En cor gentil, amor per mort no passa.
AUSIAS MARCH, TROUBADOUR.
We return to Longfield and to Mrs. Elizabeth Fitzhenry. The glory of
summer invested the world with light, cheerfulness, and beauty, when the
sorrowing sister of Lodore visited London, to receive her orphan niece from
the hands of the friend of Mrs. Greville, under whose protection she had
made the voyage. The good lady folded poor Ethel in her arms, overcome
by the likeness she saw to her beloved brother Henry, in his youthful
days, before passion had worn and misfortune saddened him. Her soft,
brown, lamp-like eyes, beamed with the same sensibility. Yet when she
examined her more closely, Mrs Elizabeth lost somewhat of the likeness;
for the lower part of her face resembled her mother: her hair was
lighter and her complexion much fairer than Lodore; besides that the
expression of her countenance was peculiar to herself, and possessed
that individuality which is so sweet to behold, but impossible to
describe.
They lingered but a few days in London. Fanny Derham, who accompanied
her on her voyage, had already returned to her father, and there was
nothing to detain them from Longfield. Ethel had no adieus to make that
touched her heart. Her aunt was more to her than any other living being,
and her strongest desire now was, to visit the scenes once hallowed by
her father's presence. The future was a chaos of dark regret and
loneliness; her whole life, she thought, would be composed of one long
memory.
One memory, and one fatal image. Ethel had not only consecrated her
heart to her father, but his society was a habit with her, and, until
now, she had never even thought how she could endure existence without
the supporting influence of his affection. His conversation, so full of
a kind penetration into her thoughts, was calculated to develop and
adorn them; his manly sense and paternal solicitude, had all fostered a
filial love, the most tender and strong. Add to this, his sudden and
awful death. Already had they schemed their future life in a world new
to Ethel: he had excited her enthusiasm by descriptions of the wonders
of art in the old countries, and raised her curiosity while promising to
satisfy it; and she had eagerly looked forward to the time when she
should see the magical works of man, and mingle with a system of
society, of which, except by books, he alone presented any ensample to
her. Their voyage was fixed, and on the other side of their watery way
she had figured a very Elysium of wonders and pleasures. The late change
in their mode of life had served to endear him doubly to her. It had
been the occupation of her life to think of her father, to communicate
all her thoughts to him, and in the unreflecting confidence of youth,
she had looked forward to no termination of a state of existence, that
had began from her cradle. He propped her entire world; the foundations
must moulder and crumble away without him--and he was gone--where then
was she?
Mr. Villiers had, as soon as he was able, hurried to Mrs. Greville's
house. By some strange chance, the fatal tidings had preceded him, and he
found the daughter of the unfortunate Lodore bewildered and maddened by her
frightful calamity. Her first desire was to see all that was left of her
parent--she could not believe that he was indeed dead--she was certain
that care and skill might revive him--she insisted on being led to his
side; her friends strove to restrain her, but she rushed into the
street, she knew not whither, to ask for, to find her father. The
timidity of her temper was overborne by the wild expectation of yet
being able to recall him from among the dead. Villiers followed her,
and, yielding to her wishes, guided her towards the hotel whither the
remains of Lodore had been carried. He judged that the exertion of
walking thither, and the time that must elapse before she arrived, would
calm and subdue her. He talked to her of her father as they went
along--he endeavoured to awaken the source of tears--but she was
silent--absorbed--brooding darkly on her hopes. Pity for herself had not
yet arisen, nor the frightful certainty of bereavement. To see those
dear lineaments--to touch his hand--the very hand that had so often
caressed her, clay-cold and incapable of motion! Could it be!
She did not answer Villiers, she only hurried forward; she feared
obstruction to her wishes; her soul was set on one thought only. Had
Villiers endeavoured to deceive her, it would have been in vain. Arrived
at the hotel, as by instinct, she sprung up the stairs, and reached the
door of the room. It was darkened, in useless but decent respect for the
death within; there lay a figure covered by a sheet, and already
chilling the atmosphere around it. The imagination is slow to act upon
the feelings in comparison with the quick operation of the senses. Ethel
now knew that her father was dead. Mortal strength could support no
more--the energy of hope deserting her, she sunk lifeless on the ground.
For a long time she was passive in the hands of others. A violent
illness confined her to her bed, and physical suffering subdued the
excess of mental agony. Villiers left her among kind friends. It was
resolved that she and Fanny Derham should proceed to England, under the
protection of the friends of Mrs. Greville about to return thither; he
was himself obliged to return to England without delay.
Ethel's destiny was as yet quite uncertain. It was decided by the
opening of her father's will. This had been made twelve years before on
his first arrival at New York, and breathed the spirit of resentment, and
even revenge, against his wife. Lodore had indeed not much wealth to leave.
