in
her eyes. An aristocrat in politics, she could not conceive that public
virtue could soar to a higher pitch than a devoted attachment to the
house of Stuart afforded for its flight; and her religion had never
given her any disturbance.--Strictly attached to the Church of
England, as her forefathers had been from its first establishment, she
included in an adherence to this not only all the graces of religion,
but all the virtues of morality; and she could hardly conceive how
there could be majesty in the sovereign, or loyalty in the subject, or
valour in man, or virtue in woman, unless they were comprised
within the pale of the Church of England. These qualities, with their
adjuncts, had been always represented to her as co-existent with an
attachment to monarchy and Episcopacy, and vested solely in those
heroic characters of her ancestry, whose lives, and even deaths, it
was a proud delight to their young descendant to listen to,--while
all the opposite qualities,--all that man can hate, or woman despise,
--had been represented to her as instinctively resident in the
partizans of republicanism and the Presbytery. Thus her feelings and
her principles,--her reasoning powers and the habits of her life, all
took one way; and she was not only unable to make the least
allowance for a divergence from this way, but utterly unable to
conceive that another existed for those who believed in a God, or
acknowledged human power at all. She was as much at a loss to
conceive how any good could come out of that Nazareth of her
abhorrence,576 as an ancient geographer would have been to have
pointed out America in a classical map.--Such was Margaret.

'Elinor, on the other hand, bred up amid a clamour of perpetual
contention,--for the house of her mother's family, in which her first
years had been passed, was, in the language of the profane of those
times, a scruple-shop, where the godly of all denominations held
their conferences of contradiction,--had her mind early awakened
to differences of opinion, and opposition of principle. Accustomed to
hear these differences and oppositions often expressed with the most
unruly vehemence, she had never, like Margaret, indulged in a
splendid aristocracy of imagination, that bore every thing before it,
and made prosperity and adversity alike pay tribute to the pride of
its triumph. Since her admission into the house of her grandfather,
the mind of Elinor had become still more humble and patient,--
more subdued and self-denied. Compelled to hear the opinions she
was attached to decried, and the characters she reverenced vilified,
she sat in reflective silence; and, balancing the opposite extremes
which she was destined to witness, she came to the right conclusion,
--that there must be good on both sides, however obscured or
defaced by passion and by interest, and that great and noble
qualities must exist in either party, where so much intellectual
power, and so much physical energy, had been displayed by both.
Nor could she believe that these clear and mighty spirits would be
for ever opposed to each other in their future destinations,--she
loved to view them as children who had 'fallen out by the way,'
from mistaking the path that led to their father's house, but who
would yet rejoice together in the light of his presence, and smile
at the differences that divided them on their journey.

'In spite of the influence of her early education, Elinor had
learned to appreciate the advantages of her residence in her
grandfather's castle. She was fond of literature and of poetry. She
possessed imagination and enthusiasm,--and these qualities met
with their loveliest indulgence amid the picturesque and historical
scenery that surrounded the Castle,--the lofty tales told within its
walls, and to which every stone in them seemed to cry out in
attestation,--and the heroic and chivalrous characters of its
inmates, with whom the portraits of their high descended ancestry
seemed starting from their gorgeous frames to converse, as the tale
of their virtues and their valour was told in their presence. This was
a different scene from that in which she had passed her childhood.
The gloomy and narrow apartments, divested of all ornament, and
awaking no associations but those of an awful futurity--the uncouth
habits, austere visages, denunciatory language and polemical fury of
its inmates or guests, struck her with a feeling for which she
reproached herself, but did not suppress; and though she continued
a rigid Calvinist in her creed, and listened whenever she could to
the preaching of the non-conformist ministers, she had adopted in
her pursuits the literary tastes, and in her manners the dignified
courtesy, that became the descendant of the Mortimers.

'Elinor's beauty, though of a style quite different from that of her
cousin, was yet beauty of the first and finest character. Margaret's
was luxuriant, lavish and triumphant,--every movement displayed a
conscious grace,--every look demanded homage, and obtained it
the moment it was demanded. Elinor's was pale, contemplative, and
touching;--her hair was as black as jet, and the thousand small
curls into which, according to the fashion of the day, it was woven,
seemed as if every one of them had been twined by the hand of
nature,--they hung so softly and shadowingly, that they appeared
like a veil dropping over the features of a nun, till she shook them
back, and there beamed among them an eye of dark and brilliant
light, like a star amid the deepening shades of twilight. She wore
the rich dress prescribed by taste and habits of Mrs Ann, who had
never, even in the hour of extreme adversity, relaxed in what may
be called the rigour of her aristocratical costume, and would have
thought it little less than a desecration of the solemnity, had she
appeared at prayers, even though celebrated (as she loved to term
it) in the Castle-hall, unless arrayed in satins and velvets, that,
like ancient suits of armour, could have stood alone and erect with-
out the aid of human inhabitant. There was a soft and yielding tone
in the gently modulated harmony of Elinor's form and movements,--a
gracious melancholy in her smile,--a tremulous sweetness in her
voice,--an appeal in her look, which the heart that refused to
answer could not have living pulse within its region. No head of
Rembrandt's, amid its contrasted luxuries of light and shade,--no
form of Guido's,577 hovering in exquisite and speechful undulation
between earth and heaven, could vie with the tint and character of
Elinor's countenance and form. There was but one touch to be
added to the picture of her beauty, and that touch was given by no
physical grace,--no exterior charm. It was borrowed from a feeling
as pure as it was intense,--as unconscious as it was profound. The
secret fire that lit her eyes with that lambent glory, while it amused
the paleness of her young cheek,--that preyed on her heart, while it
seemed to her imagination that she clasped a young cherub in her
arms, like the unfortunate queen of Virgil,578--that fire was a secret
even to herself.--She knew she felt, but knew not what she felt.

'When first admitted into the Castle, and treated with sufficient
hauteur by her grandfather and his sister, who could not forget the
mean descent and fanatic principles of her father's family, she
remembered, that, amid the appalling grandeur and austere reserve
of her reception, her cousin, John Sandal, was the only one who
spoke to her in accents of tenderness, or turned on her an eye that
beamed consolation. She remembered him as the beautiful and
gentle boy who had lightened all her tasks, and partaken in all her
recreations.

'At an early age John Sandal, at his own request, had been sent
to sea, and had never since visited the Castle. On the Restoration,
the remembered services of the Mortimer family, and the high fame
of the youth's courage and ability, had procured him a distinguished
situation in the navy. John Sandal's consequence now rose in the
eyes of the family, of whom he was at first an inmate on toleration
only; and even Mrs Ann Mortimer began to express some anxiety to
hear tidings of her valiant cousin John. When she spoke thus, the
light of Elinor's eye fell on her aunt with as rich a glow as ever
summer sun on an evening landscape; but she felt, at the same
moment, an oppression,--an indefinable suspension of thought, of
speech, almost of breath, which was only relieved by the tears
which, when retired from her aunt's presence, she indulged in. Soon
this feeling was exchanged for one of deeper and more agitating
interest. The war with the Dutch579 broke out, and Captain John
Sandal's name, in spite of his youth, appeared conspicuous among
those of the officers appointed to that memorable service.

'Mrs Ann, long accustomed to hear the names of her family uttered
always in the same breath with the stirring report of high heroic
deeds, felt the elation of spirit she had experienced in bygone
days, combined with happier associations, and more prosperous
auguries. Though far advanced in life, and much declined in strength,
it was observed, that during the reports of the war, and while she
listened to the accounts of her kinsman's valour and fast-advancing
eminence, her step became firm and elastic, her lofty figure di-
lated to its youthful height, and a colour at times visited her
cheek, with as rich and brilliant a tinge as when the first sighs
of love murmured over its young roses. The high minded Margaret,
partaking that enthusiasm which merged all personal feeling in the
glory of her family and of her country, heard of the perils to which
her cousin (whom she hardly remembered) was exposed, only with
a haughty confidence that he would meet them as she felt she would
have met them herself, had she been, like him, the last male
descendant of the family of Mortimer. Elinor trembled and wept,--
and when alone she prayed fervently.

'It was observable, however, that the respectful interest with
which she had hitherto listened to the family legends so elo-
quently told by Mrs Ann, was now exchanged for a restless and
unappeaseable anxiety for tales of the naval heroes who had
dignified the family history. Happily she found a willing narrat-
or in Mrs Ann, who had little need to search her memory, and no
occasion to consult her invention, for splendid stories of those
whose home was the deep, and whose battle-field was the wild
waste ocean. Amid the gallery richly hung with family portraits,
she pointed out the likeness of many a bold adventurer, whom the
report of the riches and felicities of the new discovered world had
tempted on speculations sometimes wild and disastrous, sometimes
prosperous beyond the golden dreams of cupidity. 'How precarious!
--how perilous!' murmured Elinor, shuddering. But when Mrs Ann
told the tale of her uncle, the literary speculator, the polished
scholar, the brave and gentle of the family, who had accompanied
Sir Walter Raleigh on his calamitous expedition,580 and years after
died of grief for his calamitous death, Elinor, with a start of horror,
caught her aunt's arm, emphatically extended towards the portrait,
and implored her to desist. The decorum of the family was so great,
that this liberty could not be taken without an apology for in-
disposition;--it was duly though faintly made, and Elinor retired
to her apartment.

'From February 1665,--from the first intelligence of De Ruyter's
enterprises,581 till the animating period when the Duke of York was
appointed to the command of the Royal fleet,--all was eager and
anticipative excitement, and eloquent expatiations on ancient
achievements, and presageful hopes of new honours, on the part of
the heiress of Mortimer and Mrs Ann, and profound and speechless
emotion on that of Elinor.

'The hour arrived, and an express was dispatched from London to
Mortimer Castle with intelligence, in which King Charles, with that
splendid courtesy which half redeemed his vices, announced himself
most deeply interested, inasmuch as it added to the honours of the
loyal family, whose services he appreciated so highly. The victory
was complete,--and Captain John Sandal, in the phrase which the
King's attachment to French manners and language was beginning
to render popular, had 'covered himself with glory.' Amid the
thickest of the fight, in an open boat, he had carried a message from
Lord Sandwich to the Duke of York, under a shower of balls, and
when older officers had stoutly declined the perilous errand; and
when, on his return, Opdam the Dutch Admiral's ship blew up,582
amid the crater of the explosion John Sandal plunged into the sea,
to save the half-drowning, half-burning wretches who clung to the
fragments that scorched them, or sunk in the boiling waves; and
then,--dismissed on another fearful errand, flung himself between
the Duke of York and the ball that struck at one blow the Earl of
Falmouth, Lord Muskerry, and Mr Boyle,583 and when they all fell at
the same moment, wiped, with unfaultering hand, and on bended
knee, their brains and gore, with which the Duke of York was
covered from head to foot. When this was read by Mrs Ann Mort-
imer, with many pauses, caused by sight dim with age, and
diffused with tears,--and when at length, finishing the long and
laborious read detail, Mrs Ann exclaimed--'He is a hero!' Elinor
tremblingly whispered to herself--'He is a Christian.'

'The details of such an event forming a kind of era in a family so
sequestered, imaginative and heroic, as that of the Mortimers, the
contents of the letter signed by the King's own hand were read over
and over again. They formed the theme of converse at their meals,
and the subject of their study and comment when alone. Margaret
dwelt much on the gallantry of the action, and half-imagined she
saw the tremendous explosion of Opdam's ship. Elinor repeated to
herself, 'And he plunged amid the burning wave to save the lives of
the men he had conquered!' And some months elapsed before the
brilliant vision of glory, and of grateful royalty, faded from their
imagination; and when it did, like that of Micyllus,584 it left honey
on the eye-lids of the dreamer.

'From the date of the arrival of this intelligence, a change had
taken place in the habits and manners of Elinor, so striking as to
become the object of notice to all but herself. Her health, her rest,
and her imagination, became the prey of indefinable fantasies. The
cherished images of the past,--the lovely visions of her golden
childhood,--seemed fearfully and insanely contrasted in her
imagination with the ideas of slaughter and blood,--of decks
strewed with corses,--and of a young and terrible conqueror
bestriding them amid showers of ball and clouds of fire. Her very
senses reeled between these opposite impressions. Her reason could
not brook the sudden transition from the smiling and Cupid-like
companion of her childhood, to the hero of the embattled deep, and
of nations and navies on fire,--garments rolled in blood,--the
thunder of the battle and the shouting.

'She sat and tried, as well as her wandering fancy would allow
her, to reconcile the images of that remembered eye, whose beam
rested on her like the dark blue of a summer heaven swimming in
dewy light,--with the flash that darted from the burning eye of the
conqueror, whose light was as fatal where it fell as his sword. She
saw him, as he had once sat beside her, smiling like the first
morning in spring,--and smiled in return. The slender form, the soft
and springy movements, the kiss of childhood that felt like velvet,
and scented like balm,--was suddenly exchanged in her dream (for
all her thoughts were dreams) for a fearful figure of one drenched in
blood, and spattered with brains and gore. And Elinor, half-screaming,
exclaimed, 'Is this he whom I loved?' Thus her mind, vacillating
between contrasts so strongly opposed, began to feel its moorings
give way. She drifted from rock to rock, and on every rock she
struck a wreck.

'Elinor relinquished her usual meetings with the family--she sat
in her own apartment all the day, and most of the evening. It was a
lonely turret projecting so far from the walls of the Castle, that there
were windows, or rather casements, on three sides. There Elinor sat
to catch the blast, let it blow as it would, and imagined she heard in
its moaning the cries of drowning seamen. No music that her lute,
or that which Margaret touched with a more powerful and brilliant
finger, could wean her from this melancholy indulgence.

'Hush!' she would say to the females who attended her--'Hush!
let me listen to the blast!--It waves many a banner spread for
victory,--it sighs over many a head that has been laid low!'
'Her amazement that a being could be at once so gentle and so
ferocious--her dread that the habits of his life must have converted
the angel of her wilderness into a brave but brutal seaman, estranged
from the feelings that had rendered the beautiful boy so indulgent to
her errors,--so propitiatory between her and her proud relatives,--
so aidant585 in all her amusements,--so necessary to her very
existence.--The tones of this dreamy life harmonized, awfully for
Elinor, with the sound of the blast as it shook the turrets of the
Castle, or swept the woods that groaned and bowed beneath its
awful visitings. And this secluded life, intense feeling, and profound
and heart-rooted secret of her silent passion, held perhaps fearful
and indescribable alliance with that aberration of mind, that
prostration at once of the heart and the intellect, that have been
found to bring forth, according as the agents were impelled, 'the
savour of life unto life, or of death unto death.'586 She had all the
intensity of passion, combined with all the devotedness of religion;
but she knew not which way to steer, or what gale to follow. She
trembled and shrunk from her doubtful pilotage, and the rudder was
left to the mercy of the winds and waves. Slender mercy do those
experience who commit themselves to the tempests of the mental
world--better if they had sunk at once amid the strife of the dark
waters in their wild and wintry rage; there they would soon have
arrived at the haven where they would be secure.

'Such was the state of Elinor, when the arrival of one who had
been long a stranger in the vicinity of the Castle caused a strong
sensation in its inhabitants.

'The widow Sandal, the mother of the young seaman, who had
hitherto lived in obscurity on the interest of the small fortune
bequeathed her by Sir Roger, (under the rigid injunction of never
visiting the Castle), suddenly arrived in Shrewsbury, which was
scarce a mile from it, and declared her intention of fixing her
residence there.

'The affection of her son had showered on her, with the profusion
of a sailor, and the fondness of a child, all the rewards of his
services--but their glory;--and in comparative affluence, and
honoured and pointed to as the mother of the young hero who stood
high in royal favour, the widow of many sorrows took up her abode
once more near the seat of her ancestors.

'At this period, every step taken by the member of a family was a
subject of anxious and solemn consultation to those who considered
themselves its heads, and there was a kind of chapter587 held in
Mortimer Castle on this singular movement of the widow Sandal.
Elinor's heart beat hard during the debate--it subsided, however, at
the determination, that the severe sentence of Sir Roger was not to
be extended beyond his death, and that a descendant of the House
of Mortimer should never live neglected while almost under the
shadow of its walls.

'The visit was accordingly solemnly paid, and gratefully received,
--there was much stately courtesy on the part of Mrs Ann towards
her niece, (whom she called cousin after the old English fashion),
and a due degree of retrospective humility and decorous dejection
on that of the widow. They parted mutually softened towards, if
not pleased with each other, and the intercourse thus opened was
unremittingly sustained by Elinor, whose weekly visits of ceremony
soon became the daily visits of interest and of habit. The object of
the thoughts of both was the theme of the tongue of but one; and, as
is not uncommon, she who said nothing felt the most. The details of
his exploits, the description of his person, the fond enumeration of
the promises of his childhood, and the graces and goodliness of his
youth, were dangerous topics for the listener, to whom the bare
mention of his name caused an intoxication of the heart, from which
it scarce recovered for hours.

'The frequency of these visits was not observed to be diminished
by a faint rumour, which the widow seemed to believe, rather from
hope than probability, that Captain Sandal was about to visit the
neighbourhood of the Castle. It was one evening in autumn, that
Elinor, who had been prevented during the day from visiting her
aunt, set out attended only by her maid and her usher. There was a
private path through the park, that opened by a small door on the
verge of the suburbs where the widow lived. Elinor, on her arrival,
found her aunt from home, and was informed she had gone to pass
the evening with a friend in Shrewsbury. Elinor hesitated for a
moment, and then recollecting that this friend was a grave staid
widow of one of Oliver's knights, wealthy, however, and well
respected, and a common acquaintance, she resolved to follow her
thither. As she entered the room, which was spacious, but dimly lit
by an old-fashioned casement window, she was surprised to see it
filled with an unusual number of persons, some of whom were seat-
ed, but the greater number were collected in the ample recess of
the window, and among them Elinor saw a figure, remarkable rather
for its height, than its attitude or pretension,--it was that of a
tall slender boy, about eighteen, with a beautiful infant in his
arms, whom he was caressing with a tenderness that seemed rather
associated with the retrospective fondness of brotherhood, than the
anticipated hope of paternity. The mother of the infant, proud of
the notice bestowed on her child, made, however, the usual incred-
ulous apology for its troubling him.

'Troubling me!' said the boy, in tones that made Elinor think it
was the first time she had heard music. 'Oh, no--if you knew how
fond I am of children,--how long it is since I had the delight of
pressing one to my breast--how long it may be again before'--and
averting his head, he bowed it over the babe. The room was very
dark, from the increasing shades of evening, deepened by the effect
of the heavy wainscotting of its walls; but at this moment, the last
bright light of an autumnal evening, in all its rich and fading
glory, burst on the casement, pouring on every object a golden and
purpureal light. That end of the apartment in which Elinor sat
remained in the deepest shade. She then distinctly beheld the fig-
ure which her heart seemed to recognize before her senses. His
luxuriant hair, of the richest brown, (its feathery summits tinged
by the light resembling the halo round some glorified head), hung,
according to the fashion of the day, in clusters on his bosom, and
half-concealed the face of the infant, as it lay like a nestling
among them.

'His dress was that of a naval officer,--it was splendidly adorned
with lace, and the superb insignia of a foreign order, the guerdon588
of some daring deed; and as the infant played with these, and then
looked upward, as if to repose its dazzled sight on the smile of its
young protector, Elinor thought she had never beheld association
and contrast so touchingly united,--it was like a finely coloured
painting, where the tints are so mellowed and mingled into each
other, that the eye feels no transition in passing from one brill-
iant hue to another, with such exquisite imperceptibility are they
graduated,--it was like a fine piece of music, where the art of the
modulator prevents your knowing that you pass from one key to
another; so softly are the intermediate tones of harmony touched,
that the ear knows not where it wanders, but wherever it wanders,
feels its path is pleasant. The young loveliness of the infant, al-
most assimilated to the beauty of the youthful caresser, and yet
contrasted with the high and heroic air of his figure, and the
adornments of his dress, (splendid as they were), all emblematic of
deeds of peril and of death, seemed to the imagination of Elinor like
the cherub-angel of peace reposing on the breast of valour, and
whispering that his toils were done. She was awoke from her vision
by the voice of the widow.--'Niece, this is your cousin John Sandal.'
Elinor started, and received the salute of her kinsman, thus abruptly
introduced, with an emotion, which, if it deprived her of those
courtly graces which ought to have embellished her reception of the
distinguished stranger, gave her, at least, the more touching ones of
diffidence.

'The forms of the day admitted of, and even sanctioned, a mode of
salutation since exploded; and as Elinor felt the pressure of a lip
as vermeil589 as her own, she trembled to think that that lip had
often given the war-word to beings athirst for human blood, and
that the arm that enfolded her so tenderly had pointed the weapons
of death with resistless and terrible aim against bosoms that beat
with all the cords of human affection. She loved her young kinsman,
but she trembled in the arms of the hero.

'John Sandal sat down by her, and in a few moments the melody of
his tones, the gentle facility of his manner, the eyes that smiled
when the lips were closed, and the lips whose smile was more
eloquent in silence than the language of the brightest eyes, made
her gradually feel at ease with herself--she attempted to converse,
but paused to listen--she tried to look up, but felt like the
worshippers of the sun, sickening under the blaze she gazed on,--
and averted her eyes that she might see. There was a mild, inop-
pressive, but most seductive light in the dark-blue eyes that fell
so softly on hers, like moon-light floating over a fine landscape.
And there was a young and eloquent tenderness in the tones of that
voice, which she expected to have spoken in thunder, that disarmed
and dulcified speech almost to luxury. Elinor sat, and imbibed
poison at every inlet of the senses, ear and eye, and touch, for her
kinsman, with a venial, and to her imperceptible licence, had taken
her hand as he spoke. And he spoke much, but not of war and
blood, of the scenes where he had been so eminent, and of the
events to which his simple allusion would have given interest and
dignity,--but of his return to his family, of the delight he felt at
again beholding his mother, and of the hopes that he indulged of
being not an unwelcome visitor at the Castle. He inquired after
Margaret with affectionate earnestness, and after Mrs Ann with
reverential regard, and in mentioning the names of these relatives,
he spoke like one whose heart was at home before his steps, and
whose heart could make every spot where it rested a home to itself
and to others. Elinor could have listened for ever. The names of the
relatives she loved and revered sounded in her ears like music, but
the advancing night warned her of the necessity of returning to the
Castle, where the hours were scrupulously observed; and when John
Sandal offered to attend her home, she had no longer a motive to
delay her departure.

