Though the wilds of enchantment all vernal and bright,
In the days of delusion by fancy combined
With the vanishing phantoms of love and delight,
Abandon my soul, like a dream of the night,
And leave but a desert behind,
Be hush’d my dark spirit, for Wisdom condemns
When the faint and the feeble deplore;
Be strong as the rock of the ocean that stems
A thousand wild waves on the shore.--CAMPBELL.
“Shall I order the carriage round, sir?” said Harrison; “it is past
one.”
“Yes; yet stay: the day is fine; I will ride; let the carriage come on
in the evening; see that my horse is saddled; you looked to his mash
last night?”
“I did, sir. He seems wonderfully fresh: would you please to have me
stay here with the carriage, sir, till the groom comes on with the other
horse?”
“Ay, do: I don’t know yet how far strange servants may be welcome where
I am going.”
“Now, that’s lucky!” said Harrison to himself, as he shut the door: “I
shall have a good five hours’ opportunity of making my court here. Miss
Elizabeth is really a very pretty girl, and might not be a bad match. I
don’t see any brothers; who knows but she may succeed to the inn--hem! A
servant may be ambitious as well as his master, I suppose.”
So meditating, Harrison sauntered to the stables; saw (for he was an
admirable servant, and could, at a pinch, dress a horse as well as its
master) that Clarence’s beautiful steed received the utmost nicety of
grooming which the ostler could bestow; led it himself to the door; held
the stirrup for his master, with the mingled humility and grace of his
profession, and then strutted away--“pride on his brow and glory in his
eye”--to be the cynosure and oracle of the taproom.
Meanwhile Linden rode slowly onwards. As he passed that turn of the town
by which he had for the first time entered it, the recollection of the
eccentric and would-be gypsy flashed upon him. “I wonder,” thought
he, “where that singular man is now, whether he still preserves his
itinerant and woodland tastes,--
‘Si flumina sylvasque inglorius amet,’
[“If, unknown to fame, he love the streams and the woods.”]
or whether, as his family increased in age or number, he has turned from
his wanderings, and at length found out ‘the peaceful hermitage?’ How
glowingly the whole scene of that night comes across me,--the wild
tents, their wilder habitants, the mingled bluntness, poetry, honest
good-nature, and spirit of enterprise which constituted the chief’s
nature; the jovial meal and mirth round the wood fire, and beneath the
quiet stars, and the eagerness and zest with which I then mingled in the
merriment. Alas! how ill the fastidiousness and refinement of after days
repay us for the elastic, buoyant, ready zeal with which our first youth
enters into whatever is joyous, without pausing to ask if its cause and
nature be congenial to our habits or kindred to our tastes. After all,
there really was something philosophical in the romance of the jovial
gypsy, childish as it seemed; and I should like much to know if the
philosophy has got the better of the romance, or the romance, growing
into habit, become commonplace and lost both its philosophy and its
enthusiasm. Well, after I leave Mordaunt, I will try and find out my old
friend.”
With this resolution Clarence’s thoughts took a new channel, and he soon
entered upon Mordaunt’s domain. As he rode through the park where brake
and tree were glowing in the yellow tints which Autumn, like Ambition,
gilds ere it withers, he paused for a moment to recall the scene as he
last beheld it. It was then spring--spring in its first and flushest
glory--when not a blade of grass but sent a perfume to the air, the
happy air,--
“Making sweet music while the young leaves danced:”
when every cluster of the brown fern, that now lay dull and motionless
around him, and amidst which the melancholy deer stood afar off gazing
upon the intruder, was vocal with the blithe melodies of the infant
year,--the sharp, yet sweet, voices of birds,--and (heard at intervals)
the chirp of the merry grasshopper or the hum of the awakened bee. He
sighed, as he now looked around, and recalled the change both of time
and season; and with that fondness of heart which causes man to knit his
own little life to the varieties of time, the signs of heaven, or the
revolutions of Nature, he recognized something kindred in the change of
scene to the change of thought and feeling which years had wrought in
the beholder.
Awaking from his revery, he hastened his horse’s pace, and was soon
within sight of the house. Vavasour, during the few years he had
possessed the place, had conducted and carried through improvements and
additions to the old mansion, upon a scale equally costly and judicious.
The heavy and motley magnificence of the architecture in which the house
had been built remained unaltered; but a wing on either side, though
exactly corresponding in style to the intermediate building, gave, by
the long colonnade which ran across the one and the stately windows
which adorned the other, an air not only of grander extent, but more
cheerful lightness to the massy and antiquated pile. It was, assuredly,
in the point of view by which Clarence now approached it, a structure
which possessed few superiors in point of size and effect; and
harmonized so well with the nobly extent of the park, the ancient woods,
and the venerable avenues, that a very slight effort of imagination
might have poured from the massive portals the pageantries of old days,
and the gay galliard of chivalric romance with which the scene was in
such accordance, and which in a former age it had so often witnessed.