His income chiefly consisted in a grant from the crown, entailed on
heirs male, which in default of these, reverted back, and in a sinecure
which expired with him. His paternal estate at Longfield, and a sum
under twenty thousand pounds, the savings of twelve years, formed all
his possessions. The income arising from the former was absorbed by Lady
Lodore's jointure of a thousand a year, and five hundred a year settled
on his sister, together with permission to occupy the family mansion
during her life. The remaining sum was disposed of in a way most
singular. Without referring to the amount of what he could leave, he
bequeathed the additional sum of six hundred a year to Lady Lodore, on
the express condition, that she should not interfere with, nor even see,
her child; upon her failing in this condition, this sum was to be left
to accumulate till Ethel was of age. Ethel was ultimately to inherit
every thing; but while her mother and aunt lived, her fortune consisted
of little more than five thousand pounds; and even in this, she was
limited to the use of the interest only until she was of age; a previous
marriage would have no influence on the disposition of her property.
Mrs. Elizabeth was left her guardian.
This will was in absolute contradiction to the wishes and feelings in
which Lord Lodore died; so true had his prognostic been, that he had no
power beyond the grave. He had probably forgotten the existence of this
will, or imagined that it had been destroyed: he had determined to make a
new one on his arrival in England. Meanwhile it was safely deposited with
his solicitor in London, and Mrs. Elizabeth, with mistaken zeal,
hastened to put it into force, and showed herself eager to obey her
brother's wishes with scrupulous exactitude. The contents of it were
communicated to Lady Lodore. She made no comment--returned no answer.
She was suddenly reduced from comparative affluence (for her husband's
allowance had consisted of several thousands) to a bare sixteen hundred
a year. Whether she would be willing to diminish this her scanty income
one third, and take on herself, besides, the care of her daughter, was
not known. She remained inactive and silent, and Ethel was placed at
once under the guardianship of her aunt.
These two ladies left London in the old lumbering chariot which had
belonged to the Admiral. Now, indeed, Ethel found herself in a new
country, with new friends around her, speaking a new language, and each
change of scene made more manifest the complete revolution of her
fortunes. She looked on all with languid eyes, and a heart dead to every
pleasure. Her aunt, who bore a slight resemblance of her father, won
some degree of interest; and the sole consolation offered her, was to
trace a similarity of voice and feature, and thus to bring the lost Lodore
more vividly before her. The journey to Longfield was therefore not wholly
without a melancholy charm. Mrs. Elizabeth longed to obtain more minute
information concerning her brother, her pride and her delight, than had
been contained in his short and infrequent letters. She hazarded a few
questions. Grief loves to feed upon itself, and to surround itself with
multiplications of its own image; like a bee, it will find sweets in the
poison flower, and nestle within its own creations, although they pierce
the heart that cherishes them. Ethel felt a fascination in dwelling for
ever on the past. She asked for nothing better than to live her life
over again, while narrating its simple details, and to bring her father
back from his grave to dwell with her, by discoursing perpetually
concerning him. She was unwearied in her descriptions, her anecdotes,
her praises. The Illinois rose before the eyes of her aunt, like a
taintless paradise, inhabited by an angel. Love and good dwelt together
there in blameless union; the sky was brighter; the earth fairer,
fresher, younger, more magnificent, and more wonderful, than in the old
world. The good lady called to mind, with surprise, the melancholy and
despairing letters she had received from her brother, while inhabiting
this Eden. It was matter of mortification to his mourning daughter to
hear, as from himself, as it were, that any sorrows had visited his
heart while with her. When we love one to whom we have devoted our lives
with undivided affection, the idea that the beloved object suffered any
grief while with us, jars with our sacred sorrow. We delight to make the
difference between the possession of their society, and our subsequent
bereavement, entire in its contrasted happiness and misery; we wish to
have engrossed their whole souls, as they do ours, at the period of
regret, and it is like the most cruel theft, to know that we have been
deprived of any of the power we believed that we possessed, to influence
their entire being. But then again, forgetting her aunt's interruptions.
Ethel returned to the story of their occupations, their amusements,
their fond and unsullied intercourse, her eyes streamed with tears as
she spoke, while yet her heart felt relief in the indulgence of her woe.
When the ladies returned to Longfield, it became Mrs. Elizabeth's turn
to narrate. She had lived many years feeding silently on the memory of
by-gone time. During her brother's exile, she had seldom spoken his
name, for she felt little inclined to satisfy the inquisitiveness of the
good people of Longfield. But now her long-stored anecdotes, her sacred
relics, the spots made dear by his presence, all were a treasure poured
out bounteously before Ethel. Nothing appeared so natural to the
unfortunate girl as that another should, like herself, worship the
recollection of her adored father. To love him while he lived, to see
nothing in the world that had lost him, except his shadow cast upon its
benighted state, appeared the only existence that could follow his
extinction. Some people, when they die, leave but a foot of ground
vacant, which the eager pressing ranks of their fellow-creatures fill up
immediately, walking on their grave, as on common earth; others leave a
gap, a chasm, a fathomless gulf, beside which the survivor sits for ever
hopeless. Both Ethel and her aunt, in their several ways, in youth and
age, were similarly situated. Both were cut off from the great family of
their species; wedded to one single being, and he was gone. Both made
the dead Lodore the focus to concentrate, and the mirror to reflect, all
their sensations and experience. He visited their dreams by night, his name
was their study, their pastime, their sole untiring society.