'It had appeared dark in the room where they were sitting, but it
was still rich and purple twilight in the sky, when they set out for
the Castle.

'Elinor took the path through the park, and, absorbed in new feel-
ings, was for the first time insensible of its woodland beauty, at
once gloomy and resplendent, mellowed by the tints of autumnal
colouring, and glorious with the light of an autumnal evening,--till
she was roused to attention by the exclamations of her companion,
who appeared rapt into delight at what he beheld. This sensibility
of nature, this fresh and unworn feeling, in one whom she had be-
lieved hardened by scenes of toil and terror against the perception
of beauty,--whom her imagination had painted to her as fitter to
cross the Alps, than to luxuriate in Campania,590 touched her deeply.
She attempted to reply, but was unable,--she remembered how her
quick susceptibility of nature had enabled her to sympathize with
and improve on the admiration expressed by others, and she won-
dered at her silence, for she knew not its cause.

'As they approached the Castle, the scene became glorious beyond
the imagination of a painter, whose eye has dreamed of sunset
in foreign climes. The vast edifice lay buried in shade,--all its
varied and strongly charactered features of tower and pinnacle,
bartizan and battlement, were melted into one dense and sombrous
mass. The distant hills, with their conical summits, were still clearly
defined in the dark-blue heaven, and their peaks still retained a hue
of purple so brilliant and lovely, that it seemed as if the light had
loved to linger there, and, parting, had left that tint as the promise
of a glorious morning. The woods that surrounded the Castle stood
as dark, and apparently as solid as itself. Sometimes a gleam like
gold trembled over the tufted foliage of their summits, and at
length, through a glade which opened among the dark and massive
boles of the ancient trees, one last rich and gorgeous flood of light
burst in, turned every blade of grass it touched into emerald for a
moment,--paused on its lovely work--and parted. The effect was so
instantaneous, brilliant, and evanishing, that Elinor had scarce time
for a half uttered exclamation, as she extended her arm in the
direction where the light had fallen so brightly and so briefly. She
raised her eyes to her companion, in that full consciousness of
perfect sympathy that makes words seem like counters, compared to
the sterling gold of a heart-minted look. Her companion had turned
towards it too. He neither uttered exclamation, nor pointed with
finger,--he smiled, and his countenance was as that of an angel. It
seemed to reflect and answer the last bright farewell of day, as if
friends had parted smiling at each other. It was not alone the lips
that smiled,--the eyes, the cheeks, every feature had its share in
that effulgent light that was diffused over his aspect, and all
combined to make that harmony to the eye, which is often as
deliciously perceptible, as the combination of the most exquisite
voices with the most perfect modulation, is to the ear. To the last
hour of her mortal existence, that smile, and the scene where it was
uttered, were engraved on the heart of Elinor. It announced at once
a spirit, that, like the ancient statue,591 answered every ray of light
that fell on it with a voice of melody, and blended the triumph of
the glories of nature with the profound and tender felicities of the
heart. They spoke no more during the remainder of their walk, but
there was more eloquence in their silence than in many words.

*

'It was almost night before they arrived at the Castle. Mrs Ann
received her distinguished kinsman with stately cordiality, and
affection mingled with pride. Margaret welcomed him rather as the
hero than the relative; and John, after the ceremonies of intro-
duction, turned to repose himself on the smile of Elinor. They
had arrived just at the time when the chaplain was about to read the
evening prayers,--a form so strictly adhered to at the Castle, that
not even the arrival of a stranger was permitted to interfere with its
observance. Elinor watched this moment with peculiar solicitude;--
her religious feelings were profound, and amid all the young hero's
vivid display of the gentlest affections, and purest sensibilities by
which our wretched existence can be enhanced or beautified, she
still dreaded that religion, the companion of deep thought and
solemn habits, might wander far for an abode before it settled in the
heart of a sailor. The last doubt passed from her mind, as she beheld
the intense but silent devotion with which John mingled in the
family rite. There is something very ennobling in the sight of male
piety. To see that lofty form, that never bowed to man, bowed to the
earth to God,--to behold the knee, whose joints would be as
adamant under the influence of mortal force or threat, as flexible as
those of infancy in the presence of the Almighty,--to see the locked
and lifted hands, to hear the fervent aspiration, to feel the sound of
the mortal weapon as it drags on the floor beside the kneeling
warrior,--these are things that touch the senses and the heart at
once, and suggest the awful and affecting image of all physical
energy prostrate before the power of the Divinity. Elinor watched
him even to the forgetfulness of her own devotions;--and when his
white hands, that seemed never formed to grasp a weapon of
destruction, were clasped in devotion, and one of them slightly and
occasionally raised to part the redundant curls that shaded his face
as he knelt, she thought that she beheld at once angelic strength and
angelic purity.

When the service concluded, Mrs Ann, after repeating her solemn
welcome to her nephew, could not help expressing her satisfaction
at the devotion he had showed; but she mingled with that
expression a kind of incredulity, that men accustomed to toil and
peril could ever have devotional feelings. John Sandal bowed to the
congratulatory part of Mrs Ann's speech, and, resting one hand on
his short sword, and with the other removing the thick ringlets of
his luxuriant hair, he stood before them a hero in deed, and a boy in
form. A blush overspread his young features, as he said, in accents
at once emphatic and tremulous, 'Dear Aunt, why should you accuse
those of neglecting the protection of the Almighty who need it most.
They who 'go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in
the great waters,'592 have the best right to feel, in their hour of
peril, 'it is but the wind and the storm fulfilling his word.' A seaman
without a belief and hope in God, is worse off than a seaman without
chart or pilot.'

'As he spoke with that trembling eloquence that makes conviction
be felt almost before it is heard, Mrs Ann held out to him her
withered but still snow-white hand to kiss. Margaret presented
hers also, like a heroine to a feudal knight; and Elinor turned
aside, and wept in delicious agony.

*

'When we set ourselves resolutely to discover perfection in a char-
acter, we are always sure to find it. But Elinor needed little aid
from the pencil of imagination to colour the object that had been
stamped by an ineffaceable touch upon her heart. Her kinsman's
character and temper developed themselves slowly, or rather were
developed by external and accidental causes; for a diffidence al-
most feminine prevented his ever saying much,--and when he did,
himself was the last theme he touched on. He unfolded himself
like a blowing flower,--the soft and silken leaves expanded
imperceptibly to the eye, and every day the tints were deepening,
and the scent becoming richer, till Elinor was dazzled by their
lustre, and inebriated with the fragrance.

This wish to discover excellencies in the object we love, and to
identify esteem and passion by seeking the union of moral beauty
and physical grace, is a proof that love is of a very ennobling
character,--that, however the stream may be troubled by many
things, the source at least is pure,--and that the heart capable of
feeling it intensely, proves it possesses an energy that may one day
be rewarded by a brighter object, and a holier flame, than earth
ever afforded, or nature ever could kindle.

*

'Since her son's arrival, the widow Sandal had betrayed a marked
degree of anxiety, and a kind of restless precaution against some
invisible evil. She was now frequently at the Castle. She could not
be blind to the increasing attachment of John and Elinor,--and her
only thought was how to prevent the possibility of their union, by
which the interest of the former and her own importance would be
materially affected.

'She had obtained, by indirect means, a knowledge of the
contents of Sir Roger's will; and the whole force of a mind which
possessed more of art than of power, and of a temper which had
more passion than energy, was strained to realize the hopes it
suggested. Sir Roger's will was singular. Alienated as he was from
his daughter Sandal, and his younger son the father of Elinor, by the
connexions they had adopted, it seemed to be the strongest object of
his wishes to unite their descendants, and invest the wealth and
rank of the house of Mortimer in the last of its representatives. He
had therefore bequeathed his immense estates to his grand-daughter
Margaret, in the event of her marrying her kinsman John Sandal;--
in the case of his marrying Elinor, he was entitled to no more than
her fortune of £5000;--and the bequest of the greater part of the
property to a distant relative who bore the name of Mortimer, was
to be the consequence of the non-intermarriage of Sandal with
either of his cousins.

'Mrs Ann Mortimer, anticipating the effect that this opposition of
interest to affection might produce in the family, had kept the
contents of the will a secret,--but Mrs Sandal had discovered it by
means of the domestics at the Castle, and her mind wrought
intensely on the discovery. She was a woman too long familiar with
want and privation to dread any evil but their continuance, and too
ambitious of the remembered distinctions of her early life, not to
risk any thing that might enable her to recover them. She felt
a personal feminine jealousy of the high-minded Mrs Ann, and the
noble-hearted beautiful Margaret, which was unappeasable; and she
hovered round the walls of the Castle like a departed spirit groaning
for its re-admission to the place from which it had been driven, and
feeling and giving no peace till its restoration was accomplished.
'When with these feelings was united the anxiety of maternal am-
bition for her son, who might be raised to a noble inheritance, or
sunk to comparative mediocrity by his choice, the result may be
easily guessed; and the widow Sandal, once determined on the end,
felt little scruple about the means. Want and envy had given her an
unslakeable appetite for the restored splendours of her former state;
and false religion had taught her every shade and penumbra of hyp-
ocrisy, every meanness of artifice, every obliquity of insinuation.
In her varied life she had known the good, and chosen the evil. The
widow Sandal was now determined to interpose an insurmountable
obstruction to their union.

*

'Mrs Ann still flattered herself that the secret of Sir Roger's will
was suppressed. She saw the intense and disruptable feeling that
seemed to mark John and Elinor for each other; and, with a feeling
half-borrowed from magnanimity, half from romance, (for Mrs Ann had
been fond of the high-toned romances of her day), she looked for-
ward to the felicity of their union as being little disturbed by the
loss of land and lordship,--of the immense revenues,--and the far
descended titles of the Mortimer family.

'Highly as she prized these distinctions, dear to every noble mind,
she prized still more highly the union of devoted hearts and con-
genial spirits, who, trampling on the golden apples that were
flung in their path,593 pressed forward with unremitting ardour for
the prize of felicity.

'The wedding-day of John and Elinor was fixed,--the bridal clothes
were made,--the noble and numerous friends summoned,--the Castle
hall decorated, the bells of the parish church ringing out a
loud and merry peal, and the blue-coated serving men adorned with
favours, and employed in garnishing the wassail bowl, which was
doomed by many a thirsty eye to be often drained and often
replenished. Mrs Ann herself took with her own hands, from an
ample chest of ebony, a robe of velvet and satin, which she had
worn at the court of James the First, on the marriage of the princess
Elizabeth with the prince palatine,594 of whom the former, to borrow
the language of a contemporary writer, had 'brided and bridled it so
well, and indeed became herself so handsomely,' that Mrs Ann, as
she arrayed herself, thought she saw the splendid vision of the royal
bridal float before her faded eyes in dim but gorgeous pageantry
once more. The heiress, too, attired herself splendidly, but it was
observed, that her beautiful cheek was paler than even that of the
bride, and the smile which held a fixed unjoyous station on her
features all that morning, seemed more like the effort of resolu-
tion than the expression of felicity. The widow Sandal had betrayed
considerable agitation, and quitted the Castle at an early hour. The
bridegroom had not yet appeared, and the company, after having in
vain for some time awaited his arrival, set out for the church,
where they supposed he was impatiently expecting them.

'The cavalcade was magnificent and numerous--the dignity and
consequence of the Mortimer family had assembled all who had
aspired to the distinction of their acquaintance, and such was then
the feudal grandeur attendant on the nuptials of a high-descended
family, that relatives, however remote in blood or in local distance,
collected for sixty miles in every direction around the Castle, and
presented a 'host of friends, gorgeously arrayed and attended on
that eventful morning.'

'Most of the company, even including the females, were mounted
on horseback, and this, by apparently increasing the number of the
procession, added to its tumultuous magnificence. There were some
cumbrous vehicles, misnamed carriages of a fashion indescribably
inconvenient, but gorgeously gilded and painted,--and the Cupids
on the pannels had been re-touched for the occasion. The bride was
lifted on her palfrey by two peers,--Margaret rode beside her
gallantly attended,--and Mrs Ann, who once more saw nobles con-
tending for her withered hand, and adjusting her silken rein, felt
the long-faded glories of her family revive, and led the van of the
pompous procession with as much dignity of demeanour, and as
much glow of faded beauty, once eminent and resistless, as if she
still followed the gorgeous nuptial progress of the princess palatine.
They arrived at the church,--the bride, the relatives, the splendid
company, the minister--all but the bridegroom, were there. There
was a long painful silence. Several gentlemen of the bridal party
rode rapidly out in every direction in which it was thought probable
to meet him,--the clergyman stood at the altar, till, weary of
standing, he retired. The crowd from the neighbouring villages,
combined with the numerous attendants, filled the church-yard.
Their acclamations were incessant,--the heat and distraction
became intolerable, and Elinor begged for a few moments to be
allowed to retire to the vestry.

'There was a casement window which opened on the road, and
Mrs Ann supported the bride as she tottered towards it, attempting
to loose her wimple, and veil of costly lace. As Elinor approached
the casement, the thundering hoofs of a horse at full speed shook
the road. Elinor looked up mechanically,--the rider was John Sandal,
--he cast a look of horror at the pale bride, and plunging his
desperate spurs deeper, disappeared in a moment.

*

'A year after this event, two figures were seen to walk, or rather
wander, almost every evening, in the neighbourhood of a small
hamlet in a remote part of Yorkshire. The vicinage595 was pictur-
esque and attractive, but these figures seemed to move amid the
scenery like beings, who, if they still retained eyes for nature,
had lost all heart for it. That wan and attenuated form, so young,
yet so withered, whose dark eyes emit a fearful light amid features
chill and white as those of a statue, and the young graces of whose
form seem to have been nipt like those of a lily that bloomed too
soon in spring, and was destroyed by the frost of the treacherous
season, whose whispers had first invited it to bud,--that is Elinor
Mortimer,--and that figure that walks beside her, so stiff and
rectangular, that it seems as its motion was regulated by mech-
anism, whose sharp eyes are directed so straight forward, that
they see neither tree on the right hand, or glade on the left, or
heaven above, or earth beneath, or any thing but a dim vision of
mystic theology for ever before them, which is aptly reflected in
their cold contemplative light, that is the Puritan maiden sister of
her mother, with whom Elinor had fixed her residence. Her dress is
arranged with as much precision as if a mathematician had calcu-
lated the angles of every fold,--every pin's point knows its place,
and does its duty--the plaits596 of her round-eared cap do not
permit one hair to appear on her narrow forehead, and her large
hood, adjusted after the fashion in which it was worn by the godly
sisters, who rode out to meet Prynne597 on his return from the
pillory, lends a deeper shade to her rigid features,--a wretched-
looking lacquey is carrying a huge clasped bible after her, in the
mode in which she remembered to have seen Lady Lambert and Lady
Desborough march to prayer, attended by their pages, while she
proudly followed in their train, distinguished as the sister of that
godly man and powerful preacher of the world, Sandal. From the day
of her disappointed nuptials, Elinor, with that insulted feeling of
maiden pride, which not even the anguish of her broken heart could
suppress, had felt an unappeaseable anxiety to quit the scene of her
disgrace and her misfortune. It was vainly opposed by her aunt and
Margaret, who, horror-struck at the event of those disastrous
nuptials, and wholly unconscious of the cause, had implored her,
with all the energy of affection, to fix her residence at the Castle,
within whose walls they pledged themselves he who had abandoned
her should never be permitted to place his foot. Elinor answered the
impassioned importunities, only by eager and clinging pressures of
her cold hands, and by tears which trembled on her eyelids, without
the power to fall.--'Nay, stay with us,' said the kind and noble-
hearted Margaret, 'you shall not leave us!' And she pressed the
hands of her kinswoman, with that cordial touch that gives a
welcome as much to the heart as to the home of the inviter.--
'Dearest cousin,' said Elinor, answering, for the first time, this
affectionate appeal with a faint and ghastly smile--'I have so many
enemies within these walls, that I can no longer encounter them
with safety to my life.'--'Enemies!' repeated Margaret.--'Yes,
dearest cousin--there is not a spot where he trod--not a prospect
on which he has gazed--not an echo which has repeated the sound
of his voice,--that does not send daggers through my heart, which
those who wish me to live would not willingly see infixed any
longer.' To the emphatic agony with which these words were utter-
ed, Margaret had nothing to reply but with tears; and Elinor set
out on her journey to the relative of her mother, a rigid Puritan,
who resided in Yorkshire.

'As the carriage was ordered for her departure, Mrs Ann, support-
ed by her female attendants, stood on the drawbridge to take
leave of her niece, with solemn and affectionate courtesy. Margaret
wept bitterly, and aloud, as she stood at a casement, and waved her
hand to Elinor. Her aunt never shed a tear, till out of the presence
of the domestics,--but when all was over,--'she entered into her
chamber, and wept there.'598

'When her carriage had driven some miles from the Castle, a servant
on a fleet horse followed it at full speed with Elinor's lute,
which had been forgotten,--it was offered to her, and after viewing
it for some moments with a look in which memory struggled with
grief, she ordered its strings to be broken on the spot, and pro-
ceeded on her journey.

'The retreat to which Elinor had retired, did not afford her the
tranquillity she expected. Thus, change of place always deceives us
with the tantalizing hope of relief, as we toss on the feverish bed
of life.

'She went in a faint expectation of the revival of her religious
feelings--she went to wed, amid the solitude and desert where she
had first known him, the immortal bridegroom, who would never
desert her as the mortal one had done,--but she did not find him
there--the voice of God was no longer heard in the garden--either
her religious sensibility had abated, or those from whom she first
received the impression, had no longer power to renew it, or
perhaps the heart which has exhausted itself on a mortal object,
does not find its powers soon recruited to meet the image of
celestial beneficence, and exchange at once the visible for the
invisible,--the felt and present, for the future and the unknown.

'Elinor returned to the residence of her mother's family in the
hope of renewing former images, but she found only the words that
had conveyed those ideas, and she looked around in vain for the
impressions they had once suggested. When we thus come to feel
that all has been illusion, even on the most solemn subjects,--that
the future world seems to be deserting us along with the present,
and that our own hearts, with all their treachery, have done us no
more wrong than the false impressions which we have received from
our religious instructors, we are like the deity in the painting
of the great Italian artist,599 extending one hand to the sun, and
the other to the moon, but touching neither. Elinor had imagined
or hoped, that the language of her aunt would have revived her
habitual associations--she was disappointed. It is true no pains
were spared--when Elinor wished to read, she was furnished amply
with the Westminster Confession, or Prynne's Histriomastrix,600 or if
she wished for lighter pages, for the Belles Lettres of Puritanism,
there were John Bunyan's Holy War, or the life of Mr Badman. If she
closed the book in despair at the insensibility of her untouched
heart, she was invited to a godly conference, where the noncon-
formist ministers, who had been, in the language of the day,
extinguished under the Bartholomew bushel*,601 met to give the
precious word in season to the scattered fold of the Lord. Elinor
knelt and wept too at these meetings; but, while her form was
prostrated before the Deity, her tears fell for one whom she dared
not name. When, in incontroulable agony, she sought, like Joseph,
where she might weep unobserved and unrestrained,602 and rushed
into the narrow garden that skirted the cottage of her aunt, and
wept there, she was followed by the quiet, sedate figure, moving at
the rate of an inch in a minute, who offered her for her consolation,
the newly published and difficultly obtained work of Marshall on
Sanctification.603

'Elinor, accustomed too much to that fatal excitement of the heart,
which renders all other excitement as faint and feeble as the air
of heaven to one who has been inhaling the potent inebriation of
the strongest perfumes, wondered how this being, so abstracted,
cold, and unearthly, could tolerate her motionless existence. She
rose at a fixed hour,--at a fixed hour she prayed,--at a fixed hour
received the godly friends who visited her, and whose existence was
as monotonous and apathetic as her own,--at a fixed hour she
dined,--and at a fixed hour she prayed again, and then retired,--
yet she prayed without unction, and fed without appetite, and
retired to rest without the least inclination to sleep. Her life
was mere mechanism; but the machine was so well wound up, that it
appeared to have some quiet consciousness and sullen satisfaction
in its movements.604

'Elinor struggled in vain for the renewal of this life of cold
mediocrity,--she thirsted for it as one who, in the deserts of Afric,
expiring for want of water, would wish for the moment to be an
inmate of Lapland, to drink of their eternal snows,--yet at that
moment wonders how its inhabitants can live among SNOW. She saw
a being far inferior to herself in mental power,--of feelings that
hardly deserved the name--tranquil, and wondered that she herself
was wretched.--Alas! she did not know, that the heartless and
unimaginative are those alone who entitle themselves to the
comforts of life, and who can alone enjoy them. A cold and sluggish
mediocrity in their occupations or their amusements, is all they
require--pleasure has with them no meaning but the exemption
from actual suffering, nor do they annex any idea to pain but the
immediate infliction of corporeal suffering, or of external calamity--
the source of pain or pleasure is never found in their hearts--while
those who have profound feelings scarce ever look elsewhere for
either. So much the worse for them,--the being reduced to provid-
ing for the necessities of human life, and being satisfied when
that provision is made, is perhaps the best condition of human life--
beyond that, all is the dream of insanity, or the agony of disa-
ppointment. Far better the dull and dusky winter's day, whose
gloom, if it never abates, never increases,--(and to which we lift up
an eye of listlessness, in which there is no apprehension of future
and added terrors),--to the glorious fierceness of the summer's day,
whose sun sets amid purple and gold,--while, panting under its
parting beams, we see the clouds collecting in the darkening East,
and view the armies of heaven on their march, whose thunders are
to break our rest, and whose lightnings may crumble us to ashes.