Ah, little could any one who looked upon that gorgeous pile, and the
broad lands which, beyond the boundaries of the park, swelled on the
hills of the distant landscape, studded at frequent intervals with
the spires and villages, which adorned the wide baronies of
Mordaunt,--little could he who thus gazed around have imagined that the
owner of all he surveyed had passed the glory and verdure of his manhood
in the bitterest struggles with gnawing want, rebellious pride, and
urgent passion, without friend or aid but his own haughty and supporting
virtue, sentenced to bear yet in his wasted and barren heart the sign of
the storm he had resisted, and the scathed token of the lightning he had
braved. None but Crauford, who had his own reasons for taciturnity, and
the itinerant broker, easily bribed into silence, had ever known of
the extreme poverty from which Mordaunt had passed to his rightful
possessions. It was whispered, indeed, that he had been reduced to
narrow and straitened circumstances; but the whisper had been only the
breath of rumour, and the imagined poverty far short of the reality:
for the pride of Mordaunt (the great, almost the sole, failing in his
character) could not endure that all he had borne and baffled should be
bared to the vulgar eye; and by a rare anomaly of mind, indifferent as
he was to renown, he was morbidly susceptible of shame.
When Clarence rang at the ivy-covered porch, and made inquiry for
Mordaunt, he was informed that the latter was in the park, by the river,
where most of his hours during the day-time were spent.
“Shall I send to acquaint him that you are come, sir?” said the servant.
“No,” answered Clarence, “I will leave my horse to one of the grooms,
and stroll down to the river in search of your master.”
Suiting the action to the word, he dismounted, consigned his steed to
the groom, and following the direction indicated to him, bent his way to
the “river.”
As he descended the hill, the brook (for it did not deserve, though it
received, a higher name) opened enchantingly upon his view. Amidst the
fragrant reed and the wild-flower, still sweet though fading, and tufts
of tedded grass, all of which, when crushed beneath the foot, sent
a mingled tribute to its sparkling waves, the wild stream took its
gladsome course, now contracted by gloomy firs, which, bending over the
water, cast somewhat of their own sadness upon its surface; now glancing
forth from the shade, as it “broke into dimples and laughed in the sun;”
now washing the gnarled and spreading roots of some lonely ash,
which, hanging over it still and droopingly, seemed--the hermit of the
scene--to moralize on its noisy and various wanderings; now winding
round the hill and losing itself at last amidst thick copses, where day
did never more than wink and glimmer, and where, at night, its waters,
brawling through their stony channel, seemed like a spirit’s wail, and
harmonized well with the scream of the gray owl wheeling from her dim
retreat, or the moaning and rare sound of some solitary deer.
As Clarence’s eye roved admiringly over the scene before him, it dwelt
at last upon a small building situated on the wildest part of the
opposite bank; it was entirely overgrown with ivy, and the outline only
remained to show the Gothic antiquity of the architecture. It was
a single square tower, built none knew when or wherefore, and,
consequently, the spot of many vagrant guesses and wild legends among
the surrounding gossips. On approaching yet nearer, he perceived, alone
and seated on a little mound beside the tower, the object of his search.
Mordaunt was gazing with vacant yet earnest eye upon the waters beneath;
and so intent was either his mood or look that he was unaware of
Clarence’s approach. Tears fast and large were rolling from those
haughty eyes, which men who shrank from their indifferent glance little
deemed were capable of such weak and feminine emotion. Far, far through
the aching void of time were the thoughts of the reft and solitary
mourner; they were dwelling, in all the vivid and keen intensity of
grief which dies not, upon the day when, about that hour and on that
spot, he sat with Isabel’s young cheek upon his bosom, and listened to
a voice now only heard in dreams. He recalled the moment when the fatal
letter, charged with change and poverty, was given to him, and the pang
which had rent his heart as he looked around upon a scene over which
spring had just then breathed, and which he was about to leave to a
fresh summer and a new lord; and then that deep, fond, half-fearful gaze
with which Isabel had met his eye, and the feeling, proud even in its
melancholy, with which he had drawn towards his breast all that earth
had left to him, and thanked God in his heart of hearts that she was
spared.
“And I am once more master,” thought he, “not only of all I then held,
but of all which my wealthier forefathers possessed. But she who was the
sharer of my sorrows and want,--oh, where is she? Rather, ah, rather
a hundredfold that her hand was still clasped in mine, her spirit
supporting me through poverty and trial, and her soft voice murmuring
the comfort that steals away care, than to be thus heaped with wealth
and honour, and alone,--alone, where never more can come love or hope,
or the yearnings of affection or the sweet fulness of a heart that seems
fathomless in its tenderness, yet overflows! Had my lot, when she left
me, been still the steepings of bitterness, the stings of penury, the
moody silence of hope, the damp and chill of sunless and aidless years,
which rust the very iron of the soul away; had my lot been thus, as it
had been, I could have borne her death, I could have looked upon her
grave, and wept not,--nay, I could have comforted my own struggles with
the memory of her escape; but thus, at the very moment of prosperity, to
leave the altered and promising earth, ‘to house with darkness and
with death;’ no little gleam of sunshine, no brief recompense for the
agonizing past, no momentary respite between tears and the tomb. Oh,
Heaven! what--what avail is a wealth which comes too late, when she, who
could alone have made wealth bliss, is dust; and the light that should
have gilded many and happy days flings only a ghastly glare upon the
tomb?”
Starting from these reflections, Mordaunt half-unconsciously rose,
and dashing the tears from his eyes, was about to plunge into the
neighbouring thicket, when, looking up, he beheld Clarence, now within
a few paces of him. He started, and seemed for one moment irresolute
whether to meet or shun his advance, but probably deeming it too late
for the latter, he banished, by one of those violent efforts with which
men of proud and strong minds vanquish emotion, all outward sign of the
past agony; and hastening towards his guest, greeted him with a welcome
which, though from ordinary hosts it might have seemed cold, appeared
to Clarence, who knew his temper, more cordial than he had ventured to
anticipate.