Mrs. Elizabeth, the gentlest visionary that had ever outlived hope,
without arriving at its fruition, having reached those years when memory
is the natural food of the human mind, found this fare exceedingly well
adapted to her constitution. She had pined a little while cut off from
all heart-felt communication with her fellow-creatures, but the presence
of Ethel fulfilled her soul's desire; she found sympathy, and an
auditress, into whose ever-attentive ear she could pour those reveries
which she had so long nourished in secret. Whoso had heard the good lady
talk of endless tears and mourning for the loss of Lodore, of life not
worth having when he was gone, of the sad desolation of their position, and
looked at her face, beaming with satisfaction, with only so much
sensibility painted there as to render it expressive of all that is kind
and compassionate, good-humour in her frequent smile, and sleek content
in her plump person, might have laughed at the contrast; and yet have
pondered on the strange riddle we human beings present, and how
contradictions accord in our singular machinery. This good aunt was
incapable of affectation, and all was true and real that she said. She
lived upon the idea of her brother; he was all in all to her, but they
had been divided so long, that his death scarcely increased the
separation; and she could talk of meeting him in heaven, with as firm
and cheerful a faith, as a few months before she had anticipated his
return to England. Though sincere in her regret for his death, habit had
turned lamentation into a healthy nutriment, so that she throve upon the
tears she shed, and grew fat and cheerful upon her sighs. She would lead
the agonized girl to the vault which contained the remains of her
brother, and hover near it, as a Catholic beside the shrine of a
favourite saint--the visible image giving substance and form to her
reverie; for hitherto, her dreamy life had wanted the touch of reality,
which the presence of her niece, and the sad memorial of her lost
brother, afforded.
The home-felt sensations of the mourning orphan, were in entire contrast
to this holiday woe. While her aunt brooded over her sorrow "to keep it
warm," it wrapped Ethel's soul as with a fiery torture. Every cheerful
thought lay buried with her father, and the tears she shed near his
grave were accompanied by a wrenching of her being, and a consequent
exhaustion, that destroyed the elasticity of the spirit of youth. The
memory of Lodore, which soothed his sister, haunted his child like a sad
beckoning, yet fatal vision; she yearned to reach the shore where his
pale ghost perpetually wandered--the earth seemed a dark prison, and
liberty and light dwelt with the dead beyond the grave. Eternally
conversant with the image of death, she was brought into too near
communion with the grim enemy of life. She wasted and grew pale: nor did
any voice speak to her of the unreasonableness of her grief; her father
was not near to teach her fortitude, and there appeared a virtue and a
filial piety in the excess of her regret, which blinded her aunt to the
fatal consequences of its indulgence.
While summer lasted, and the late autumn protracted its serenity almost
into winter, Ethel wandered in the lanes and fields; and in spite of
wasting grief, the free air of heaven, which swept her cheek, preserved
its healthy hue and braced her limbs. But when dreary inclement winter
arrived, and the dull fireside of aunt Bessy became the order of the
day, without occupation to amuse, or society to distract her thoughts,
given up to grief, and growing into a monument of woe, it became evident
that the springs of life were becoming poisoned, and that health and
existence itself were giving way before the destructive influences at
work within. Appetite first, then sleep, deserted her. A slight cold
became a cough, and then changed into a preying fever. She grew so thin
that her large eyes, shining with unnatural lustre, appeared to occupy
too much of her face, and her brow was streaked with ghastly hues. Poor
Mrs. Elizabeth, when she found that neither arrow-root nor chicken-broth
restored her, grew frightened--the village practitioner exhausted his
skill without avail. Ethel herself firmly believed that she was going to
die, and fondly cherished the hope of rejoining her father. She was in
love with death, which alone could reunite her to the being, apart from
whom she believed it impossible to exist.
But limits were now placed to Mrs. Elizabeth's romance. The danger of
Ethel was a frightful reality that awoke every natural feeling. Ethel,
the representative of her brother, the last of their nearly extinct
race, the sole relation she possessed, the only creature whom she could
entirely love, was dear to her beyond expression; and the dread of
losing her gave activity to her slothful resolves. Having seldom, during
the whole course of her life, been called upon to put any plan or wish
of her's into actual execution, what another would have immediately and
easily done, was an event to call forth all her energies, and to require
all her courage; luckily she possessed sufficient to meet the present
exigency. She wrote up to London to her single correspondent there, her
brother's solicitor. A house was taken, and the first warm days of
spring found the ladies established in the metropolis. A physician had
been called in, and he pronounced the mind only to be sick. "Amuse her,"
he said, "occupy her--prevent her from dwelling on those thoughts which
have preyed upon her health; let her see new faces, new places, every
thing new--and youth, and a good constitution, will do the rest."
There seemed so much truth in this advice, that all dangerous symptoms
disappeared from the moment of Ethel's leaving Essex. Her strength
returned--her face resumed its former loveliness; and aunt Bessy,
overjoyed at the change, occupied herself earnestly in discovering
amusements for her niece in the numerous, wide-spread, and very busy
congregation of human beings, which forms the western portion of London.