*

'Elinor strove hard with her fate,--the strength of her intellect
had been much developed since her residence at Mortimer Castle, and
there also the energies of her heart had been developed fatally. How
dreadful is the conflict of superior intellect and a burning heart,
with the perfect mediocrity of the characters and circumstances they
are generally doomed to live with! The battering-rams play against
wool-bags,--the lightnings glance on ice, hiss, and are extinguished.
The greater strength we exhibit, we feel we are more and more
paralyzed by the weakness of our enemies,--our very energy
becomes our bitterest enemy, as it fights in vain against the
impregnable fortress of total vacuity! It is in vain we assail a foe
who neither knows our language or uses our weapons. Elinor gave it
up,--yet still she struggled with her own feelings; and perhaps the
conflict which she now undertook was the hardest of all. She had
received her first religious impressions under the roof of her
Puritanic aunt, and, true or false, they had been so vivid, that she
was anxious to revive them. When the heart is robbed of its firstborn,
there is nothing it will not try to adopt. Elinor remembered a
very affecting scene that had occurred in her childhood, beneath the
roof where she now resided.

'An old non-conformist minister, a very Saint John for sanctity of
life, and simplicity of manners, had been seized by a magistrate
while giving the word of consolation to a few of his flock who had
met at the cottage of her aunt.

'The old man had supplicated for a moment's delay on the part of the
civil power, and its officers, by an unusual effort of toleration or
of humanity, complied. Turning to his congregation, who, amid the
tumult of the arrest, had never risen from their knees, and only
changed the voice of supplication from praying with their pastor,
to praying for him,--he quoted to them that beautiful passage from
the prophet Malachi,606 which appears to give such delightful
encouragement to the spiritual intercourse of Christians,--'Then
they that feared the Lord, spoke often to one another, and the Lord
heard it,' &c. As he spoke, the old man was dragged away by some
rougher hands, and died soon after in confinement.

'On the young imagination of Elinor, this scene was indelibly
written. Amid the magnificence of Mortimer Castle, it had never
been effaced or obscured, and now she tried to make herself in love
with the sounds and the scene that had so deeply touched her infant
heart.

'Resolute in her purposes, she spared no pains to excite this rem-
iniscence of religion,--it was her last resource. Like the wife of
Phineas, she struggled to bear an heir of the soul, even while she
named him Ichabod,--and felt the glory was departed.607 She went to
the narrow apartment,--she seated herself in the very chair that
venerable man occupied when he was torn from it, and his depar-
ture appeared to her like that of an ascending prophet. She
would then have caught the folds of his mantle, and mounted with
him, even though his flight had led to prison and to death. She
tried, by repeating his last words, to produce the same effect they
had once had on her heart, and wept in indescribable agony at
feeling those words had no meaning now for her. When life and
passion have thus rejected us, the backward steps we are compelled
to tread towards the path we have wandered from, are ten thousand
times more torturing and arduous than those we have exhausted in
their pursuit. Hope then supported our hands every step we took.
Remorse and disappointment scourge us back, and every step is
tinged with tears or with blood; and well it is for the pilgrim if
that blood is drained from his heart, for then--his pilgrimage will
be sooner terminated.

*

'At times Elinor, who had forgotten neither the language or habits
of her former existence, would speak in a manner that gave her
Puritanic relative hopes that, according to the language of the times,
'the root of the matter was in her,'608 and when the old lady, in
confidence of her returning orthodoxy, discussed long and learnedly
on the election and perseverance of the saints, the listener would
startle her by a burst of feeling, that seemed to her aunt more like
the ravings of a demoniac, than the language of a human being,--
especially one who had from her youth known the Scriptures, She
would say, 'Dearest aunt, I am not insensible of what you say; from
a child, (thanks to your care), I have known the holy scriptures. I
have felt the power of religion. At a latter period I have experi-
enced all the enjoyments of an intellectual existence. Surrounded by
splendour, I have conversed with enlarged minds,--I have seen all
that life can shew me,--I have lived with the mean and the rich,--
the spiritual in their poverty, and the worldly-minded in their
grandeur,--I have deeply drank of the cup which both modes of
existence held to my lip,--and at this moment I swear to you,--one
moment of heart,--one dream such as once I dreamed, (and though I
should never awake from), is worth all the existence that the
earthly-minded lavish on this world, and those who mystify expend
on the next!'--'Unfortunate wretch! and undone for everlasting!'
cried the terrified Calvinist, lifting up her hands.--'Cease, cease,'
said Elinor with that dignity which grief alone can give,--'If I have
indeed devoted to an earthly love that which is due to God alone, is
not my punishment certain in a future state? Has it not already
commenced here? May not then all reproaches be spared when we are
suffering more than human enmity can wish us,--when our very exist-
ence is a bitterer reproach to us than malignity can utter?'--As
she spoke, she added, wiping a cold tear from her wasted cheek, 'My
stroke is heavier than my groaning!'

'At other times she appeared to listen to the language of the
Puritan preachers (for all were preachers who frequented the house)
with some appearance of attention, and then, rushing from them
without any conviction but that of despair, exclaimed in her haste,
'All men are liars!' Thus it fares with those who wish to make an
instant transition from one world to another,--it is impossible,--the
cold wave interposes--for ever interposes, between the wilderness
and the land of promise--and we may as soon expect to tread the
threshold which parts life and death without pain, as to cross the
interval which separates two modes of existence so distinct as those
of passion and religion, without struggles of the soul inexpressible--
without groanings which cannot be uttered.

'To these struggles there was soon to be an addition. Letters at
this period circulated very slowly, and were written only on
important occasions. Within a very short period, Elinor received two
letters by express from Mortimer Castle, written by her cousin
Margaret. The first announced the arrival of John Sandal at the
Castle,--the second, the death of Mrs Ann,--the postscriptums of
both contained certain mysterious hints relative to the interruption
of the marriage,--intimations that the cause was known only to the
writer, to Sandal and to his mother,--and entreaties that Elinor
would return to the Castle, and partake of the sisterly love with
which Margaret and John Sandal would be glad to receive her. The
letters dropt from her hand as she received them,--of John Sandal
she had never ceased to think, but she had never ceased to wish not
to think,--and his name even now gave her a pang which she could
neither utter or suppress, and which burst forth in an involuntary
shriek, that seemed like the last string that breaks in the exqui-
site and too-highly strung instrument of the human heart.

'Over the account of Mrs Ann's death, she lingered with that
fearful feeling that a young adventurer experiences, who sees a
noble vessel set out before him on a voyage of discovery, and
wishes, while lingering in harbour himself, that he was already at
the shore where it has arrived, and tasted of its repose, and
participated in its treasures.

'Mrs Ann's death had not been unworthy of that life of magnani-
mity and high heroic feeling which had marked every hour of her
mortal existence--she had espoused the cause of the rejected
Elinor, and sworn in the chapel of Mortimer Castle, while Margaret
knelt beside, never to admit within its walls the deserter of his
betrothed bride.

'On a dim autumnal evening, when Mrs Ann, with fading sight but
undiminished feeling, was poring over some of Lady Russel's let-
ters in manuscript,609 and, to relieve her eyes, sometimes glanced
on the manuscript of Nelson's Fasts and Festivals of the Church of
England,610 it was announced to her that a Cavalier (the servants
well knew the charm of that name to the ear of the ancient loyalist)
had crossed the draw-bridge, entered the hall, and was advancing to
the apartment where she sat. 'Let him be admitted,' was her answer,
and rising from her chair, which was so lofty and so spacious, that
as she lifted herself from it to greet the stranger with a courtly
reception, her form appeared like a spectre rising from an ancient
monument,--she stood facing the entrance--at that entrance appear-
ed John Sandal. She bent forwards for a moment, but her eyes,
bright and piercing, still recognized him in a moment.

'Back!--back!'--exclaimed the stately ancestress, waving him off
with her withered hand--'Back!--profane not this floor with
another step!'--'Hear me, madam, for one moment--suffer me to
address you, even on my knees--I pay the homage to your rank and
relationship--misunderstand it not as an acknowledgement of guilt
on my part!'

'Mrs Ann's features at this action underwent a slight contraction
--a short spasmodic affection. 'Rise, Sir--rise,' she said--'and say
what you have to say--but utter it, Sir, at the door whose threshold
you are unworthy to tread.'

'John Sandal rose from his knees, and pointed instinctively as he
rose to the portrait of Sir Roger Mortimer, to whom he bore a
striking resemblance. Mrs Ann acknowledged the appeal--she
advanced a few steps on the oaken floor--she stood erect for a
moment, and then, pointing with a dignity of action which no pencil
could embody to the portrait, seemed to consider her attitude as a
valid and eloquent answer--it said--he to whose resemblance you
point, and claim protection from, never like you dishonoured these
walls by an act of baseness--of heartless treachery! Betrayer!--look
to his portrait! Her expression had in it something of the sublime--
the next moment a strong spasm contracted her features--she
attempted to speak, but her lips no longer obeyed her--she seemed
to speak, but was not heard even by herself. She stood for a moment
before John Sandal in that rigid immoveable attitude that says,
'Advance not another step at your peril--insult not the portraits of
your ancestors--insult not their living representative, by another
step of intrusion!' As she spoke thus, (for her attitude spoke), a
stronger spasm contracted her features. She attempted to move--
the same rigid constriction extended to her limbs; and, waving her
prohibitory arm still, as if in defiance at once of the approach of
death and of her rejected kinsman, she dropt at his feet.

*

'She did not long survive the interview, nor did she ever recover the
use of speech. Her powerful intellect was, however, unimpaired; and
to the last she expressed herself most intelligibly by action, as
determined not to hear a word explanatory of Sandal's conduct. This
explanation was therefore made to Margaret, who, though much
shocked and agitated at the first disclosure, seemed afterwards
perfectly reconciled to it.

*

'Shortly after the receipt of these letters, Elinor took a sudden,
but perhaps not singular resolution,--she determined to set out
immediately for Mortimer Castle. It was not her weariness of the
withering life, the 611 she lived at her Puritanic
aunt's--it was not the wish to enjoy again the stately and splendid
ceremonial of Mortimer Castle, contrasted with the frugal fare and
monastic rigour of the cottage in Yorkshire--it was not even the
wish for that change of place that always flatters us with change
of circumstance, as if we did not carry our own hearts with us
wherever we go, and might not therefore be sure that an innate and
eroding ulcer must be our companion from the Pole to the Equator--
it was not this, but a whisper half unheard, yet believed, (just in
proportion as it was inaudible and incredible), that murmured from
the bottom of her credulous heart, 'Go--and perhaps'–

'Elinor set out on her journey, and after having performed it with
fewer difficulties than can be imagined, considering the state of the
roads, and the modes of travelling in the year 1667 or thereabouts,
she arrived in the vicinity of Mortimer Castle. It was a scene of
reminiscence to her,--her heart throbbed audibly as the carriage
stopped at a Gothic gate, through which there was a walk between
two rows of lofty elms. She alighted, and to the request of the
servant who followed her, that he might be permitted to shew her
the way through a path entangled by the intersecting roots of the
trees, and dim with twilight, she answered only by her tears. She
waved him off, and advanced on foot and alone. She remembered,
from the bottom of her soul, how she had once wandered amid that
very grove with John Sandal--how his smile had shed a richer light
on the landscape, than even the purple smile of the dying day-light.
She thought of that smile, and lingered to catch it amid the rich and
burning hues flung by the fading light on the many-tinted boles of
the ancient trees. The trees were there--and the light was there--
but his smile, that once eclipsed the sun-light, was there no longer!

'She advanced alone--the lofty avenue of trees still retained its
magnificent depth of shade, and gorgeous colouring of trunk and
leaf. She sought among them for that which she had once felt--and
God and nature alone are conscious of the agony with which we
demand from them the object which we are conscious was once
consecrated to our hearts, and which we now require of both in
vain! God withholds,--and Nature denies them!

'As Elinor with trembling steps advanced towards the Castle, she
saw the funeral scutcheon612 which Mrs Margaret, in honour of her
grand-aunt, had caused to be affixed over the principal tower since
her decease, with the same heraldic decorum as if the last male of
the Mortimer family were extinct. Elinor looked up, and many
thoughts rushed on her heart.--'There is one departed,' she thought,
'whose mind was always fixed on glorious thoughts--the most ex-
alted actions of humanity, or the sublime associations of eternity!
Her noble heart had room but for two illustrious guests--the love of
God, and the love of her country. They tarried with her to the last,
for they found the abode worthy of them; and when they parted, the
inmate found the mansion untenantable any longer--the soul fled
with its glorious visitors to heaven! My treacherous heart welcomed
another inmate, and how has he repaid its hospitality?--By leaving
the mansion in ruins!' As she spoke thus, she approached the
entrance of the Castle.

'In the spacious hall she was received by Margaret Mortimer with
the embrace of rooted affection, and by John Sandal, who advanced
after the first enthusiasm of meeting was over, with that calm and
brother-like good-will, from which there was--nothing to be hoped.
There was the same heavenly smile, the same clasp of the hand, the
same tender and almost feminine expression of anxiety for her
safety--even Margaret herself, who must have felt, and who did feel
the perils of the long journey, did not enter into them with that
circumstantiality, or appear to sympathize with them so vividly, or,
when the tale of toil and travel was told, appear to urge the
necessity of speedy retirement, with such solicitude as did John
Sandal. Elinor, faint and gasping, grasped the hands of both, and by
an involuntary motion locked both together. The widow Sandal was
present--she shewed much agitation at the appearance of Elinor;
but when she saw this extraordinary and spontaneous movement, it
was observed she smiled.

'Soon after, Elinor retired to the apartment she had formerly
occupied. By the affectionate and delicate prévoyance613 of Margaret,
the furniture had all been changed--there was nothing to remind
her of former days, except her heart. She sat for some time
reflecting on her reception, and hope died within her heart as she
thought of it. The strongest expression of aversion or disdain would
not have been so withering.

'It is certain that the fiercest passions may be exchanged for their
widest extremes in a time incredibly short, and by means the most
incalculable. Within the narrow circle of a day, enemies may
embrace, and lovers may hate,--but, in the course of centuries, pure
complacency and cordial good-will never can be exalted into passion.
The wretched Elinor felt this,--and feeling it, knew that all was
lost.

'She had now, for many days, to undergo the torture of complacent
and fraternal affection from the man she loved,--and perhaps a
keener torture was never endured. To feel hands that we long to
press to our burning hearts, touch ours with cool and pulseless
tranquillity--to see eyes in whose light we live, throw on us a
cold but smiling beam, that gives light, but not fertility, to the
parched and thirsting soil of the heart--to hear the ordinary lan-
guage of affectionate civility addressed to us in tones of the most
delicious suavity--to seek in these expressions an ulterior meaning,
and to find it not--This--this is an agony which only those who
have felt can conceive!

'Elinor, with an effort that cost her heart many a pang, mingled
in the habits of the house, which had been greatly changed since the
death of Mrs Ann. The numerous suitors of the wealthy and noble
heiress, now crowded to the Castle; and, according to the custom of
the times, they were sumptuously entertained, and invited to
prolong their stay by numerous banquets.

'On these occasions, John Sandal was the first to pay distin-
guished attention to Elinor. They danced together; and though
her Puritanic education had taught her an abhorrence of those
'devil's measures,' as her family was accustomed to term them, she
tried to adapt herself to the gay steps of the Canaries,614 and the
stately movements of the Measures--(for the newer dances had not,
even in report, reached Mortimer Castle)--and her slender and
graceful form needed no other inspiration than the support of John
Sandal's arms, (who was himself an exquisite dancer), to assume all
the graces of that delightful exercise. Even the practised courtiers
applauded her. But, when it was over, Elinor felt, that had John
Sandal been dancing with a being the most indifferent to him on
earth, his manner would have been exactly the same. No one could
point with more smiling grace to her slight deviations from the
figure,--no one could attend her to her seat with more tender and
anxious politeness, and wave the vast fan of those days over her
with more graceful and assiduous courtesy. But Elinor felt that
these attentions, however flattering, were offered not by a lover.

*

'Sandal was absent on a visit to some neighbouring nobleman, and
Margaret and Elinor were one evening completely alone. Each
seemed equally anxious for an explanation, which neither appeared
willing to begin. Elinor had lingered till twilight at the casement,
from which she had seen him ride, and lingered still when to see
him was no longer possible. Her sight was strained to catch a
glimpse of him through the gathering clouds, as her imagination still
toiled to catch a gleam of that light of the heart, which now
struggled dimly amid clouds of gloomy and unpierceable mystery.
'Elinor,' said Margaret emphatically, 'look for him no longer,--he
never can be yours!'

'The sudden address, and the imperative tone of conviction, had
upon Elinor the effect of being addressed by a supernatural monitor.
She was unable even to ask how the terrible intelligence that burst
on her so decisively, was obtained.

'There is a state of mind in which we listen thus to a human voice
as if it were an oracle,--and instead of asking an explanation
of the destiny it announces, we wait submissively for what yet
remains to be told. In this mood, Elinor slowly advanced from the
casement, and asked in a voice of fearful calmness, 'Has he
explained himself perfectly to you?'--'Perfectly.'--'And there is
nothing to expect?'--'Nothing. '--'And you have heard this from
himself--his very self?'--'I have; and, dear Elinor, let us never
again speak on the subject.'--'Never!' answered Elinor,--'Never!'

'The veracity and dignity of Margaret's character, were inviolable
securities for the truth of what she uttered; and perhaps that was the
very reason why Elinor tried to shrink most from the conviction. In
a morbid state of heart, we cannot bear truth--the falsehood that
intoxicates us for a moment, is worth more than the truth that would
disenchant us for life.--I hate him because he tells me the truth,
is the language natural to the human mind, from the slave of power
to the slave of passion.

*

'Other symptoms that could not escape the notice of the most
shallow, struck her every hour. That devotion of the eye and heart,
--of the language and the look, that cannot be mistaken,--were all
obviously directed to Margaret. Still Elinor lingered in the Castle,
and said to herself, while every day she saw and felt what was
passing, 'Perhaps.' That is the last word that quits the lips of
those who love.

*

'She saw with all her eyes,--she felt to the bottom of her soul,--the
obviously increasing attachment of John Sandal and Margaret; yet
still she dreamed of interposing obstacles,--of an explanation. When
passion is deprived of its proper aliment, there is no telling the food
on which it will prey,--the impossibilities to which, like a famished
garrison, it will look for its wretched sustenance.

'Elinor had ceased to demand the heart of the being she was devoted
to. She now lived on his looks. She said to herself, Let him smile,
though not on me, and I am happy still--wherever the sunlight
falls, the earth must be blessed. Then she sunk to lower claims.
She said, Let me but be in his presence, and that is enough--let his
smiles and his soul be devoted to another, one wandering ray may
reach me, and that will be enough!

'Love is a very noble and exalting sentiment in its first germ and
principle. We never love without arraying the object in all the
glories of moral as well as physical perfection, and deriving a kind
of dignity to ourselves from our capacity of admiring a creature so
excellent and dignified; but this lavish and magnificent prodigality
of the imagination often leaves the heart a bankrupt. Love in its
iron age of disappointment, becomes very degraded--it submits to be
satisfied with merely exterior indulgences--a look, a touch of the
hand, though occurring by accident--a kind word, though uttered
almost unconsciously, suffices for its humble existence. In its first
state, it is like man before the fall, inhaling the odours of paradise,
and enjoying the communion of the Deity; in the latter, it is like the
same being toiling amid the briar and the thistle, barely to maintain
a squalid existence without enjoyment, utility, or loveliness.

*

'About this time, her Puritan aunt made a strong effort to recover
Elinor out of the snare of the enemy. She wrote a long letter (a great
exertion for a woman far advanced in years, and never in the habits
of epistolary composition) adjuring her apostate niece to return to
the guide of her youth, and the covenant of her God,--to take shel-
-ter in the everlasting arms while they were still held out to her,
--and to flee to the city of refuge while its gates were yet open to
receive her. She urged on her the truth, power, and blessedness of
the system of Calvin, which she termed the gospel.615--She supported
and defended it with all the metaphysical skill, and all the scrip-
tural knowledge she possessed,--and the latter was not scanty.--And
she affectingly reminded her, that the hand that traced these lines,
would be unable ever to repeat the admonition, and would probably
be mouldering into dust while she was employed in their perusal.

'Elinor wept while she read, but that was all. She wept from
physical emotion, not from mental conviction; nor is there such an
induration of heart caused by any other power, as by that of the
passion which seems to soften it most. She answered the letter,
however, and the effort scarce cost her less than it did her decrepid
and dying relative. She acknowledged her dereliction of all religious
feeling, and bewailed it--the more, she added with painful sincer-
ity, because I feel my grief is not sincere. 'Oh, my God!' she
continued, 'you who have clothed my heart with such burning ener-
gies--you who have given to it a power of loving so intense, so
devoted, so concentrated--you have not given it in vain;--no, in
some happier world, or perhaps even in this, when this 'tyranny is
overpast,'616 you will fill my heart with an image worthier than him
whom I once believed your image on earth. The stars, though their
light appears so dim and distant to us, were not lit by the Almighty
hand in vain. Their glorious light burns for remote and happier
worlds; and the beam of religion that glows so feebly to eyes almost
blind with earthly tears, may be rekindled when a broken heart has
been my passport to a place of rest.

*

'Do not think me, dear aunt, deserted by all hope of religion, even
though I have lost the sense of it. Was it not said by unerring lips
to a sinner, that her transgressions were forgiven because she loved
much? And does not this capacity of love prove that it will one day
be more worthily filled, and more happily employed.

*

'Miserable wretch that I am! At this moment, a voice from the
bottom of my heart asks me 'Whom hast thou loved so much? Was it
man or God, that thou darest to compare thyself with her who knelt
and wept--not before a mortal idol, but at the feet of an incarnate
divinity?'

*

'It may yet befall, that the ark which has floated through the waste
of waters may find its resting-place, and the trembling inmate
debark on the shores of an unknown but purer world.'



