CHAPTER LX.
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.