CHAPTER XXXI



There is an oak beside the froth-clad
pool,
Where in old time, as I have often heard,
A woman desperate, a wretch like me!
Ended her woes!--Her woes were not
like mine!
*
--Ronan will know;
When he beholds me floating on the
stream,
His heart will tell him why Rivine died!
HOME ' S FATAL DISCOVERY617



'The increasing decline of Elinor's health was marked by all the
family; the very servant who stood behind her chair looked sadder
every day--even Margaret began to repent of the invitation she had
given her to the Castle.

'Elinor felt this, and would have spared her what pain she could;
but it was not possible for herself to be insensible of the fast-fading
remains of her withering youth and blighted beauty. The place--the
place itself, was the principal cause of that mortal disease that was
consuming her; yet from that place she felt she had less resolution to
tear herself every day. So she lived, like those sufferers in eastern
prisons, who are not allowed to taste food unless mixed with poison,
and who must perish alike whether they eat or forbear.

'Once, urged by intolerable pain of heart, (tortured by living in
the placid light of John Sandal's sunny smile), she confessed this to
Margaret. She said, 'It is impossible for me to support this existence
--impossible! To tread the floor which those steps have trod--to
listen for their approach, and when they come, feel they do not bear
him we seek--to see every object around me reflect his image, but
never--never to see the reality--to see the door open which once
disclosed his figure, and when it opens, not to see him, and when he
does appear, to see him not what he saw--to feel he is the same and
not the same,--the same to the eye, but not to the heart--to
struggle thus between the dream of imagination and the cruel
awaking of reality--Oh! Margaret--that undeception plants a
dagger in the heart, whose point no human hand can extract, and
whose venom no human hand can heal!' Margaret wept as Elinor
spoke thus, and slowly, very slowly, expressed her consent that
Elinor should quit the Castle, if it was necessary for her peace.

'It was the very evening after this conversation, that Elinor,
whose habit was to wander among the woods that surrounded the
Castle unattended, met with John Sandal. It was a glorious
autumnal evening, just like that on which they had first met,--the
associations of nature were the same, those of the heart alone had
suffered change. There is that light in an autumnal sky,--that shade
in autumnal woods,--that dim and hallowed glory in the evening of
the year, which is indefinably combined with recollections. Sandal,
as they met, had spoken to her in the same voice of melody, and
with the same heart-thrilling tenderness of manner, that had never
ceased to visit her ear since their first meeting, like music in dreams.
She imagined there was more than usual feeling in his manner; and
the spot where they were, and which memory made populous and
eloquent with the imagery and speech of other days, flattered this
illusion. A vague hope trembled at the bottom of her heart,--she
thought of what she dared not to utter, and yet dared to believe.
They walked on together,--together they watched the last light on
the purple hills, the deep repose of the woods, whose summits were
still like 'feathers of gold,'618--together they once more tasted the
confidence of nature, and, amid the most perfect silence, there was
a mutual and unutterable eloquence in their hearts. The thoughts of
other days rushed on Elinor,--she ventured to raise her eyes to that
countenance which she once more saw 'as it had been that of an an-
gel.'619 The glow and the smile, that made it appear like a reflect-
ion of heaven, were there still,--but that glow was borrowed from
the bright flush of the glorious west, and that smile was for na-
ture,--not for her. She lingered till she felt it fade with the fading
light,--and a last conviction striking her heart, she burst into an
agony of tears. To his words of affectionate surprise, and gentle
consolation, she answered only by fixing her appealing eyes on him,
and agonizingly invoking his name. She had trusted to nature, and
to this scene of their first meeting, to act as an interpreter be-
tween them,--and still even in despair she trusted to it.

'Perhaps there is not a more agonizing moment than that in which
we feel the aspect of nature give a perfect vitality to the asso-
ciation of our hearts, while they lie buried in those in which we
try in vain to revive them.

'She was soon undeceived. With that benignity which, while it
speaks of consolation, forbids hope--with that smile which angels
may be supposed to give on the last conflict of a sufferer who is
casting off the garments of mortality in pain and hope--with such
an expression he whom she loved regarded her. From another world
he might have cast such a glance on her,--and it sealed her doom in
this for ever.

*

'As, unable to witness the agony of the wound he had inflicted but
could not heal, he turned from her, the last light of day faded from
the hills--the sun of both worlds set on her eye and soul--she sunk
on the earth, and notes of faint music that seemed designed to echo
the words--'No--no--no--never--never more!' trembled in her ears.
They were as simple and monotonous as the words themselves, and
were played accidentally by a peasant boy who was wandering in
the woods. But to the unfortunate, every thing seems prophetic;
and amid the shades of evening, and accompanied by the sound of
his departing footsteps, the breaking heart of Elinor accepted
the augury of these melancholy notes.*



'A few days after this final meeting, Elinor wrote to her aunt in
York to announce, that if she still lived, and was not unwilling to
admit her, she would reside with her for life; and she could not help
intimating, that her life would probably not outlast that of her
hostess. She did not tell what the widow Sandal had a whispered to
her at her first arrival at the Castle, and what she now ventured to
repeat with a tone that struggled between the imperative and the
persuasive,--the conciliating and the intimidative. Elinor yielded,--
and the indelicacy of this representation, had only the effect to
make her shrink from its repetition.

'On her departure, Margaret wept, and Sandal shewed as much tender
o--ciousness about her journey, as if it were to terminate in
their renewed bridal. To escape from this, Elinor hastened her
preparations for departure.

'When she arrived at a certain distance from the Castle, she
dismissed the family carriage, and said she would go on foot with
her female servant to the farmhouse where horses were awaiting
her. She went there, but remained concealed, for the report of the
approaching bridal resounded in her ears.

*

'The day arrived--Elinor rose very early--the bells rung out a
merry peal--(as she had once heard them do on another occasion)--
the troops of friends arrived in greater numbers, and with equal
gaiety as they had once assembled to escort her--she saw their
equipages gleaming along--she heard the joyous shouts of half the
county--she imagined to herself the timid smile of Margaret, and
the irradiated countenance of him who had been her bridegroom.

'Suddenly there was a pause. She felt that the ceremony was
going on--was finished--that the irrevocable words were spoken--
the indissoluble tie was knit! Again the shout and wild joyance burst
forth as the sumptuous cavalcade returned to the Castle. The glare
of the equipages,--the splendid habits of the riders,--the cheerful
groupe of shouting tenantry,--she saw it all!

*

'When all was over, Elinor glanced accidentally at her dress--it was
white like her bridal habit;--shuddering she exchanged it for a
mourning habit, and set out, as she hoped, on her last journey.



CHAPTER XXXII


　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Fuimus, non sumus.620



'When Elinor arrived in Yorkshire, she found her aunt was dead.
Elinor went to visit her grave. It was, in compliance with her last
request, placed near the window of the independent meeting-house,
and bore for inscription her favourite text, 'Those whom he foreknew,
he also predestinated,'621 &c. &c. Elinor stood by the grave some
time, but could not shed a tear. This contrast of a life so rigid,
and a death so hopeful,--this silence of humanity, and eloquence of
the grave,--pierced through her heart, as it will through every heart
that has indulged in the inebriation of human passion, and feels that
the draught has been drawn from broken cisterns.

'Her aunt's death made Elinor's life, if possible, more secluded,
and her habits more monotonous than they would otherwise have
been. She was very charitable to the cottagers in her neighbour-
hood; but except to visit their habitations, she never quitted
her own.

*

'Often she contemplated a small stream that flowed at the end of her
garden. As she had lost all her sensibility of nature, another motive
was assigned for this mute and dark contemplation; and her servant,
much attached to her, watched her close.

*

'She was roused from this fearful state of stupefaction and despair,
which those who have felt shudder at the attempt to describe, by a
letter from Margaret. She had received several from her which lay
unanswered, (no unusual thing in those days), but this she tore
open, read with interest inconceivable, and prepared instantly to
answer by action.

'Margaret's high spirits seemed to have sunk in her hour of danger.
She hinted that that hour was rapidly approaching, and that she
earnestly implored the presence of her affectionate kinswoman
to soothe and sustain in the moment of her approaching peril. She
added, that the manly and affectionate tenderness of John Sandal at
this period, had touched her heart more deeply, if possible, than all
the former testimonies of his affection--but that she could not bear
his resignation of all his usual habits of rural amusement, and of
the neighbouring society--that she in vain had chided him from her
couch, where she lingered in pain and hope, and hoped that Elinor's
presence might induce him to yield to her request, as he must feel,
on her arrival, the dearest companion of her youth was present--
and that, at such a moment, a female companion was more suitable
than even the gentlest and most affectionate of the other sex.

*

'Elinor set out directly. The purity of her feelings had formed
an impenetrable barrier between her heart and its object,--and
she apprehended no more danger from the presence of one who was
wedded, and wedded to her relative, than from that of her own
brother.

'She arrived at the Castle--Margaret's hour of danger had begun
--she had been very ill during the preceding period. The natural
consequences of her situation had been aggravated by a feeling of
dignified responsibility of the birth of an heir to the house of
Mortimer--and this feeling had not contributed to render that
situation more supportable.

'Elinor bent over the bed of pain--pressed her cold lips to the
burning lips of the sufferer--and prayed for her.

'The first medical assistance in the country (then very rarely
employed on such occasions) had been obtained at a vast expence.
The widow Sandal, declining all attendance on the sufferer, paced
through the adjacent apartments in agony unutterable and unuttered.

'Two days and nights went on in hope and terror--the bellringers
sat up in every church within ten miles round--the tenantry
crowded round the Castle with honest heartfelt solicitude--the
neighbouring nobility sent their messages of inquiry every hour.
An accouchement in a noble family was then an event of importance.

'The hour came--twins were born dead--and the young mother
was fated to follow them within a few hours! While life yet
remained, Margaret shewed the remains of the lofty spirit of the
Mortimers. She sought with her cold hand that of her wretched
husband and of the weeping Elinor. She joined them in an embrace
which one of them at least understood, and prayed that their union
might be eternal. She then begged to see the bodies of her infant
sons--they were produced; and it was said that she uttered
expressions, intimating that, had they not been the heirs of the
Mortimer family--had not expectation been wound so high, and
supported by all the hopes that life and youth could flatter her
with, --she and they might yet have existed.

'As she spoke, her voice grew feebler, and her eyes dim--their
last light was turned on him she loved, and when sight was gone,
she still felt his arms enfold her. The next moment they enfolded--
nothing!

'In the terrible spasms of masculine agony--the more intensely
felt as they are more rarely indulged--the young widower dashed
himself on the bed, which shook with his convulsive grief; and
Elinor, losing all sense but that of a calamity so sudden and so
terrible, echoed his deep and suffocating sobs, as if she whom they
deplored622 had not been the only obstacle to her happiness.

*

'Amid the voice of mourning that rung through the Castle from vault
to tower in that day of trouble, none was loud like that of the
widow Sandal--her wailings were shrieks, her grief was despair.
Rushing through the rooms like one distracted, she tore her hair
out by the roots, and imprecated the most fearful curses on her
head. Atlength she approached the apartment where the corse lay. The
servants, shocked at her distraction, would have withheld her from
entering it, but could not. She burst into the room, cast one wild
look on its inmates--the still corse and the dumb mourners--and
then, flinging herself on her knees before her son, confessed the
secret of her guilt, and developed to its foul base the foundation
of that pile of iniquity and sorrow which had now reached its summit.
'Her son listened to this horrible confession with fixed eye and
features unmoved; and at its conclusion, when the wretched peni-
tent implored the assistance of her son to raise her from her
knees, he repelled her outstretched hands, and with a weak wild
laugh, sunk back on the bed. He never could be removed from it till
the corse to which he clung was borne away, and then the mourners
hardly knew which to deplore--her who was deprived of the light
of life, or him in whom the light of reason was extinguished for
ever!

*

'The wretched, guilty mother, (but for her fate no one can be sol-
icitous), a few months after, on her dying bed, declared the secret
of her crime to a minister of an independent congregation, who was
induced, by the report of her despair, to visit her. She confessed
that, being instigated by avarice, and still more by the desire of
regaining her lost consequence in the family, and knowing the
wealth and dignity her son would acquire, and in which she must
participate, by his marriage with Margaret, she had, after using all
the means of persuasion and intreaty, been driven, in despair at her
disappointment, to fabricate a tale as false as it was horrible,
which she related to her deluded son on the evening before his in-
tended nuptials with Elinor. She had assured him he was not her
son, but the offspring of the illicit commerce of her husband the
preacher with the puritan mother of Elinor, who had formerly been
one of his congregation, and whose well-known and strongly-expressed
admiration of his preaching had been once supposed extended to his
person,--had caused her much jealous anxiety in the early years of
their marriage, and was now made the basis of this horrible fiction.
She added, that Margaret's obvious attachment to her cousin had, in
some degree, palliated her guilt to herself; but that, when she saw
him quit her house in despair on the morning of his intended
marriage and rush he knew not whither, she was half tempted to
recall him, and confess the truth. Her mind again became hardened,
and she reflected that her secret was safe, as she had bound him by
an oath, from respect to his father's memory, and compassion to the
guilty mother of Elinor, never to disclose the truth to her daughter.

'The event had succeeded to her guilty wishes.--Sandal beheld
Elinor with the eyes of a brother, and the image of Margaret easily
found a place in his unoccupied affections. But, as often befals to
the dealers in falsehood and obliquity, the apparent accomplishment
of her hopes proved her ruin. In the event of the marriage of John
and Margaret proving issueless, the estates and title went to the
distant relative named in the will; and her son, deprived of reason
by the calamities in which her arts had involved him, was by them
also deprived of the wealth and rank to which they were meant to
raise him, and reduced to the small pension obtained by his former
services.--the poverty of the King, then himself a pensioner of
Lewis XIV., forbidding the possibility of added remuneration. When
the minister heard to the last the terrible confession of the dying
penitent, in the awful language ascribed to Bishop Burnet623 when
consulted by another criminal,--he bid her 'almost despair,' and
departed.

*

'Elinor has retired, with the helpless object of her unfading love
and unceasing care, to her cottage in Yorkshire. There, in the
language of that divine and blind old man, the fame of whose poet-
ry has not yet reached this country, it is

　　　　　　　　　　　'Her delight to see him sitting in the house,'624

and watch, like the father of the Jewish champion, the growth of
that 'God-given strength,' that intellectual power, which, unlike
Samson's, will never return.

'After an interval of two years, during which she had expended a
large part of the capital of her fortune in obtaining the first
medical advice for the patient, and 'suffered many things of many
physicians,'625 she gave up all hope,--and, reflecting that the in-
terest of her fortune thus diminished would be but sufficient to
procure the comforts of life for herself and him whom she has re-
solved never to forsake, she sat down in patient misery with her
melancholy companion, and added one more to the many proofs of
woman's heart, 'unwearied in well-doing,'626 without the intoxic-
ation of passion, the excitement of applause, or even the grat-
itude of the unconscious object.

“Were this a life of calm privation, and pulseless apathy, her
efforts would scarce have merit, and her sufferings hardly demand
compassion; but it is one of pain incessant and immitigable. The
first-born of her heart lies dead within it; but that heart is still
alive with all its keenest sensibilities, its most vivid hopes, and
its most exquisite sense of grief.

*

'She sits beside him all day--she watches that eye whose light was
life, and sees it fixed on her in glassy and unmeaning complacency--
she dreams of that smile which burst on her soul like the morning
sun over a landscape in spring, and sees that smile of vacancy which
tries to convey satisfaction, but cannot give it the language of
expression. Averting her head, she thinks of other days. A vision
passes before her.--Lovely and glorious things, the hues of whose
colouring are not of this world, and whose web is too fine to be
woven in the loom of life,--rise to her eye like the illusions of
enchantment. A strain of rich remembered music floats in her
hearing--she dreams of the hero, the lover, the beloved,--him in
whom were united all that could dazzle the eye, inebriate the
imagination, and melt the heart. She sees him as he first appeared
to her,--and the mirage of the desert presents not a vision more
delicious and deceptive--she bends to drink of that false fountain,
and the stream disappears--she starts from her reverie, and hears
the weak laugh of the sufferer, as he moves a little water in a
shell, and imagines he sees the ocean in a storm!

*

'She has one consolation. When a short interval of recollection
returns,--when his speech becomes articulate,--he utters her name,
not that of Margaret, and a beam of early hope dances on her heart
as she hears it, but fades away as fast as the rare and wandering
ray of intellect from the lost mind of the sufferer!

*

'Unceasingly attentive to his health and his comforts, she walk-
ed out with him every evening, but led him through the most
sequestered paths, to avoid those whose mockful persecution, or
whose vacant pity, might be equally torturing to her feelings,
or harassing to her still gentle and smiling companion.

'It was at this period,' said the stranger to Aliaga, 'I first be-
came acquainted with--I mean--at this time a stranger, who had
taken up his abode near the hamlet where Elinor resided, was seen
to watch the two figures as they passed slowly on their retired
walk. Evening after evening he watched them. He knew the history
of these two unhappy beings, and prepared himself to take advan-
tage of it. It was impossible, considering their secluded mode of
existence, to obtain an introduction. He tried to recommend himself
by his occasional attentions to the invalid--he sometimes picked up
the flowers that an unconscious hand flung into the stream, and lis-
tened, with a gracious smile, to the indistinct sounds in which the
sufferer, who still retained all the graciousness of his perished
mind, attempted to thank him.

'Elinor felt grateful for these occasional attentions; but she was
somewhat alarmed at the assiduity with which the stranger attended
their melancholy walk every evening,--and, whether encouraged,
neglected, or even repelled, still found the means of insinuating
himself into companionship. Even the mournful dignity of Elinor's
demeanour,--her deep dejection,--her bows or brief replies,--were
unavailing against the gentle but indefatigable importunity of the
intruder.

'By degrees he ventured to speak to her of her misfortunes,--and
that topic is a sure key to the confidence of the unhappy. Elinor
began to listen to him;--and, though somewhat amazed at the
knowledge he displayed of every circumstance of her life, she could
not but feel soothed by the tone of sympathy in which he spoke, and
excited by the mysterious hints of hope which he sometimes
suffered to escape him as if involuntarily. It was observed soon by
the inmates of the hamlet, whom idleness and the want of any
object of excitement had made curious, that Elinor and the stranger
were inseparable in their evening walks.

*

'It was about a fortnight after this observation was first made,
that Elinor, unattended, drenched with rain, and her head uncovered,
loudly and eagerly demanded admittance, at a late hour, at the
house of a neighbouring clergyman. She was admitted,--and the
surprise of her reverend host at this visit, equally unseasonable
and unexpected, was exchanged for a deeper feeling of wonder and
terror as she related the cause of it. He at first imagined (knowing
her unhappy situation) that the constant presence of an insane
person might have a contagious effect on the intellects of one so
perseveringly exposed to that presence.

'As Elinor, however, proceeded to disclose the awful proposal,
and the scarcely less awful name of the unholy intruder, the
clergyman betrayed considerable emotion; and, after a long pause,
desired permission to accompany her on their next meeting. This
was to be the following evening, for the stranger was unremitting
in his attendance on her lonely walks.

'It is necessary to mention, that this clergyman had been for some
years abroad--that events had occurred to him in foreign countries,
of which strange reports were spread, but on the subject of which he
had been always profoundly silent--and that having but lately fixed
his residence in the neighbourhood, he was equally a stranger to
Elinor, and to the circumstances of her past life, and of her present
situation.

*

'It was now autumn,--the evenings were growing short,--and the
brief twilight was rapidly succeeded by night. On the dubious verge
of both, the clergyman quitted his house, and went in the direction
where Elinor told him she was accustomed to meet the stranger.

'They were there before him; and in the shuddering and averted
form of Elinor, and the stern but calm importunity of her compan-
ion, he read the terrible secret of their conference. Suddenly
he advanced and stood before the stranger. They immediately rec-
ognized each other. An expression that was never before beheld
there--an expression of fear627--wandered over the features of the
stranger! He paused for a moment, and then departed without
uttering a word--nor was Elinor ever again molested by his
presence.

*

'It was some days before the clergyman recovered from the shock of
this singular encounter sufficiently to see Elinor, and explain to
her the cause of his deep and painful agitation.

'He sent to announce to her when he was able to receive her, and
appointed the night for the time of meeting, for he knew that during
the day she never forsook the helpless object of her unalienated
heart. The night arrived--imagine them seated in the antique study
of the clergyman, whose shelves were filled with the ponderous
volumes of ancient learning--the embers of a peat fire shed a dim
and fitful light through the room, and the single candle that burned
in a distant oaken stand, seemed to shed its light on that alone--not
a ray fell on the figures of Elinor and her companion, as they sat in
their massive chairs of carved-like figures in the richly-wrought
nitches of some Catholic place of worship--'

'That is a most profane and abominable comparison,' said Aliaga,
starting from the doze in which he had frequently indulged during
this long narrative.628

'But hear the result,' said the pertinacious narrator. 'The
clergyman confessed to Elinor that he had been acquainted with
an Irishman of the name of Melmoth, whose various erudition,
profound intellect, and intense appetency for information, had
interested him so deeply as to lead to a perfect intimacy between
them. At the breaking out of the troubles in England, the clergy-
man had been compelled, with his father's family, to seek refuge
in Holland. There again he met Melmoth, who proposed to him a
journey to Poland--the offer was accepted, and to Poland they
went. The clergyman here told many extraordinary tales of Dr
Dee,629 and of Albert Alasco, the Polish adventurer, who were their
companions both in England and Poland--and he added, that he felt
his companion Melmoth was irrevocably attached to the study of
that art which is held in just abomination by all 'who name the
name of Christ.'630 The power of the intellectual vessel was too great
for the narrow seas where it was coasting--it longed to set out on a
voyage of discovery--in other words, Melmoth attached himself to
those impostors, or worse, who promised him the knowledge and
the power of the future world--on conditions that are unutterable'.
A strange expression crossed his face as he spoke. He recovered
himself, and added, 'From that hour our intercourse ceased. I con-
ceived of him as of one given up to diabolical delusions--to the
power of the enemy.

'I had not seen Melmoth for some years. I was preparing to quit
Germany, when, on the eve of my departure, I received a message
from a person who announced himself as my friend, and who,
believing himself dying, wished for the attendance of a Protestant
minister. We were then in the territories of a Catholic electoral
bishop. I lost no time in attending the sick person. As I entered his
room, conducted by a servant, who immediately closed the door and
retired, I was astonished to see the room filled with an astrological
apparatus, books and implements of a science I did not understand;
in a corner there was a bed, near which there was neither priest or
physician, relative or friend--on it lay extended the form of
Melmoth. I approached, and attempted to address to him some
words of consolation. He waved his hand to me to be silent--and I
was so. The recollection of his former habits and pursuits, and the
view of his present situation, had an effect that appalled more than
it amazed me. 'Come near,' said Melmoth, speaking very faintly--
'nearer. I am dying--how my life has been passed you know but too
well. Mine was the great angelic sin--pride and intellectual
glorying! It was the first mortal sin--a boundless aspiration after
forbidden knowledge! I am now dying. I ask for no forms of religion
--I wish not to hear words that have to me no meaning, or that I
wish had none! Spare your look of horror. I sent for you to exact
your solemn promise that you will conceal from every human being
the fact of my death--let no man know that I died, or when, or
where.'

'He spoke with a distinctness of tone, and energy of manner, that
convinced me he could not be in the state he described himself to
be, and I said, 'But I cannot believe you are dying--your intellects
are clear, your voice is strong, your language is coherent, and but
for the paleness of your face, and your lying extended on that bed, I
could not even imagine you were ill.' He answered, 'Have you
patience and courage to abide by the proof that what I say is true?' I
replied, that I doubtless had patience, and for the courage, I looked
to that Being for whose name I had too much reverence to utter in
his hearing. He acknowledged my forbearance by a ghastly smile
which I understood too well, and pointed to a clock that stood at the
foot of his bed. 'Observe,' said he, 'the hour-hand is on eleven,
and I am now sane, clear of speech, and apparently healthful--tarry
but an hour, and you yourself will behold me dead!'631

'I remained by his bed-side--the eyes of both were fixed intently
on the slow motion of the clock. From time to time he spoke, but his
strength now appeared obviously declining. He repeatedly urged on
me the necessity of profound secresy, its importance to myself, and
yet he hinted at the possibility of our future meeting. I asked why
he thought proper to confide to me a secret whose divulgement was
so perilous, and which might have been so easily concealed? Un-
knowing whether he existed, or where, I must have been equally
ignorant of the mode and place of his death. To this he returned no
answer. As the hand of the clock approached the hour of twelve, his
countenance changed--his eyes became dim--his speech inarticulate
--his jaw dropped--his respiration ceased. I applied a glass to
his lips--but there was not a breath to stain it. I felt his wrist--
but there was no pulse. I placed my hand on his heart--there
was not the slightest vibration. In a few minutes the body was
perfectly cold. I did not quit the room till nearly an hour after--
the body gave no signs of returning animation.

'Unhappy circumstances detained me long abroad. I was in various
parts of the Continent, and every where I was haunted with the
report of Melmoth being still alive. To these reports I gave no
credit, and returned to England in the full conviction of his being
dead. Yet it was Melmoth who walked and spoke with you the last night
of our meeting. My eyes never more faithfully attested the presence
of living being. It was Melmoth himself, such as I beheld him many
years ago, when my hairs were dark and my steps were firm. I am
changed, but he is the same--time seems to have forborne to touch
him from terror. By what means or power he is thus enabled to
continue his posthumous and preternatural existence, it is impos-
sible to conceive, unless the fearful report that every where
followed his steps on the Continent, be indeed true.'

'Elinor, impelled by terror and wild curiosity, inquired into that
report which dreadful experience had anticipated the meaning of.
'Seek no farther' said the minister, 'you know already more than
should ever have reached the human ear, or entered into the
conception of the human mind. Enough that you have been enabled
by Divine Power to repel the assaults of the evil one--the trial was
terrible, but the result will be glorious. Should the foe persevere
in his attempts, remember that he has been already repelled amid the
horrors of the dungeon and of the scaffold, the screams of Bedlam
and the flames of the Inquisition--he is yet to be subdued by a foe
that he deemed of all others the least invincible--the withered
energies of a broken heart. He has traversed the earth in search of
victims, 'Seeking whom be might devour,'632 and has found no prey,
even where he might seek for it with all the cupidity of infernal
expectation. Let it be your glory and crown of rejoicing, that even
the feeblest of his adversaries has repulsed him with a power that
will always annihilate his.'

*

'Who is that faded form that supports with diffculty an emaciated
invalid, and seems at every step to need the support she gives?--It
is still Elinor tending John. Their path is the same, but the season
is changed--and that change seems to her to have passed alike on
the mental and physical world. It is a dreary evening in Autumn--
the stream flows dark and turbid beside their path--the blast is
groaning among the trees, and the dry discoloured leaves are
sounding under their feet--their walk is uncheered by human
converse, for one of them no longer thinks, and seldom speaks!

'Suddenly he gives a sign that he wishes to be seated--it is com-
plied with, and she sits beside him on the felled trunk of a tree.
He declines his head on her bosom, and she feels with delighted
amazement, a few tears streaming on it for the first time for years--
a soft but conscious pressure of her hand, seems to her like the
signal of reviving intelligence--with breathless hope she watches
him as he slowly raises his head, and fixes his eyes--God of all
consolation, there is intelligence in his glance! He thanks her with
an unutterable look for all her care, her long and painful labour
of love! His lips are open, but long unaccustomed to utter human
sounds, the effort is made with difficulty--again that effort is
repeated and fails--his strength is exhausted--his eyes close--his
last gentle sigh is breathed on the bosom of faith and love--and
Elinor soon after said to those who surrounded her bed, that she
died happy, since he knew her once more! She gave one parting
awful sign to the minister, which was understood and answered!



CHAPTER XXXIII


Cum mihi non tantum furesque feræque, suëtæ,
Hunc vexare locum, curæ sunt atque labori;
Quantum carminibus quæ versant atque venenis,
Humanos animos.633

HORACE


'It is inconceivable to me,' said Don Aliaga to himself, as he pursued
his journey the next day--'it is inconceivable to me how this person
forces himself on my company, harasses me with tales that have no
more application to me than the legend of the Cid, and may be as
apocryphal as the ballad of Roncesvalles634--and now he has ridden
by my side all day, and, as if to make amends for his former
uninvited and unwelcome communicativeness, he has never once
opened his lips.'

'Senhor,' said the stranger, then speaking for the first time, as
if he read Aliaga's thoughts--'I acknowledge myself in error for
relating to you a narrative in which you must have felt there was
little to interest you. Permit me to atone for it, by recounting to you
a very brief one, in which I flatter myself you will be disposed to
feel a very peculiar interest.'--'You assure me it will be brief,' said
Aliaga. 'Not only so, but the last I shall obtrude on your patience,'
replied the stranger. 'On that condition,' said Aliaga, 'in God's name,
brother, proceed. And look you handle the matter discreetly, as you
have said.'

'There was,' said the stranger, 'a certain Spanish merchant, who
set out prosperously in business; but, after a few years, finding his
affairs assume an unfavourable aspect, and being tempted by an
offer of partnership with a relative who was settled in the East
Indies, had embarked for those countries with his wife and son,
leaving behind him an infant daughter in Spain.'--'That was exactly
my case,' said Aliaga, wholly unsuspicious of the tendency of this
tale.

'Two years of successful occupation restored him to opulence,
and to the hope of vast and future accumulation. Thus encouraged,
our Spanish merchant entertained ideas of settling in the East Indies,
and sent over for his young daughter with her nurse, who embarked
for the East Indies with the first opportunity, which was then very
rare.'--'This reminds me exactly of what occurred to myself,' said
Aliaga, whose faculties were somewhat obtuse.

'The nurse and infant were supposed to have perished in a storm
which wrecked the vessel on an isle near the mouth of a river, and
in which the crew and passengers perished. It was said that the
nurse and child alone escaped; that by some extraordinary chance
they arrived at this isle, where the nurse died from fatigue and
want of nourishment, and the child survived, and grew up a wild
and beautiful daughter of nature, feeding on fruits,--and sleeping
amid roses,--and drinking the pure element,--and inhaling the
harmonies of heaven,--and repeating to herself the few Christian
words her nurse had taught her, in answer to the melody of the
birds that sung to her, and of the stream whose waves murmured in
accordance to the pure and holy music of her unearthly heart.'--'I
never heard a word of this before,' muttered Aliaga to himself. The
stranger went on.

'It was said that some vessel in distress arrived at the isle,--that
the captain had rescued this lovely lonely being from the brutality
of the sailors,--and, discovering from some remains of the Spanish
tongue which she still spoke, and which he supposed must have
been cultivated during the visits of some other wanderer to the isle,
he undertook, like a man of honour, to conduct her to her parents,
whose names she could tell, though not their residence, so acute and
tenacious is the memory of infancy. He fulfilled his promise, and the
pure and innocent being was restored to her family, who were then
residing in the city of Benares.' Aliaga, at these words, stared with
a look of intelligence somewhat ghastly. He could not interrupt the
stranger--he drew in his breath, and closed his teeth.

'I have since heard,' said the stranger, 'that the family has
returned to Spain,--that the beautiful inhabitant of the foreign
isle is become the idol of your cavaliers of Madrid,--your loung-
ers of the Prado,--your sacravienses,635--your--by what other name of
contempt shall I call them? But listen to me,--there is an eye fixed
on her, and its fascination is more deadly than that fabled of the
snake!--There is an arm extended to seize her, in whose grasp
humanity withers!--That arm even now relaxes for a moment,--its
fibres thrill with pity and horror,--it releases the victim for a
moment,--it even beckons her father to her aid!--Don Francisco, do
you understand me now?--Has this tale interest or application for
you?'

'He paused, but Aliaga, chilled with horror, was unable to answer
him but by a feeble exclamation. 'If it has,' resumed the stranger,
'lose not a moment to save your daughter!' and, clapping spurs to
his mule, he disappeared through a narrow passage among the
rocks, apparently never intended to be trod by earthly traveller.
Aliaga was not a man susceptible of strong impressions from nature;
but, if he had been, the scene amid which this mysterious warning
was uttered would have powerfully ministered to its effect. The time
was evening,--grey and misty twilight hung over every object;--the
way lay through a rocky road, that wound among mountains, or
rather stony hills, bleak and bare as those which the weary traveller
through the * western isles sees rising amid the moors, to which
they form a contrast without giving a relief. Heavy rains had made
deep gullies amid the hills, and here and there a mountain-stream
brawled amid its stony channel, like a proud and noisy upstart,
while the vast chasms that had been the beds of torrents which once
swept through them in thunder, now stood gaping and ghastly like
the deserted abodes of ruined nobility.636 Not a sound broke on the
stillness, except the monotonous echo of the hoofs of the mules
answered from the hollows of the hill, and the screams of the birds,
which, after a few short circles in the damp and cloudy air, fled
back to their retreats amid the cliffs.

*

'It is almost incredible, that after this warning, enforced as it was
by the perfect acquaintance which the stranger displayed of Aliaga's
former life and family-circumstances, it should not have had the
effect of making him hurry homewards immediately, particularly as
it seems he thought it of sufficient importance to make it the sub-
ject of correspondence with his wife. So it was however.

'At the moment of the stranger's departure, it was his resolution
not to lose a moment in hastening homewards; but at the next stage
he arrived at, there were letters of business awaiting him. A
mercantile correspondent gave him the information of the probable
failure of a house in a distant part of Spain, where his speedy
presence might be of vital consequence. There were also letters from
Montilla, his intended son-in-law, informing him that the state of his
father's health was so precarious, it was impossible to leave him till
his fate was decided. As the decisions of fate involved equally the
wealth of the son, and the life of the father, Aliaga could not help
thinking there was as much prudence as affection in this resolution.

'After reading these letters, Aliaga's mind began to flow in its
usual channel. There is no breaking through the inveterate
habitudes of a thorough-paced mercantile mind, 'though one rose
from the dead.'637 Besides, by this time the mysterious image of the
stranger's presence and communications were fading fast from a mind
not at all habituated to visionary impressions. He shook off the ter-
rors of this visitation by the aid of time, and gave his courage the
credit due to that aid. Thus we all deal with the illusions of the
imagination,--with this difference only, that the impassioned recal
them with the tear of regret, and the unimaginative with the blush
of shame. Aliaga set out for the distant part of Spain where his
presence was to save this tottering house in which he had an ex-
tensive concern, and wrote to Donna Clara, that it might be some
months before be returned to the neighbourhood of Madrid.



CHAPTER XXXIV


Husband, husband, I've the ring
Thou gavest to-day to me;
And thou to me art ever wed,
As I am wed to thee!

LITTLE'S POEMS638


'The remainder of that dreadful night when Isidora disappeared,
had been passed almost in despair by Donna Clara, who, amid all
her rigour and chilling mediocrity, had still the feelings of a
mother--and by Fra Jose, who, with all his selfish luxury and
love of domination, had a heart where distress never knocked for
admittance, that she did not find pity ready to open the door.
'The distress of Donna Clara was aggravated by her fear of her
husband, of whom she stood in great awe, and who, she dreaded,
might reproach her with unpardonable negligence of her maternal
authority.

'In this night of distress, she was often tempted to call on her son
for advice and assistance; but the recollection of his violent passions
deterred her, and she sat in passive despair till day. Then, with an
unaccountable impulse, she rose from her seat, and hurried to her
daughter's apartment, as if she imagined that the events of the
preceding night were only a fearful and false illusion that would be
dispersed by the approach of day.

'It seemed, indeed, as if they were, for on the bed lay Isidora in
a profound sleep, with the same pure and placid smile as when she
was lulled into slumber by the melodies of nature, and the sound
was prolonged in her dream by the whispered songs of the spirits of
the Indian Ocean. Donna Clara uttered a shriek of surprise, that had
the singular effect of rousing Fra Jose from a deep sleep into which
he had fallen at the approach of day. Starting at the sound, the good
natured, pampered priest, tottered into the room, and saw, with
incredulity that slowly yielded to frequent application to his
obstinate and adhesive eye-lids, the form of Isidora extended in
profound slumber.

'Oh what an exquisite enjoyment!' said the yawning priest, as he
looked on the sleeping beauty without another emotion than that of
the delight of an uninterrupted repose.--'Pray, don't disturb her,'
he said, yawning himself out of the room--'after such a night as we
all have had, sleep must be a very refreshing and laudable exercise;
and so I commend you to the protection of the holy saints!'--'Oh,
reverend Father!--Oh holy Father!' cried Donna Clara clinging to
him, 'desert me not in this extremity--this has been the work of
magic--of infernal spirits. See how profoundly she sleeps, though
we are speaking, and it is now day-light.'--'Daughter, you are much
mistaken,' answered the drowsy priest; 'people can sleep soundly
even in the day-time; and for proof send me, as I am now retiring to
rest, a bottle of Foncarral or Valdepenas--not that I value the
richest vintage of Spain from the Chacoli of Biscay to the Mataro of
Catalonia,639 but I would never have it said that I slept in the
daytime, but for sufficient reason.'--'Holy Father!' answered Donna
Clara, 'do you not think my daughter's disappearance and intense
slumber are the result of preternatural causes?'--'Daughter,'
answered the priest, contracting his brows, 'let me have some wine
to slake the intolerable thirst caused by my anxiety for the welfare
of your family, and let me meditate some hours afterwards on the
measures best to be adopted, and then--when I awake, I will give
you my opinion.'--'Holy Father, you shall judge for me in every
thing.'--'It were not amiss, daughter,' said the priest retiring,
'if a few slices of ham, or some poignant640 sausages, accompanied
the wine--it might, as it were, abate the deleterious effects of that
abominable liquor, which I never drink but on emergencies like
these.'--'Holy Father, they shall be ordered,' said the anxious
mother--'but do you not think my daughter's sleep is supernatural?'
--'Follow me to mine apartment, daughter,' answered the priest,
exchanging his cowl for a night-cap, which one of the numerous
household obsequiously presented him, 'and you will soon see that
sleep is a natural effect of a natural cause. Your daughter has
doubtless passed a very fatiguing night, and so have you, and so
have I, though perhaps from very different causes; but all those
causes dispose us to a profound repose.--I have no doubt of mine--
fetch up the wine and sausages--I am very weary--Oh I am weak
and worn with fasts and watching, and the labours of exhortation.
My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and my jaws cling
together,--perhaps a draught or two might dissolve their parching
adhesion. But I do so hate wine--why the devil don't you fetch up
the bottle?'

'The attendant domestic, terrified by the tone of wrath in which
the last words were uttered, hurried on with submissive expedition,
and Fra Jose sat down at length in his apartment to ruminate on the
calamities and perplexities of the family, till he was actually
overcome by the subject, and exclaimed in a tone of despair, 'Both
bottles empty! Then it is useless to meditate further on this
subject.'

*

'He was roused at an earlier hour than he wished, by a message
from Donna Clara, who, in the distress of a weak mind, accustomed
always to factitious and external support, now felt as if every step
she took without it, must lead to actual and instant perdition. Her
fear of her husband, next to her superstitious fears, held the
strongest power over her mind, and that morning she called Fra
Jose to an early consultation of terror and inquietude.--Her great
object was to conceal, if possible, the absence of her daughter on
that eventful night; and finding that none of the domestics appeared
conscious of it, and that amid the numerous household, only one
aged servant was absent, of whose absence no one took notice amid
the superfluous multitude of a Spanish establishment, her courage
began to revive. It was raised still higher by a letter from Aliaga,
announcing the necessity of his visiting a distant part of Spain, and
of the marriage of his daughter with Montilla being deferred for
some months--this sounded like reprieve in the ears of Donna Clara
--she consulted with the priest, who answered in words of comfort,
that if Donna Isidora's short absence were known, it was but a slight
evil, and if it were not known, it was none at all,--and he reco-
mmended to her, to ensure the secresy of the servants by means
that he swore by his habit were infallible, as he had known them
operate effectively among the servants of a far more powerful and
extensive establishment.--'Reverend Father,' said Donna Clara, 'I
know of no establishment among the grandees of Spain more
splendid than ours.'--'But I do, daughter,' said the priest, 'and the
head of that establishment is--the Pope;--but go now, and awake
your daughter, who deserves to sleep till doomsday, as she seems
totally to have forgotten the hour of breakfast. It is not for myself
I speak, daughter, but I cannot bear to see the regularity of a
magnificent household thus interrupted; for myself, a basin of choc-
olate, and a cluster of grapes, will be sufficient; and to allay the
crudity of the grapes, a glass of Malaga.--Your glasses, by the bye,
are the shallowest I ever drank out of--could you not find some
means to get from Ildefonso641 glasses of the right make, with short
shanks and ample bodies; Yours resemble those of Quichotte,642 all
limbs and no trunk. I like one that resembles his squire, a spacious
body and a shank that may be measured by my little finger.'--'I will
send to St Ildefonso this day,' answered Donna Clara.--'Go and
awake your daughter first,' said the priest.

'As he spoke, Isidora entered the room--the mother and the priest
both stood amazed. Her countenance was as serene, her step as e-
qual, and her mien as composed, as if she were totally uncon-
scious of the terror and distress her disappearance the pre-
ceding night had caused. To the first short silence of amazement,
succeeded a storm of interrogations from Donna Clara and Fra Jose
in concert--why--where--wherefore--and what, and with whom
and how--that was all they could articulate. They might as well
have spared themselves the trouble, for neither that day nor many
following, could the remonstrances, intreaties, or menaces of her
mother, aided by the spiritual authority and more powerful anxiety
of the priest, extort from her a word of explanation on the cause of
her absence that awful night. When closely and sternly pressed,
Isidora's mind seemed to assume something of the wild but potent
spirit of independence, which her early habits and feelings might
have communicated to her. She had been her own teacher and
mistress for seventeen years, and though naturally gentle and
tractable, when imperious mediocrity attempted to tyrannize over
her, she felt a sense of disdain which she expressed only by
profound silence.

'Fra Jose, incensed at her obstinacy, and trembling for the loss
of his power over the family, threatened to exclude her from
confession, unless she disclosed to him the secret of that night--
'Then I will confess to God!' said Isidora. Her mother's importunity
she found it more difficult to resist, for her feminine heart loved
all that was feminine even in its most unattractive shape, and the
persecution from that quarter was alike monotonous and unremitting.

'There was a weak but harassing tenacity about Donna Clara, that
is the general adjunct to the female character when it combines
intellectual mediocrity with rigid principle. When she laid siege to
a secret, the garrison might as well capitulate at once.--What she
wanted in vigour and ability, she supplied by a minute and gnawing
assiduity.643 She never ventured to carry the fort by storm, but her
obstinacy blockaded it till it was forced to surrender. But here e-
ven her importunity failed.--Isidora remained respectfully, but
resolutely silent; finding matters thus desperate, Donna Clara, who
had a fine talent for keeping as well as discovering a secret, agreed
with Fra Jose not to utter a syllable of the business to her father
and brother.--'We will show,' said Donna Clara, with a sagacious and
self-approving nod, 'that we can keep a secret as well as she.'--
'Right, daughter,' said Fra Jose, 'imitate her in the only point in
which you can flatter yourself with the hope of resemblance.'

*

'The secret was, however, soon disclosed. Some months had elapsed,
and the visits of her husband began to give an habitual calm and
confidence to the mind of Isidora. He imperceptibly was exchanging
his ferocious misanthropy for a kind of pensive gloom.--It was like
the dark, cold, but unterrific and comparatively soothing night, that
succeeds to a day of storm and earthquake. The sufferers remember
the terrors of the day, and the still darkness of the night feels
to them like a shelter. Isidora gazed on her espoused with delight,
when she saw no longer his withering frown, or more withering
smile; and she felt the hope that the calm purity of female hearts
always suggests, that its influence will one day float over the
formless and the void, like the spirit that moved upon the face of
the waters,644 and that the unbelieving husband may yet be saved by
the believing wife.

'These thoughts were her comfort, and it was well she had
thoughts to comfort her, for facts are miserable allies when
imagination fights its battle with despair. On one of those nights
that she expected Melmoth, he found her employed in her usual
hymn to the Virgin, which she accompanied on her lute. 'Is it not
rather late to sing your vesper hymn to the Virgin after midnight,'
said Melmoth with a ghastly smile. 'Her ear is open at all times, I
have been told,' answered Isidora.--'If it is, then, love,' said
Melmoth, vaulting as usual through the casement, 'add a stanza to
your hymn in favour of me.'--'Alas!' said Isidora, dropping her lute,
'you do not believe, love, in what the Holy Church requires.'--'Yes,
I do believe, when I listen to you.'--'and only then?'--'Sing again
your hymn to the Virgin.'

'Isidora complied, and watched the effect on the listener. He
seemed affected--he motioned to her to repeat it. 'My love,' said
Isidora, 'is not this more like the repetition of a theatrical song
called for by an audience, than a hymn which he who listens to loves
his wife better for, because she loves her God.'--'It is a shrewd
question,' said Melmoth, 'but why am I in your imagination ex-
cluded from the love of God?'--'Do you ever visit the church,'
answered the anxious Isidora. A profound silence.--'Do you ever
receive the Holy Sacrament?'--Melmoth did not utter a word.--
'Have you ever, at my earnest solicitation, enabled me to announce
to my anxious family the tie that united us?'--No answer.--'And
now--that--perhaps--I dare not utter what I feel! Oh, how shall I
appear before eyes that watch me even now so closely?--what shall
I say?--a wife without a husband--a mother without a father for
her child, or one whom a fearful oath has bound her never to
declare! Oh! Melmoth, pity me,--deliver me from this life of
constraint, falsehood, and dissimulation. Claim me as your wedded
wife in the face of my family, and in the face of ruin your wedded
wife will follow--will cling to--will perish with you!' Her arms
clung round him, her cold but heart-wrung tears fell fast on his
cheek, and the imploring arms of woman supplicating for deliv-
erance in her hour of shame and terror, seldom are twined round
us in vain. Melmoth felt the appeal--it was but for a moment.
He caught the white arms extended towards him--he fixed an eager
and fearful look of inquiry on his victim-consort, as he asked--
'And is it so?' The pale and shuddering wife shrunk from his arms
at the question--her silence answered him. The agonies of nature
throbbed audibly in his heart. He said to himself--it is mine--the
fruit of affection--the first-born of the heart and of nature--mine--
mine,--and whatever becomes of me, there shall yet be a human
being on earth who traces me in its external form, and who will be
taught to pray for its father, even when its prayer falls parched and
hissing on the fires that burn for ever, like a wandering drop of dew
on the burning sands of the desert!

*

'From the period of this communication, Melmoth's tenderness for
his wife visibly increased.

'Heaven only knows the source of that wild fondness with which
he contemplated her, and in which was still mingled something of
ferocity. His warm look seemed like the glow of a sultry summer
day, whose heat announces a storm, and compels us by its burning
oppression, to look to the storm almost for relief.

'It is not impossible that he looked to some future object of his
fearful experiment--and a being so perfectly in his power as his
own child, might have appeared to him fatally fitted for his purpose
--the quantum of misery, too, necessary to qualify the probationer,
it was always in his own power to inflict.645 Whatever was his motive,
he assumed as much tenderness as it was possible for him to
assume, and spoke of the approaching event with the anxious
interest of a human father.

'Soothed by his altered manner, Isidora bore with silent
sufferance the burden of her situation, with all its painful
accompaniments of indisposition and dejection, aggravated by
hourly fear and mysterious secresy. She hoped he would at length
reward her by an open and honourable declaration, but this hope
was expressed only in her patient smiles. The hour approached fast,
and fearful and indefinite apprehensions began to overshadow her
mind, relative to the fate of the infant about to be born under
circumstances so mysterious.

'At his next nightly visit, Melmoth found her in tears.

'Alas!' said she in answer to his abrupt inquiry, and brief attempt
at consolation, 'How many causes have I for tears--and how few
have I shed? If you would have them wiped away, be assured it is
only your hand can do it. I feel,' she added, 'that this event will
be fatal to me--I know I shall not live to see my child--I demand
from you the only promise that can support me even under this
conviction'--Melmoth interrupted her by the assurance, that these
apprehensions were the inseparable concomitants of her situation,
and that many mothers, surrounded by a numerous offspring, smiled
as they recollected their fears that the birth of each would be fatal
to them.

'Isidora shook her head. 'The presages,' said she, 'that visit me,
are such as never visited mortality in vain. I have always believed,
that as we approach the invisible world, its voice becomes more
audible to us, and grief and pain are very eloquent interpreters
between us and eternity--quite distinct from all corporeal suffering,
even from all mental terror, is that deep and unutterable impression
which is alike incommunicable and ineffaceable--it is as if heaven
spoke to us alone, and told us to keep its secret, or divulge it on
the condition of never being believed. Oh! Melmoth, do not give
that fearful smile when I speak of heaven--soon I may be your only
intercessor there.' 'My dear saint,' said Melmoth, laughing and
kneeling to her in mockery, 'let me make early interest for your
mediation--how many ducats will it cost me to get you canonized?
--you will furnish me, I hope, with an authentic account of leg-
itimate miracles--one is ashamed of the nonsense that is sent
monthly to the Vatican.' 'Let your conversion be the first miracle
on the list,' said Isidora, with an energy that made Melmoth trem-
ble--it was dark--but she felt that he trembled--she pursued her
imagined triumph--'Melmoth,' she exclaimed, 'I have a right to de-
mand one promise from you--for you I have sacrificed every thing--
never was woman more devoted--never did woman give proofs of
devotion like mine. I might have been the noble, honoured wife of
one who would have laid his wealth and titles at my feet. In this my
hour of danger and suffering, the first families in Spain would have
been waiting round my door. Alone, unaided, unsustained, uncon-
soled, I must undergo the terrible struggle of nature--terrible
to those whose beds are smoothed by the hands of affection, whose
agonies are soothed by the presence of a mother--who hears the
first feeble cry of her infant echoed by the joy of exulting noble
relatives. Oh Melmoth! what must be mine! I must suffer in secresy
and in silence! I must see my babe torn from me before I have even
kissed it,--and the chrism-mantle will be one of that mysterious
darkness which your fingers have woven! Yet grant me one thing--
one thing!' continued the suppliant, growing earnest in her prayer
even to agony: 'swear to me that my child shall be baptised ac-
cording to the forms of the Catholic church,--that it shall be a
Christian as far as those forms can make it,--and I shall feel that,
if all my fearful presages are fulfilled, I shall leave behind me one
who will pray for his father, and whose prayer may be accepted. Pro-
mise me,--swear to me,' she added, in intenser agony, 'that my child
shall be a Christian! Alas! if my voice be not worthy to be heard in
heaven, that of a cherub may! Christ himself suffered children to
come unto him while on earth, and will he repel them in heaven?--
Oh! no,--no! he will not repel yours!'

'Melmoth listened to her with feelings that it is better to suppress
than explain or expatiate on. Thus solemnly adjured, however, he
promised that the child should be baptised; and added, with an
expression which Isidora's delight at this concession did not give her
time to understand, that it should be a Christian as far as the rites
and ceremonies of the Catholic church could make it one. While he
added many a bitter hint of the inefficacy of any external rites--and
the impotentiality of any hierarchy--and of the deadly and desperate
impositions of priests under every dispensation--and exposed them
with a spirit at once ludicrous and Satanic,--a spirit that ming-
led ridicule with horror, and seemed like a Harlequin in the infer-
nal regions, flirting with the furies, Isidora still repeated her
solemn request that her child, if it survived her, should be baptised.
To this he assented; and added, with a sarcastic and appalling levity,
--'And a Mahometan, if you should change your mind,--or any
other mythology you please to adopt;--only send me word,--priests
are easily obtained, and ceremonies cheaply purchased! Only let me
know your future intentions,--when you know them yourself.'--'I
shall not be here to tell you,' said Isidora, replying with profound
conviction to this withering levity, like a cold winter day to the
glow of a capricious summer one, that blends the sunshine and the
lightning;--'Melmoth, I shall not be here then!' And this energy of
despair in a creature so young, so inexperienced, except in the
vicissitudes of the heart, formed a strong contrast to the stony
apathy of one who had traversed life from Dan to Beersheba, and
found all barren, or--made it so.646

'At this moment, while Isidora wept the cold tears of despair,
without daring to ask the hand of him she loved to dry them, the
bells of a neighbouring convent, where they were performing a mass
for the soul of a departed brother, suddenly rung out. Isidora seiz-
ed that moment, when the very air was eloquent with the voice of
religion, to impress its power on that mysterious being whose
presence inspired her equally with terror and with love. 'Listen,--
listen!' she cried. The sounds came slowly and stilly on, as if it
was an involuntary expression of that profound sentiment that night
always inspires,--the reverberating watch-word from sentinel to
sentinel, when wakeful and reflecting minds have become the
'watchers of the night.647 The effect of these sounds was increased,
by their catching from time to time the deep and thrilling chorus
of the voices,--these voices more than harmonized, they were co-
incident with the toll of the bell, and seemed like them set in
involuntary motion,--music played by invisible hands.

'Listen,' repeated Isidora, 'is there no truth in the voice that
speaks to you in tones like these? Alas! if there be no truth in
religion, there is none on earth! Passion itself evanishes into an
illusion, unless it is hallowed by the consciousness of a God and of
futurity. That sterility of the heart that forbids the growth of divine
feeling, must be hostile also to every tender and generous sentiment.
He who is without a God must be without a heart! Oh my love, will you
not, as you bend over my grave, wish my last slumbers to have been
soothed by sounds like these,--wish that they may whisper peace to
your own? Promise me, at least, that you will lead your child to my
tomb-stone,--that you will suffer it to read the inscription that tells
I died in the faith of Christ, and the hope of immortality. Its tears
will be powerful pleaders to you not to deny it the consolation that
faith has given me in hours of suffering, and the hopes with which it
will illuminate my parting hour. Oh promise me this at least, that
you will suffer your child to visit my grave--that is all. Do not
interrupt or distract the impression by sophistry or levity, or by that
wild and withering eloquence that flashes from your lips, not to
enlighten but to blast. You will not weep, but you will be silent,--
leave Heaven and nature free to their work. The voice of God will
speak to its heart, and my spirit, as it witnesses the conflict, will
tremble though in paradise,--and, even in heaven, will feel an
added joy, when it beholds the victory won. Promise me, then,--
swear to me!' she added, with agonizing energy of tone and gesture.
'Your child shall be a Christian!' said Melmoth.



CHAPTER XXXV


--Oh, spare me, Grimbald!
I will tempt hermits for thee in their cells.
And virgins in their dreams.

DRYDEN'S KING ARTHUR648


It is a singular, but well-attested fact, that women who are
compelled to undergo all the inconveniences and uneasiness of
clandestine pregnancy, often fare better than those whose situation
is watched over by tender and anxious relatives; and that concealed
or illegitimate births are actually attended with less danger and
suffering than those which have all the aid that skill and affection
can give. So it appeared likely to fare with Isidora. The retirement
in which her family lived--the temper of Donna Clara, as slow to
suspect from want of penetration, as she was eager in pursuing an
object once discovered, from the natural cupidity of a vacant mind--
these circumstances, combined with the dress of the day, the enor-
mous and enveloping fardingale, gave safety to her secret, at least
till the arrival of its crisis. As this crisis approached, one may
easily imagine the secret and trembling preparation--the important
nurse, proud of the trust reposed in her--the confidential maid--the
faithful and discreet medical attendant--to obtain all these Melmoth
supplied her amply with money--a circumstance that would have
surprised Isidora, as his appearance was always remarkably plain
and private, if, at this moment of anxiety, any thought but that of
the hour could have found room in her mind.

*

'On the evening supposed to be that preceding the dreaded event,
Melmoth had thrown an unusual degree of tenderness into his
manner--he gazed on her frequently with anxious and silent
fondness--he seemed to have something to communicate which he
had not courage to disclose. Isidora, well versed in the language
of the countenance, which is often, more than that of words, the
language of the heart, intreated him to tell her what he looked.
'Tour father is returning,' said Melmoth reluctantly. 'He will cer-
tainly be here in a few days, perhaps in a few hours.' Isidora heard
him in silent horror. 'My father!' she cried--'I have never seen
my father.--Oh, how shall I meet him now! And is my mother ignorant
of this?--would she not have apprized me?'--'She is ignorant at
present; but she will not long be so.'--'And from whence could you
have obtained intelligence that she is ignorant of?' Melmoth paus-
ed some time,--his features assumed a more contracted and gloomy
character than they had done laterally649--he answered with slow
and stern reluctance--'Never again ask me that question--the
intelligence that I can give you must be of more importance to you
than the means by which I obtain it--enough for you that it is true.'
--'Pardon me, love,' said Isidora; 'it is probable that I may never
again offend you--will you not, then, forgive my last offence?'

'Melmoth seemed too intently occupied with his own thoughts to
answer even her tears. He added, after a short and sullen pause,
'Your betrothed bridegroom is coming with your father--Montilla's
father is dead--the arrangements are all concluded for your nuptials
--your bridegroom is coming to wed the wife of another--with him
comes your fiery, foolish brother, who has set out to meet his father
and his future relative. There will be a feast prepared in the house
on the occasion of your future nuptials--you may hear of a strange
guest appearing at your festival--I will be there!'

'Isidora stood stupified with horror. 'Festival!' she repeated--'a
bridal festival!--and I already wedded to you, and about to become
a mother!'

*

'At this moment the trampling of many horsemen was heard as they
approached the villa--the tumult of the domestics hurrying to admit
and receive them, resounded through the apartments--and
Melmoth, with a gesture that seemed to Isidora rather like a menace
than a farewell, instantly disappeared; and within an hour, Isidora
knelt to the father she had never till then beheld--suffered herself
to be saluted by Montilla--and accepted the embrace of her brother,
who, in the petulance of his spirit, half rejected the chill and altered
form that advanced to greet him.

*

'Every thing at the family meeting was conducted in true Spanish
formality. Aliaga kissed the cold hand of his withered wife--the
numerous domestics exhibited a grave joy at the return of their
master--Fra Jose assumed increased importance, and called for
dinner in a louder tone. Montilla, the lover, a cold and quiet
character, took things as they occurred.

'Every thing lay hushed under a brief and treacherous calm. Isi-
dora, who trembled at the approaching danger, felt her terrors on
a sudden suspended. It was not so very near as she apprehended--
and she bore with tolerable patience the daily mention of her ap-
proaching nuptials, while she was momently650 harassed by her con-
fidential servants with hints of the impossibility of the event of
which they were in expectation, being much longer delayed. Isidora
heard, felt, endured all with courage--the grave congratulation of
her father and mother--the self-complacent attentions of Montilla,
sure of the bride and of her dower--the sullen compliance of the
brother, who, unable to refuse his consent, was for ever hinting
that his sister might have formed a higher connection. All these
passed over her mind like a dream--the reality of her existence
seemed internal, and she said to herself.--'Were I at the altar,
were my hand locked in that of Montilla, Melmoth would rend me
from him.' A wild but deeply-fixed conviction--a wandering image
of preternatural power, overshadowed her mind while she thought
of Melmoth;--and this image, which had caused her so much terror
and inquietude in her early hours of love, now formed her only
resource against the hour of inconceivable suffering; as those
unfortunate females in the Eastern Tales, whose beauty has at-
tracted the fearful passion of some evil genie, are supposed to
depend, at their nuptial hour, on the presence of the seducing
spirit, to tear from the arms of the agonized parent, and the
distracted bridegroom, the victim whom he has reserved for him-
self, and whose wild devotion to him gives a dignity to the u-
nion so unhallowed and unnatural.651

*

'Aliaga's heart expanded amid the approaching completion of the
felicitous plans he had formed, and with his heart, his purse, which
was its depositary, opened also, and he resolved to give a splendid
fete in honour of his daughter's nuptials. Isidora remembered
Melmoth's prediction of a fatal festival; and his words, 'I will be
there,' gave her for a time a kind of trembling confidence. But as
the preparations were carried on under her very eye,--as she was
hourly consulted about the disposal of the ornaments, and the
decorations of the apartments,--her resolution failed, and while
she uttered a few incoherent words, her eye was glazed with horror.

'The entertainment was to be a masked ball; and Isidora, who
imagined that this might suggest to Melmoth some auspicious
expedient for her escape, watched in vain for some hint of hope,--
some allusion to the probability of this event facilitating her
extrication from those snares of death that seemed compassing her
about. He never uttered a word, and her dependence on him was at
one moment confirmed, at another shaken to its foundation, by this
terrible silence. In one of these latter moments, the anguish of
which was increased beyond expression by a conviction that her
hour of danger was not far distant, she exclaimed to Melmoth--
'Take me--take me from this place! My existence is nothing--it is
a vapour that soon must be exhaled--but my reason is threatened
every moment! I cannot sustain the horrors to which I am exposed!
All this day I have been dragged through rooms decorated for my
impossible nuptials!--Oh, Melmoth, if you no longer love me, at
least commiserate me! Save me from a situation of horror
unspeakable!--have mercy on your child, if not on me! I have hung
on your looks,--I have watched for a word of hope--you have not
uttered a sound--you have not cast a glance of hope on me! I am
wild!--I am reckless of all but the imminent and present horrors of
to-morrow--you have talked of your power to approach, to enter
these walls without suspicion or discovery--you boasted of that
cloud of mystery in which you could envelope yourself. Oh! in this
last moment of my extremity, wrap me in its tremendous folds, and
let me escape in them, though they prove my shroud!--Think of the
terrible night of our marriage! I followed you then in fear and
confidence--your touch dissolved every earthly barrier--your steps
trod an unknown path, yet I followed you!--Oh! If you really
possess that mysterious and inscrutable power, which I dare not
either question or believe, exert it for me in this terrible emergency
--aid my escape--and though I feel I shall never live to thank you,
the silent suppliant will remind you by its smiles of the tears that I
now shed; and if they are shed in vain, its smile will have a bitter
eloquence as it plays with the flowers on its mother's grave!'

'Melmoth, as she spoke, was profoundly silent, and deeply
attentive. He said at last, 'Do you then resign yourself to me?'--
'Alas! have I not?'--'A question is not an answer. Will you,
renouncing all other engagements, all other hopes, depend on me
solely for your extrication from this fearful emergency?'--'I will--I
do!'--'Will you promise, that if I render you the service you require,
if I employ the power you say I have alluded to, you will be mine?'--
'Yours!--Alas! am I not yours already?'--'You embrace my
protection, then? You voluntarily seek the shelter of that power
which I can promise? You yourself will me to employ that power in
effecting your escape?--Speak--do I interpret your sentiments
aright?--I am unable to exercise those powers you invest me with,
unless you yourself require me to do so. I have waited--I have
watched for the demand--it has been made--would that it never
had!' An expression of the fiercest agony corrugated his stern
features as he spoke.--'But it may yet be withdrawn--reflect!'--
'And you will not then save me from shame and danger? Is this the
proof of your love--is this the boast of your power?' said Isidora,
half frantic at this delay. 'If I adjure you to pause--if I myself
hesitate and tremble--it is to give time for the salutary whisper of
your better angel.'652 'Oh! save me, and you shall be my angel!' said
Isidora, falling at his feet. Melmoth shook through his whole frame
as he heard these words. He raised and soothed her, however, with
promises of safety, though in a voice that seemed to announce
despair--and then turning from her, burst into a passionate
soliloquy. 'Immortal Heaven! what is man?--A being with the
ignorance, but not the instinct, of the feeblest animals!--They are
like birds--when thy hand, O Thou whom I dare not call Father, is
on them, they scream and quiver, though the gentle pressure is
intended only to convey the wanderer back to his cage--while, to
shun the light fear that scares their senses, they rush into the snare
that is spread in their sight, and where their captivity is hopeless!'
As he spoke, hastily traversing the room, his foot struck against a
chair on which a gorgeous dress was spread. 'What is this?' he
exclaimed--'What ideot trumpery, what May-queen foolery is this?'
--'It is the habit I am to wear at the feast to-night,' said Isidora--
'My attendants are coming--I hear them at the door--oh, with what
a throbbing heart I shall put on this glittering mockery!--But you
will not desert me then?' she added, with wild and breathless
anxiety. 'Tear not,' said Melmoth, solemnly--'You have demanded
my aid, and it shall be accorded. May your heart tremble no more
when you throw off that habit, than now when you are about to put
it on!'

'The hour approached, and the guests were arriving. Isidora, ar-
rayed in a splendid and fanciful garb, and rejoicing in the shelter
which her mask afforded to the expression of her pale features,
mingled among the groupe. She walked one measure with Montilla,
and then declined dancing on the pretence of assisting her mother
in receiving and entertaining her guests.

'After a sumptuous banquet, dancing was renewed in the spacious
hall, and Isidora followed the company thither with a beating
heart. Twelve was the hour at which Melmoth had promised to meet
her, and by the clock, which was placed over the door of the hall,
she saw it wanted but a quarter to twelve. The hand moved on--
it arrived at the hour--the clock struck! Isidora, whose eyes
had been rivetted on its movements, now withdrew them in despair.
At that moment she felt her arm gently touched, and one of the
maskers, bending towards her, whispered, 'I am here!' and he added
the sign which Melmoth and she had agreed on as the signal of their
meeting. Isidora, unable to reply, could only return the sign. 'Make
haste,' he added--'All is arranged for your flight--there is not a
moment to be lost--I will leave you now, but meet me in a few
moments in the western portico--the lamps are extinguished there,
and the servants have neglected to relight them--be silent and be
swift!' He disappeared as he spoke, and Isidora, after a few
moments, followed him. Though the portico was dark, a faint gleam
from the splendidly illuminated rooms disclosed to her the figure of
Melmoth. He drew her arm under his in silence, and proceeded to
hurry her from the spot. 'Stop, villain, stop!' exclaimed the voice
of her brother, who, followed by Montilla, sprung from the balcony--
'Where do you drag my sister?--and you, degraded wretch, where
are you about to fly, and with whom?' Melmoth attempted to pass
him, supporting Isidora with one arm, while the other was extended
to repel his approach; but Fernan, drawing his sword, placed himself
directly in their way, at the same time calling on Montilla to raise
the household, and tear Isidora from his arms. 'Off, fool--off!'
exclaimed Melmoth--'Rush not on destruction!--I seek not your life
--one victim of your house is enough--let us pass ere you perish!'--
'Boaster, prove your words!' said Fernan, making a desperate thrust
at him, which Melmoth coolly put by with his hand. 'Draw, coward!'
cried Fernan, rendered furious by this action--'My next will be
more successful!' Melmoth slowly drew his sword. 'Boy!' said he in
an awful voice--'If I turn this point against you, your life is not
worth a moment's purchase--be wise and let us pass.' Fernan made
no answer but by a fierce attack, which was instantly met by his
antagonist.

'The shrieks of Isidora had now reached the ears of the revellers,
who rushed in crowds to the garden--the servants followed them
with flambeaux snatched from the walls adorned for this ill-omened
festival, and the scene of the combat was in a moment as light as
day, and surrounded by a hundred spectators.

'Part them--part them--save them!' shrieked Isidora, writhing at the
feet of her father and mother, who, with the rest, were gazing in
stupid horror at the scene--'Save my brother--save my husband!'
The whole dreadful truth rushed on Donna Clara's mind at these
words, and casting a conscious look at the terrified priest, she
fell to the ground. The combat was short as it was unequal,--in
two moments Melmoth passed his sword twice through the body of
Fernan, who sunk beside Isidora, and expired! There was a universal
pause of horror for some moments--at length a cry of--'Seize the
murderer!' burst from every lip, and the crowd began to close
around Melmoth. He attempted no defence. He retreated a few
paces, and sheathing his sword, waved them back only with his arm;
and this movement, that seemed to announce an internal power above
all physical force, had the effect of nailing every spectator to
the spot where he stood.

'The light of the torches, which the trembling servants held up to
gaze on him, fell full on his countenance, and the voices of a few
shuddering speakers exclaimed, 'MELMOTH THE WANDERER!'--'I am
--I am!' said that unfortunate being--'and who now will oppose my
passing--who will become my companion?--I seek not to injure
now--but I will not be detained. Would that breathless fool had
yielded to my bidding, not to my sword--there was but one human
chord that vibrated in my heart--it is broken to-night, and for ever!
I will never tempt woman more! Why should the whirlwind, that
can shake mountains, and overwhelm cities with its breath, descend
to scatter the leaves of the rosebud?' As he spoke, his eyes fell on
the form of Isidora, which lay at his feet extended beside that of
Fernan. He bent over it for a moment--a pulsation like returning
life agitated her frame. He bent nearer--he whispered, unheard by
the rest,--'Isidora, will you fly with me--this is the moment--every
arm is paralysed--every mind is frozen to its centre!--Isidora, rise
and fly with me--this is your hour of safety!' Isidora, who
recognized the voice but not the speaker, raised herself for a
moment--looked on Melmoth--cast a glance on the bleeding bosom
of Fernan, and fell on it dyed in that blood. Melmoth started up--
there was a slight movement of hostility among some of the guests--
he turned one brief and withering glance on them--they stood
every man his hand on his sword, without the power to draw them,
and the very domestics held up the torches in their trembling hands,
as if with involuntary awe they were lighting him out. So he passed
on unmolested amid the groupe, till he reached the spot where
Aliaga, stupified with horror, stood beside the bodies of his son and
daughter. 'Wretched old man!' he exclaimed, looking on him as the
unhappy father strained his glazing and dilated eyes to see who
spoke to him, and at length with difficulty recognized the form of
the stranger--the companion of his fearful journey some months past
--'Wretched old man--you were warned--but you neglected the
warning--I adjured you to save your daughter--I best knew her
danger--you saved your gold--now estimate the value of the dross
you grasped, and the precious ore you dropt! I stood between myself
and her--I warned--I menaced--it was not for me to intreat.
Wretched old man--see the result!'--and he turned slowly to
depart. An involuntary sound of execration and horror, half a howl
and half a hiss, pursued his parting steps, and the priest, with a
dignity that more became his profession than his character,
exclaimed aloud, 'Depart accursed, and trouble us not--go, cursing
and to curse.'--'I go conquering and to conquer,' answered Melmoth
with wild and fierce triumph--'wretches! your vices, your passions,
and your weaknesses, make you my victims. Upbraid yourselves,
and not me. Heroes in your guilt, but cowards in your despair, you
would kneel at my feet for the terrible immunity with which I pass
through you at this moment.--I go accursed of every human heart,
yet untouched by one human hand!'--As he retired slowly, the
murmur of suppressed but instinctive and irrepressible horror and
hatred burst from the groupe. He past on scowling at them like a
lion on a pack of bayed hounds, and departed unmolested--
unassayed--no weapon was drawn--no arm was lifted--the mark
was on his brow,--and those who could read it knew that all human
power was alike forceless and needless,--and those who could not
succumbed in passive horror. Every sword was in its sheath as
Melmoth quitted the garden. 'Leave him to God!'--was the universal
exclamation. 'You could not leave him in worse hands,' exclaimed
Fra Jose--'He will certainly be damned--and--that is some comfort
to this afflicted family.'



CHAPTER XXXVI


Nunc animum pietas, et materna nomina frangunt.653


'In less than half an hour, the superb apartments, the illuminated
gardens of Aliaga, did not echo a footstep; all were gone, except a
few who lingered, some from curiosity, some from humanity, to
witness or condole with the sufferings of the wretched parents. The
sumptuously decorated garden now presented a sight horrid from
the contrasted figures and scenery. The domestics stood like statues,
holding the torches still in their hands--Isidora lay beside the
bloody corse of her brother, till an attempt was made to remove it,
and then she clung to it with a strength that required strength to
tear her from it--Aliaga, who had not uttered a word, and scarcely
drawn a breath, sunk on his knees to curse his half-lifeless daughter
--Donna Clara, who still retained a woman's heart, lost all fear of
her husband in this dreadful emergency, and, kneeling beside him,
held his uplifted hands, and struggled hard for the suspension of the
malediction--Fra Jose, the only one of the groupe who appeared to
possess any power of recollection or of mental sanity, addressed
repeatedly to Isidora the question, 'Are you married,--and married
to that fearful being?'--I am married!' answered the victim, rising
from beside the corse of her brother. 'I am married!' she added,
glancing a look at her splendid habit, and displaying it with a
frantic laugh. A loud knocking at the garden gate was heard at this
moment. I am married!' shrieked Isidora, 'and here comes the
witness of my nuptials!'

'As she spoke, some peasants from the neighbourhood, assisted
by the domestics of Don Aliaga, brought in a corse, so altered from
the fearful change that passes on the mortal frame, that the nearest
relative could not have known it. Isidora recognized it in a moment
for the body of the old domestic who had disappeared so mysterious-
ly on the night of her frightful nuptials. The body had been dis-
covered but that evening by the peasants; it was lacerated as by
a fall from rocks, and so disfigured and decayed as to retain no
resemblance to humanity. It was recognizable only by the livery of
Aliaga, which, though much defaced, was still distinguishable by
some peculiarities in the dress, that announced that those defaced
garments covered the mortal remains of the old domestic. 'There!'
cried Isidora with delirious energy--'There is the witness of my
fatal marriage!'

'Fra Jose hung over the illegible fragments of that whereon na-
ture had once written--'This is a human being,' and, turning his
eyes on Isidora, with involuntary horror he exclaimed, 'Your witness
is dumb!' As the wretched Isidora was dragged away by those who
surrounded her, she felt the first throes of maternal suffering, and
exclaimed, 'Oh! there will be a living witness--if you permit it to
live!' Her words were soon realized; she was conveyed to her
apartment, and a few hours after, scarcely assisted and wholly
unpitied by her attendants, gave birth to a daughter.

'This event excited a sentiment in the family at once ludicrous
and horrible. Aliaga, who had remained in a state of stupefaction
since his son's death, uttered but one exclamation--'Let the wife
of the sorcerer, and their accursed offspring, be delivered into
the hands of the merciful and holy tribunal, the Inquisition.'
He afterwards muttered something about his property being
confiscated, but nobody paid attention. Donna Clara was almost
distracted between compassion for her wretched daughter, and
being grandmother to an infant demon, for such she deemed the
child of 'Melmoth the Wanderer' must be--and Fra Jose, while he
baptized the infant with trembling hands, almost expected a fearful
sponsor to appear and blast the rite with his horrible negative to
the appeal made in the name of all that is holy among Christians.
The baptismal ceremony was performed, however, with an omission
which the good-natured priest overlooked--there was no sponsor--
the lowest domestic in the house declined with horror the proposal
of being sponsor for the child of that terrible union. The wretched
mother heard them from her bed of pain, and loved her infant better
for its utter destitution.

*

'A few hours put an end to the consternation of the family, on the
score of religion at least. The offlcers of the Inquisition arrived,
armed with all the powers of their tribunal, and strongly excited
by the report, that the Wanderer of whom they had been long in
search, had lately perpetrated an act that brought him within the
sphere of their jurisdiction, by involving the life of the only being
his solitary existence held alliance with. 'We hold him by the cords
of a man,' said the chief inquisitor, speaking more from what he
read than what he felt--'if he burst these cords he is more than
man. He has a wife and child, and if there be human elements in
him, if there be any thing mortal clinging to his heart, we shall
wind round the roots of it, and extract it.'

*

'It was not till after some weeks, that Isidora recovered her perfect
recollection. When she did, she was in a prison, a pallet of straw
was her bed, a crucifix and a death's head the only furniture of her
cell; the light struggled through a narrow grate, and struggled in
vain, to cast one gleam on the squalid apartment that it visited and
shrunk from. Isidora looked round her--she had light enough to see
her child--she clasped it to her bosom, from which it had uncon-
sciously drawn its feverish nourishment, and wept in extasy.
'It is my own,' she sobbed, 'and only mine! It has no father--he
is at the ends of the earth--he has left me alone--but I am not
alone while you are left to me!'

'She was left in solitary confinement for many days, undisturbed
and unvisited. The persons in whose hands she was had strong
reasons for this mode of treatment. They were desirous that she
should recover perfect sanity of intellect previous to her
examination, and they also wished to give her time to form that
profound attachment to the innocent companion of her solitude,
that might be a powerful engine in their hands in discovering those
circumstances relative to Melmoth that had hitherto baffled all the
power and penetration of the Inquisition itself. All reports agreed
that the Wanderer had never before been known to make a woman the
object of his temptation, or to entrust her with the terrible secret
of his destiny;* and the Inquisitors were heard to say to each other,
'Now that we have got the Delilah in our hands, we shall soon have
the Sampson.'

'It was on the night previous to her examination, (of which she
was unapprized), that Isidora saw the door of her cell opened,
and a figure appear at it, whom, amid the dreary obscurity that
surrounded her, she recognized in a moment,--it was Fra Jose.
After a long pause of mutual horror, she knelt in silence to receive
his benediction, which he gave with feeling solemnity; and then the
good monk, whose propensities, though somewhat 'earthly and
sensual,' were never 'devilish,' after vainly drawing his cowl over
his face to stifle his sobs, lifted up his voice and 'wept bitterly.'

'Isidora was silent, but her silence was not that of sullen apathy,
or of conscience-seared impenitence. At length Fra Jose seated
himself on the foot of the pallet, at some distance from the prisoner,
who was also sitting, and bending her cheek, down which a cold
tear slowly flowed, over her infant. 'Daughter,' said the monk,
collecting himself, 'it is to the indulgence of the holy offlce I owe
this permission to visit you.'--'I thank them,' said Isidora, and her
tears flowed fast and relievingly. 'I am permitted also to tell you
that your examination will take place to-morrow,--to adjure you to
prepare for it,--and, if there be any thing which'--'My exam-
ination!' repeated Isidora with surprise, but evidently without
terror, 'on what subject am I then to be examined?'--'On that of
your inconceivable union with a being devoted and accursed.' His
voice was choaked with horror, and he added, 'Daughter, are you
then indeed the wife of--of--that being, whose name makes the
flesh creep, and the hair stand on end?'--'I am.'--'Who were the
witnesses of your marriage, and what hand dared to bind yours with
that unholy and unnatural bond?'--'There were not witnesses--we
were wedded in darkness. I saw no form, but I thought I heard
words uttered--I know I felt a hand place mine in Melmoth's--its
touch was as cold as that of the dead.'--'Oh complicated and
mysterious horror!' said the priest, turning pale, and crossing
himself with marks of unfeigned terror: he bowed his head on his
arm for some time, and remained silent from unutterable emotion.
'Father,' said Isidora at length, 'you knew the hermit who lived amid
the ruins of the monastery near our house,--he was a priest also,
he was a holy man, it was he who united us!' Her voice trembled--
'Wretched victim!' groaned the priest, without raising his head,
'you know not what you utter--that holy man is known to have died
the very night preceding that of your dreadful union.'

'Another pause of mute horror followed, which the priest at
length broke.--'Unhappy daughter,' said he in a composed and
solemn voice, 'I am indulged with permission to give you the benefit
of the sacrament of confession, previous to your examination. I
adjure you to unburden your soul to me,--will you?'--'I will, my
father.'--'Will you answer me, as you would answer at the tribunal
of God?'--'Yes,--as I would answer at the tribunal of God.' As she
spake, she prostrated herself before the priest in the attitude of
confession.

*

'And you have now disclosed the whole burden of your spirit?'--'I
have, my father.' The priest sat thoughtfully for a considerable time.
He then put to her several singular questions relative to Melmoth,
which she was wholly unable to answer. They seemed chiefly the
result of those impressions of supernatural power and terror, which
were every where associated with his image. 'My father,' said Isi-
dora, when he had ceased, in a faultering voice, 'My father, may I
inquire about my unhappy parents?' The priest shook his head, and
remained silent. At length, affected by the agony with which she
urged her inquiry, he reluctantly said she might guess the effect
which the death of their son, and the imprisonment of their daugh-
ter in the Inquisition, must have on parents, who were no less
eminent for their zeal for the Catholic faith, than for their parental
affection. 'Are they alive?' said Isidora.--'Spare yourself the pain of
further inquiries, daughter,' said the priest, 'and be assured, that
if the answer was such as could give you comfort, it would not be
withheld.'

'At this moment a bell was heard to sound in a distant part of the
structure. 'That bell,' said the priest, 'announces that the hour of
your examination approaches--farewell, and may the saints be with
you.'--'Stay, father,--stay one moment,--but one moment!' cried
Isidora, rushing franticly between him and the door. Fra Jose
paused. Isidora sunk before him, and, hiding her face with her
hands, exclaimed in a voice choaked with agony, 'Father, do you
think--that I am--lost for ever?'--'Daughter,' said the priest in
heavy accents, and in a troubled and doubting spirit, 'Daughter,--I
have given you what comfort I could--press for no more, lest what I
have given (with many struggles of conscience) may be withdrawn.
Perhaps you are in a state on which I can form no judgment, and
pronounce no sentence. May God be merciful to you, and may the
holy tribunal judge you in its mercy also.'--'Yet stay, father--stay
one moment--only one moment--only one question more.' As she
spoke, she caught her pale and innocent companion from the pallet
where it slept, and held it up to the priest. 'Father, tell me, can this
be the child of a demon?--can it be, this creature that smiles on me
--that smiles on you, while you are mustering curses against it?--
Oh, holy drops have sprinkled it from your own hand!--Father, you
have spoke holy words over it. Father, let them tear me with their
pincers, let them roast me on their flames, but will not my child
escape--my innocent child, that smiles on you?--Holy father, dear
father, look back on your child.' And she crawled after him on her
knees, holding up the miserable infant in her arms, whose weak cry
and wasted frame, pleaded against the dungeon-life to which its
infancy had been doomed.

'Fra Jose melted at the appeal, and he was about to bestow many
a kiss and many a prayer on the wretched babe, when the bell again
was sounded, and hasting away, he had but time to exclaim, 'My
daughter, may God protect you!'--'God protect me,' said Isidora,
clasping her infant to her bosom. The bell sounded again, and
Isidora knew that the hour of her trial approached.



CHAPTER XXXVII


Fear not now the fever's fire,
Fear not now the death-bed groan;
Pangs that torture, pains that tine
Bed-rid age with feeble moan.

MASON654


'The first examination of Isidora was conducted with the
circumspective formality that has always been known to mark the
proceedings of that tribunal. The second and the third were alike
strict, penetrating and inoperative, and the holy offlce began to
feel its highest functionaries were no match for the extraordinary
prisoner who stood before them, who, combining the extremes of
simplicity and magnanimity, uttered every thing that might crim-
inate herself, but evaded with skill that baffled all the arts of
inquisitorial examination, every question that referred to Melmoth.
'In the course of the first examination, they hinted at the torture.
Isidora, with something of the free and nature-taught dignity of her
early existence, smiled as they spoke of it. An offlcial whispered
one of the inquisitors, as he observed the peculiar expression of
her countenance, and the torture was mentioned no more.

'A second--a third examination followed at long intervals--but it
was observed, that every time the mode of examination was less
severe, and the treatment of the prisoner more and more indulgent--
her youth, her beauty, her profound simplicity of character and
language, developed strongly on this singular emergency, and the
affecting circumstance of her always appearing with her child in her
arms, whose feeble cries she tried to hush, while she bent forward
to hear and answer the questions addressed to her--all these seemed
to have wrought powerfully on the minds of men not accustomed to
yield to external impressions. There was also a docility, a sub-
mission, about this beautiful and unfortunate being--a contrite
and bending spirit--a sense of wretchedness for the misfortunes of
her family--a consciousness of her own, that touched the hearts
even of inquisitors.

'After repeated examinations, when nothing could be extorted
from the prisoner, a skilful and profound artist in the school of
mental anatomy, whispered to the inquisitor something about the
infant whom she held in her arms. 'She has defied the rack,' was the
answer. 'Try her on that rack,' was rejoined, and the hint was taken.

'After the usual formalities were gone through, Isidora's sentence
was read to her. She was condemned, as a suspected heretic, to
perpetual confinement in the prison of the Inquisition--her child
was to be taken from her, and brought up in a convent, in order to--

'Here, the reading of the sentence was interrupted by the prisoner,
who, uttering one dreadful shriek of maternal agony, louder than
any other mode of torture had ever before extorted, fell pro-
strate on the floor. When she was restored to sensation, no
authority or terror of the place or the judges, could prevent her
pouring forth those wild and piercing supplications, which, from the
energy with which they are uttered, appear to the speaker himself
like commands,--that the latter part of her sentence might be
remitted--the former appeared to make not the least impression on
her--eternal solitude, passed in eternal darkness, seemed to give her
neither fear nor pain, but she wept, and pleaded, and raved, that she
might not be separated from her infant.

'The judges listened with fortified hearts, and in unbroken silence.
When she found all was over, she rose from her posture of
humiliation and agony--and there was something even of dignity
about her as she demanded, in a calm and altered voice, that her
child might not be removed from her till the following day. She had
also self-possession enough to enforce her petition by the remark,
that its life might be the sacrifice if it was too suddenly deprived of
the nourishment it was accustomed to receive from her. To this
request the judges acceded, and she was remanded to her cell.

*

'The time elapsed. The person who brought her food departed
without uttering a word; nor did she utter a word to him. It was
about midnight that the door of her cell was unlocked, and two
persons in offlcial habits appeared at it. They seemed to pause,
like the heralds at the tent of Achilles, and then, like them,
forced themselves to enter.655 These men had haggard and livid faces
--their attitudes were perfectly stony and automaton-like--their
movements appeared the result of mere mechanism--yet these men
were touched. The miserable light within hardly shewed the pallet
on which the prisoner was seated; but a strong red light from the
torch the attendant held, flared broadly on the arch of the door
under which the figures appeared. They approached with a motion
that seemed simultaneous and involuntary--and uttered together, in
accents that seemed to issue from one mouth, 'Deliver your child to
us.' In a voice as hoarse, dry, and natureless, the prisoner an-
swered, 'Take it!'

'The men looked about the cell--it seemed as if they knew not
where to find the offspring of humanity amid the cells of the
Inquisition. The prisoner was silent and motionless during their
search. It was not long--the narrow apartment, the scanty furniture,
afforded little room for the investigation. When it was concluded,
however, the prisoner, bursting into a wild laugh, exclaimed,
'Where would you search for a child but in its mother's bosom?
Here--here it is--take it--take it!' And she put it into their hands.
'Oh what fools ye were to seek my child any where but on its
mother's bosom! It is your's now!' she shrieked in a voice that
froze the offlcials.--'Take it--take it from me!'

'The agents of the holy offlce advanced; and the technicality of
their movements was somewhat suspended when Isidora placed in
their hands the corse of her infant daughter. Around the throat of
the miserable infant, born amid agony, and nursed in a dungeon,
there was a black mark, which the offlcials made their use of in
representing this extraordinary circumstance to the holy offlce. By
some it was deemed as the sign impressed by the evil one at its birth
--by others as the fearful effect of maternal despair.

'It was determined that the prisoner should appear before them
within four-and-twenty hours, and account for the death of her
child.

*

'Within less than half that number of hours, a mightier arm than
that of the Inquisition was dealing with the prisoner--an arm that
seemed to menace, but was indeed stretched out to save, and before
whose touch the barriers of the dreaded Inquisition itself were as
frail as the fortress of the spider who hung her web on its walls.
Isidora was dying of a disease not the less mortal because it makes
no appearance in an obituary--she was dying of that internal and
incurable wound--a broken heart.

'When the inquisitors were at last convinced that there was
nothing more to be obtained by torture, bodily or mental torture,
they suffered her to die unmolested, and granted her last request,
that Fra Jose might be permitted to visit her.

*

'It was midnight, but its approach was unknown in that place, where
day and night are the same. A dim lamp was substituted for that
weak and struggling beam that counterfeited day-light. The penitent
was stretched on her bed of rest--the humane priest sat beside her;
and if his presence gave no dignity to the scene, it at least softened
it by the touches of humanity.

*

'My father,' said the dying Isidora, 'you pronounced me forgiven.'--
'Yes, my daughter,' said the priest, 'you have assured me you are
innocent of the death of your infant.'--'You never could have
believed me guilty,' said Isidora, raising herself on her pallet at the
appeal--'the consciousness of its existence alone would have kept
me alive, even in my prison. Oh, my father, how was it possible it
could live, buried with me in this dreadful place almost as soon as it
respired? Even the morbid nourishment it received from me was
dried up when my sentence was read. It moaned all night--towards
morning its moans grew fainter, and I was glad--at last they ceased,
and I was very happy!' But, as she talked of this fearful happiness,
she wept.

'My daughter, is your heart disengaged from that awful and
disastrous tie that bound it to misfortune here, and to perdition
hereafter?' It was long before she could answer; at length she said in
a broken voice. 'My father, I have not now strength to search or to
struggle with my heart. Death must very soon break every tie that
was twined with it, and it is useless to anticipate my liberation; the
effort would be agony--fruitless agony, for, while I live, I must
love my destroyer! Alas! in being the enemy of mankind, was not his
hostility to me inevitable and fatal? In rejecting his last ter-
rible temptation--in resigning him to his destiny, and preferring
submission to my own, I feel my triumph complete, and my salva-
tion assured.'--'Daughter, I do not comprehend you.'--'Melmoth,'
said Isidora, with a strong effort, 'Melmoth was here last night
--within the walls of the Inquisition--within this very cell!' The
priest crossed himself with the marks of the profoundest horror,
and, as the wind swept hollowly through the long passage, almost
expected the shaken door would burst open, and disclose the figure
of the Wanderer.

*

'My father, I have had many dreams,' answered the penitent,
shaking her head at a suggestion of the priest's, 'many--many
wanderings, but this was no dream. I have dreamed of the garden-
land where I beheld him first--I have dreamed of the nights when
he stood at my casement, and trembled in sleep at the sound of my
mother's step--and I have had holy and hopeful visions, in which
celestial forms appeared to me, and promised me his conversion--
but this was no dream--I saw him last night. Father, he was here
the whole night--he promised--he assured me--he adjured me to
accept of liberation and safety, of life and of felicity. He told me,
nor could I doubt him, that, by whatever means he effected his
entrance, he could also effect my escape. He offered to live with me
in that Indian isle--that paradise of ocean, far from human resort or
human persecution.--He offered to love me alone, and for ever--
and then I listened to him. Oh, my father. I am very young, and life
and love sounded sweetly in my ears, when I looked at my dungeon,
and thought of dying on this floor of stone! But--when he
whispered the terrible condition on which the fulfilment of his
promise depended--when he told me that'--

'Her voice failed with her failing strength, and she could utter no
more. 'Daughter,' said the priest, bending over her bed, 'daughter, I
adjure you, by the image represented on this cross I hold to your
dying lips--by your hopes of that salvation which depends on the
truth you utter to me, your priest and your friend--the conditions
proposed by your tempter!' 'Promise me absolution for repeating the
words, for I should wish that my last breath might not be exhaled in
uttering--what I must.'--'Te absolvo,' &c. said the priest, and bent
his ear to catch the sounds. The moment they were uttered, he
started as from the sting of a serpent, and, seating himself at the
extremity of the cell, rocked in dumb horror. 'My father, you
promised me absolution,' said the penitent. 'Jam tibi dedi, mori-
bunda,'656 answered the priest, in the confusion of thoughts using
the language appropriated to the service of religion. 'Moribunda
indeed!' said the sufferer, falling back on her pallet. 'Father, let me
feel a human hand in mine as I part!'--'Call upon God, daughter!'
said the priest, applying the crucifix to her cold lips. 'I loved his
religion,' said the penitent, kissing it devoutly, 'I loved it before I
knew it, and God must have been my teacher, for I had no other!
Oh!' she exclaimed, with that deep conviction that must thrill every
dying heart, and whose echo (would God) might pierce every living
one--'Oh that I have loved none but God--how profound would
have been my peace--how glorious my departure--now--his image
pursues me even to the brink of the grave, into which I plunge to
escape it!'

'My daughter,' said the priest, while the tears rolled fast down his
cheeks--'my daughter, you are passing to bliss--the conflict was
fierce and short, but the victory is sure--harps are tuned to a new
song, even a song of welcome, and wreaths of palm are weaving for
you in paradise!'

'Paradise!' uttered Isidora, with her last breath--'Will he be there!'



CHAPTER XXXVIII



Loud tolled the bell, the priests prayed
well,
The tapers they all burned bright,
The monk her son, and her daughter the
nun,
They told their beads all night!

*

The second night--

*

The monk and the nun they told their
beads
As fast as they could tell,
And aye the louder grew the noise,
The faster went the bell!

*

The third night came--

*

The monk and the nun forgot their beads,
They fell to the ground dismayed,
There was not a single saint in heaven
Whom they did not call to their aid!

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　SOUTHEY657


Monçada here concluded the tale of the Indian,--the victim of
Melmoth's passion, no less than of his destiny, both alike
unhallowed and unutterable. And he announced his intention of
disclosing to him the fates of the other victims, whose skeletons
were preserved in the vault of the Jew Adonijah in Madrid. He
added, that the circumstances relating to them, were of a character
still darker and more awful than those he had recited, as they were
the result of impressions made on masculine minds, without any
excitement but that of looking into futurity. He mentioned, too,
that the circumstances of his residence in the house of the Jew,
his escape from it, and the reasons of his subsequent arrival in
Ireland, were scarcely less extraordinary than any thing he had
hitherto related. Young Melmoth, (whose name perhaps the reader
has forgot) did 'seriously incline'658 to the purpose of having his
dangerous curiosity further gratified, nor was he perhaps altogether
without the wild hope of seeing the original of that portrait he had
destroyed, burst from the walls and take up the fearful tale himself.

The narrative of the Spaniard had occupied many days; at their
termination, young Melmoth signified to his guest that he was
prepared to hear the sequel.

A night was fixed for the continuation of the recital. Young
Melmoth and his guest met in the usual apartment--it was a dreary,
stormy night--the rain that had fallen all day, seemed now to have
yielded to the wind, that came in strong and sudden bursts,
suddenly hushed, as if collecting strength for the tempest of the
night. Monçada and Melmoth drew their chairs closer to the fire,
looking at each other with the aspect of men who wish to inspire
each other with courage to listen, and to tell, and are the more
eager to inspire it, because neither feels it himself.

At length Monçada collected his voice and resolution to proceed,
but as he went on, he perceived he could not fix his hearer's
attention, and he paused.

'I thought,' said Melmoth, answering his silence, 'I thought I
heard a noise--as of a person walking in the passage.' 'Hush! and
listen,' said Monçada, 'I would not wish to be overheard.' They
paused and held their breath--the sound was renewed--it was
evidently that of steps approaching the door, and then retiring from
it. 'We are watched,' said Melmoth, half-rising from his chair, but
at that moment the door opened, and a figure appeared at it, which
Monçada recognized for the subject of his narrative, and his
mysterious visitor in the prison of the Inquisition, and Melmoth for
the original of the picture, and the being whose unaccountable
appearance had filled him with consternation, as he sat beside his
dying uncle's bed.

The figure stood at the door for some time, and then advancing
slowly till it gained the centre of the room, it remained there fixed
for some time, but without looking at them. It then approached the
table where they sat, in a slow but distinctly heard step, and stood
before them as a living being. The profound horror that was equally
felt by both, was differently expressed by each. Monçada crossed
himself repeatedly, and attempted to utter many prayers. Melmoth,
nailed to his chair, fixed his sightless eyes on the form that stood
before him--it was indeed Melmoth the Wanderer--the same as he
was in the past century--the same as he may be in centuries to
come, should the fearful terms of his existence be renewed. His
'natural force was not abated,' but 'his eye was dim,'659--that
appalling and supernatural lustre of the visual organ, that beacon
lit by an infernal fire, to tempt or to warn the adventurers of
despair from that coast on which many struck, and some sunk--that
portentous light was no longer visible--the form and figure were
those of a living man, of the age indicated in the portrait which
the young Melmoth had destroyed, but the eyes were as the eyes of
the dead.

*

As the Wanderer advanced still nearer till his figure touched the
table, Monçada and Melmoth started up in irrepressible horror, and
stood in attitudes of defence, though conscious at the moment that
all defence was hopeless against a being that withered and mocked
at human power. The Wanderer waved his arm with an action that
spoke defiance without hostility--and the strange and solemn
accents of the only human voice that had respired mortal air beyond
the period of mortal life, and never spoken but to the ear of guilt
or suffering, and never uttered to that ear aught but despair, roll-
ed slowly on their hearing like a peal of distant thunder.

'Mortals--you are here to talk of my destiny, and the events which
it has involved. That destiny is accomplished, I believe, and
with it terminate those events that have stimulated your wild and
wretched curiosity. I am here to tell you of both!--I--I--of whom
you speak, am here!--Who can tell so well of Melmoth the Wanderer
as himself, now that he is about to resign that existence which
has been the object of terror and wonder to the world?--Melmoth,
you behold your ancestor--the being on whose portrait is in-
scribed the date of a century and a half, is before you.--Monçada,
you see an acquaintance of a later date.'--(A grim smile of
recognition wandered over his features as he spoke.)--'Fear
nothing,' he added, observing the agony and terror of his invol-
untary hearers--'What have you to fear?' he continued, while a
flash of derisive malignity once more lit up the sockets of his
dead eyes--'You, Senhor, are armed with your beads--and you,
Melmoth, are fortified by that vain and desperate inquisitiveness,
which might, at a former period, have made you my victim,'--(and
his features underwent a short but horrible convulsion)--'but now
makes you only my mockery.

*

'Have you aught to quench my thirst?' he added, seating himself.
The senses of Monçada and his companion reeled in delirious terror,
and the former, in a kind of wild confidence, filled a glass of water,
and offered it to the Wanderer with a hand as steady, but somewhat
colder, as he would have presented it to one who sat beside him in
human companionship. The Wanderer raised it to his lips, and
tasted a few drops, then replacing it on the table, said with a laugh,
wild indeed, but no longer ferocious--'Have you seen,' said he to
Monçada and Melmoth, who gazed with dim and troubled sight on
this vision, and wist not what to think--'Have you seen the fate of
Don Juan, not as he is pantomimed on your paltry stage, but as he is
represented in the real horrors of his destiny by the Spanish
writer'?660 There the spectre returns the hospitality of his inviter,
and summons him in turn to a feast.--The banquet-hall is a church
--he arrives--it is illuminated with a mysterious light--invisible
hands hold lamps fed by no earthly substance, to light the apostate
to his doom!--He enters the church, and is greeted by a numerous
company--the spirits of those whom he has wronged and murdered,
uprisen from their charnel, and swathed in shrouds, stand there
to welcome him!--As he passes among them, they call on him in
hollow sounds to pledge them in goblets of blood which they pre-
sent to him--and beneath the altar, by which stands the spirit of
him whom the parricide has murdered, the gulph of perdition is
yawning to receive him!--Through such a band I must soon prepare
to pass!--Isidora! thy form will be the last I must encounter--and--
the most terrible! Now for the last drop I must taste of earth's
produce--the last that shall wet my mortal lips!' He slowly finished
the draught of water. Neither of his companions had the power to
speak. He sat down in a posture of heavy musing, and neither
ventured to interrupt him.

They kept silence till the morning was dawning, and a faint light
streamed through the closed shutters. Then the Wanderer raised his
heavy eyes, and fixed them on Melmoth. 'Your ancestor has come
home,' he said; 'his wanderings are over!--What has been told or
believed of me is now of light avail to me. The secret of my destiny
rests with myself. If all that fear has invented, and credulity
believed of me be true, to what does it amount? That if my crimes
have exceeded those of mortality, so will my punishment. I have
been on earth a terror, but not an evil661 to its inhabitants. None
can participate in my destiny but with his own consent--none have
consented--none can be involved in its tremendous penalties, but by
participation. I alone must sustain the penalty. If I have put forth
my hand, and eaten of the fruit of the interdicted tree, am I not
driven from the presence of God and the region of paradise, and
sent to wander amid worlds of barrenness and curse for ever and
ever?

'It has been reported of me, that I obtained from the enemy of
souls a range of existence beyond the period allotted to mortality--
a power to pass over space without disturbance or delay, and visit
remote regions with the swiftness of thought--to encounter tem-
pests without the hope of their blasting me, and penetrate into
dungeons, whose bolts were as flax and tow at my touch. It has been
said that this power was accorded to me, that I might be enabled to
tempt wretches in their fearful hour of extremity, with the promise
of deliverance and immunity, on condition of their exchanging
situations with me. If this be true, it bears attestation to a truth
uttered by the lips of one I may not name, and echoed by every
human heart in the habitable world.

'No one has ever exchanged destinies with Melmoth the Wanderer.
I have traversed the world in the search, and no one to gain
that world, would lose his own soul!662 Not Stanton in his cell--
nor you, Monçada, in the prison of the Inquisition--nor Walberg,
who saw his children perishing with want--not--another'--He
paused, and though on the verge of his dark and doubtful voyage,
he seemed to cast one look of bitter and retrospective anguish
on the receding shore of life, and see, through the mists of
memory, one form that stood there to bid him farewell. He rose--
'Let me, if possible, obtain an hour's repose. Aye, repose--sleep!'
he repeated, answering the silent astonishment of his hearers' looks,
'my existence is still human!'--and a ghastly and derisive smile
wandered over his features for the last time, as he spoke. How
often had that smile frozen the blood of his victims! Melmoth and
Monçada quitted the apartment; and the Wanderer, sinking back in
his chair, slept profoundly. He slept, but what were the visions
of his last earthly slumber?


　　　　　 　　 The Wanderer's Dream


He dreamed that he stood on the summit of a precipice, whose
downward height no eye could have measured, but for the fearful
waves of a fiery ocean that lashed, and blazed, and roared at its
bottom, sending its burning spray far up, so as to drench the
dreamer with its sulphurous rain. The whole glowing ocean below
was alive--every billow bore an agonizing soul, that rose like a
wreck or a putrid corse on the waves of earth's ocean--uttered a
shriek as it burst against that adamantine precipice--sunk--and
rose again to repeat the tremendous experiment! Every billow of fire
was thus instinct with immortal and agonizing existence,--each was
freighted with a soul, that rose on the burning wave in torturing
hope, burst on the rock in despair, added its eternal shriek to the
roar of that fiery ocean, and sunk to rise again--in vain, and--for
ever!

Suddenly the Wanderer felt himself flung half-way down the pre-
cipice. He stood, in his dream, tottering on a crag midway down
the precipice--he looked upward, but the upper air (for there was
no heaven) showed only blackness unshadowed and impenetrable--
but, blacker than that blackness, he could distinguish a gigantic
outstretched arm, that held him as in sport on the ridge of that
infernal precipice, while another, that seemed in its motions to hold
fearful and invisible conjunction with the arm that grasped him, as
if both belonged to some being too vast and horrible even for the
imagery of a dream to shape, pointed upwards to a dial-plate fixed
on the top of that precipice, and which the flashes of that ocean of
fire made fearfully conspicuous. He saw the mysterious single hand
revolve--he saw it reach the appointed period of 150 years--(for in
this mystic plate centuries were marked, not hours)--he shrieked in
his dream, and, with that strong impulse often felt in sleep, burst
from the arm that held him, to arrest the motion of the hand.

In the effort he fell, and falling grasped at aught that might save
him. His fall seemed perpendicular--there was nought to save him--
the rock was as smooth as ice--the ocean of fire broke at its foot!
Suddenly a groupe of figures appeared, ascending as he fell. He
grasped at them successively;--first Stanton--then Walberg--Elinor
Mortimer--Isidora--Monçada--all passed him,--to each he seemed
in his slumber to cling in order to break his fall--all ascended the
precipice. He caught at each in his downward flight, but all forsook
him and ascended.

His last despairing reverted glance was fixed on the clock of
eternity--the upraised black arm seemed to push forward the hand
– it arrived at its period--he fell--he sunk--he blazed--he
shrieked! The burning waves boomed over his sinking head, and the
clock of eternity rung out its awful chime--'Room for the soul of
the Wanderer!'--and the waves of the burning ocean answered, as
they lashed the adamantine rock--'There is room for more!'--The
Wanderer awoke.



CHAPTER XXXIX


And in he came with eyes of flame,
The fiend to fetch the dead.

SOUTHEY'S

Old Woman of Berkeley



Melmoth and Monçada did not dare to approach the door till about
noon. They then knocked gently at the door, and finding the
summons unanswered, they entered slowly and irresolutely. The
apartment was in the same state in which they had left it the
preceding night, or rather morning; it was dusky and silent, the
shutters had not been opened, and the Wanderer still seemed
sleeping in his chair.

At the sound of their approach he half-started up, and demanded
what was the hour. They told him. 'My hour is come,' said the
Wanderer, 'it is an hour you must neither partake or witness--the
clock of eternity is about to strike, but its knell must be unheard
by mortal ears!' As he spoke they approached nearer, and saw with
horror the change the last few hours had wrought on him. The
fearful lustre of his eyes had been deadened before their late
interview, but now the lines of extreme age were visible in every
feature. His hairs were as white as snow, his mouth had fallen in,
the muscles of his face were relaxed and withered--he was the very
image of hoary decrepid debility.663 He started himself at the
impression which his appearance visibly made on the intruders.
'You see what I feel,' he exclaimed, 'the hour then is come. I am
summoned, and I must obey the summons--my master has other work
for me! When a meteor blazes in your atmosphere--when a comet
pursues its burning path towards the sun--look up, and perhaps
you may think of the spirit condemned to guide the blazing and
erratic orb.'

The spirits, that had risen to a kind of wild elation, as suddenly
subsided, and he added, 'Leave me, I must be alone for the few last
hours of my mortal existence--if indeed they are to be the last.664 He
spoke this with an inward shuddering, that was felt by his hearers.
'In this apartment,' he continued, 'I first drew breath, in this I
must perhaps resign it,--would--would I had never been born!

*

'Men--retire--leave me alone. Whatever noises you hear in the
course of the awful night that is approaching, come not near this
apartment, at peril of your lives.665 Remember,' raising his voice,
which still retained all its powers, 'remember your lives will be the
forfeit of your desperate curiosity. For the same stake I risked more
than life--and lost it!--Be warned--retire!'

They retired, and passed the remainder of that day without even
thinking of food, from that intense and burning anxiety that seemed
to prey on their very vitals. At night they retired, and though each
lay down, it was without a thought of repose. Repose indeed would
have been impossible. The sounds that soon after midnight began to
issue from the apartment of the Wanderer, were at first of a des-
cription not to alarm, but they were soon exchanged for others of
such indescribable horror, that Melmoth, though he had taken the
precaution of dismissing the servants to sleep in the adjacent of-
fices, began to fear that those sounds might reach them, and, rest-
less himself from insupportable inquietude, rose and walked up and
down the passage that led to that room of horror. As he was thus
occupied, he thought he saw a figure at the lower end of the pas-
sage. So disturbed was his vision, that he did not at first recognize
Monçada. Neither asked the other the reason of his being there--
they walked up and down together silently.

In a short time the sounds became so terrible, that scarcely had
the awful warning of the Wanderer power to withhold them from
attempting to burst into the room. These noises were of the most
mixed and indescribable kind. They could not distinguish whether
they were the shrieks of supplication, or the yell of blasphemy--
they hoped inwardly they might be the former.

Towards morning the sounds suddenly ceased--they were stilled
as in a moment. The silence that succeeded seemed to them for a
few moments more terrible than all that preceded. After consulting
each other by a glance, they hastened together to the apartment.
They entered--it was empty--not a vestige of its last inhabitant
was to be traced within.

After looking around in fruitless amazement, they perceived a
small door opposite to that by which they had entered. It
communicated with a back staircase, and was open. As they ap-
proached it, they discovered the traces of footsteps that appeared
to be those of a person who had been walking in damp sand or clay.
These traces were exceedingly plain--they followed them to a door
that opened on the garden--that door was open also. They traced
the footmarks distinctly through the narrow gravel walk, which was
terminated by a broken fence, and opened on a heathy field which
spread half-way up a rock whose summit overlooked the sea. The
weather had been rainy, and they could trace the steps distinctly
through that heathy field. They ascended the rock together.

Early as it was, the cottagers, who were poor fishermen residing
on the shore, were all up, and assuring Melmoth and his companion
that they had been disturbed and terrified the preceding night by
sounds which they could not describe. It was singular that these
men, accustomed by nature and habit alike to exaggeration and
superstition, used not the language of either on this occasion.
There is an overwhelming mass of conviction that falls on the
mind, that annihilates idiom and peculiarities, and crushes out
truth from the heart. Melmoth waved back all who offered to ac-
company him to the precipice which overhung the sea. Monçada
alone followed him.

Through the furze that clothed this rock, almost to its summit,
there was a kind of tract as if a person had dragged, or been
dragged, his way through it--a down-trodden track, over which no
footsteps but those of one impelled by force had ever passed.
Melmoth and Monçada gained at last the summit of the rock. The
ocean was beneath--the wide, waste, engulping ocean! On a crag
beneath them, something hung as floating to the blast. Melmoth
clambered down and caught it. It was the handker-chief which the
Wanderer had worn about his neck the preceding night--that was
the last trace of the Wanderer!

Melmoth and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable
horror, and returned slowly home.



FINIS






















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