• Home
  • Catalog
  • Contacts



    Evandale's inquiries were in vain. Jenny, who might have given
    (had she chosen) a very satisfactory explanation, had an interest to
    leave the matter in darkness; and interest was a matter which now weighed
    principally with Jenny, since the possession of an active and
    affectionate husband in her own proper right had altogether allayed her
    spirit of coquetry. She had made the best use of the first moments of
    confusion hastily to remove all traces of any one having slept in the
    apartment adjoining to the parlour, and even to erase the mark of
    footsteps beneath the window, through which she conjectured Morton's face
    had been seen, while attempting, ere he left the garden, to gain one look
    at her whom he had so long loved, and was now on the point of losing for
    ever. That he had passed Halliday in the garden was equally clear; and
    she learned from her elder boy, whom she had employed to have the
    stranger's horse saddled and ready for his departure, that he had rushed
    into the stable, thrown the child a broad gold piece, and, mounting his
    horse, had ridden with fearful rapidity down towards the Clyde. The
    secret was, therefore, in their own family, and Jenny was resolved it
    should remain so.

    "For, to be sure," she said, "although her lady and Halliday kend Mr.
    Morton by broad daylight, that was nae reason I suld own to kenning him
    in the gloaming and by candlelight, and him keeping his face frae Cuddie
    and me a' the time."

    So she stood resolutely upon the negative when examined by Lord Evandale.
    As for Halliday, he could only say that as he entered the garden-door,
    the supposed apparition met him, walking swiftly, and with a visage on
    which anger and grief appeared to be contending.

    "He knew him well," he said, "having been repeatedly guard upon him, and
    obliged to write down his marks of stature and visage in case of escape.
    And there were few faces like Mr. Morton's." But what should make him
    haunt the country where he was neither hanged nor shot, he, the said
    Halliday, did not pretend to conceive.

    Lady Emily confessed she had seen the face of a man at the window, but
    her evidence went no farther. John Gudyill deponed _nil novit in causa_.
    He had left his gardening to get his morning dram just at the time when
    the apparition had taken place. Lady Emily's servant was waiting orders
    in the kitchen, and there was not another being within a quarter of a
    mile of the house.

    Lord Evandale returned perplexed and dissatisfied in the highest degree
    at beholding a plan which he thought necessary not less for the
    protection of Edith in contingent circumstances, than for the assurance
    of his own happiness, and which he had brought so very near perfection,
    thus broken off without any apparent or rational cause. His knowledge of
    Edith's character set her beyond the suspicion of covering any capricious
    change of determination by a pretended vision. But he would have set the
    apparition down to the influence of an overstrained imagination, agitated
    by the circumstances in which she had so suddenly been placed, had it not
    been for the coinciding testimony of Halliday, who had no reason for
    thinking of Morton more than any other person, and knew nothing of Miss
    Bellenden's vision when he promulgated his own. On the other hand, it
    seemed in the highest degree improbable that Morton, so long and so
    vainly sought after, and who was, with such good reason, supposed to be
    lost when the "Vryheid" of Rotterdam went down with crew and passengers,
    should be alive and lurking in this country, where there was no longer
    any reason why he should not openly show himself, since the present
    Government favoured his party in politics. When Lord Evandale reluctantly
    brought himself to communicate these doubts to the chaplain, in order to
    obtain his opinion, he could only obtain a long lecture on demonology, in
    which, after quoting Delrio and Burthoog and De L'Ancre on the subject of
    apparitions, together with sundry civilians and common lawyers on the
    nature of testimony, the learned gentleman expressed his definite and
    determined opinion to be, either that there had been an actual apparition
    of the deceased Henry Morton's spirit, the possibility of which he was,
    as a divine and a philosopher, neither fully prepared to admit or to
    deny; or else that the said Henry Morton, being still in _rerum natura_,
    had appeared in his proper person that morning; or, finally, that some
    strong _deceptio visus_, or striking similitude of person, had deceived
    the eyes of Miss Bellenden and of Thomas Halliday. Which of these was the
    most probable hypothesis, the doctor declined to pronounce, but expressed
    himself ready to die in the opinion that one or other of them had
    occasioned that morning's disturbance.

    Lord Evandale soon had additional cause for distressful anxiety. Miss
    Bellenden was declared to be dangerously ill.

    "I will not leave this place," he exclaimed, "till she is pronounced to
    be in safety. I neither can nor ought to do so; for whatever may have
    been the immediate occasion of her illness, I gave the first cause for it
    by my unhappy solicitation."

    He established himself, therefore, as a guest in the family, which the
    presence of his sister, as well as of Lady Margaret Bellenden (who, in
    despite of her rheumatism, caused herself to be transported thither when
    she heard of her granddaughter's illness), rendered a step equally
    natural and delicate. And thus he anxiously awaited until, without injury
    to her health, Edith could sustain a final explanation ere his departure
    on his expedition.

    "She shall never," said the generous young man, "look on her engagement
    with me as the means of fettering her to a union, the idea of which seems
    almost to unhinge her understanding."





    CHAPTER XVIII.

    Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shades!
    Ah, fields beloved in vain!
    Where once my careless childhood strayed,
    A stranger yet to pain.
    Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

    It is not by corporal wants and infirmities only that men of the most
    distinguished talents are levelled, during their lifetime, with the
    common mass of mankind. There are periods of mental agitation when the
    firmest of mortals must be ranked with the weakest of his brethren, and
    when, in paying the general tax of humanity, his distresses are even
    aggravated by feeling that he transgresses, in the indulgence of his
    grief, the rules of religion and philosophy by which he endeavours in
    general to regulate his passions and his actions. It was during such a
    paroxysm that the unfortunate Morton left Fairy Knowe. To know that his
    long-loved and still-beloved Edith, whose image had filled his mind for
    so many years, was on the point of marriage to his early rival, who had
    laid claim to her heart by so many services as hardly left her a title to
    refuse his addresses, bitter as the intelligence was, yet came not as an
    unexpected blow.

    During his residence abroad he had once written to Edith. It was to bid
    her farewell for ever, and to conjure her to forget him. He had requested
    her not to answer his letter; yet he half hoped, for many a day, that she
    might transgress his injunction. The letter never reached her to whom it
    was addressed, and Morton, ignorant of its miscarriage, could only
    conclude himself laid aside and forgotten, according to his own
    self-denying request. All that he had heard of their mutual relations
    since his return to Scotland prepared him to expect that he could only
    look upon Miss Bellenden as the betrothed bride of Lord Evandale; and
    even if freed from the burden of obligation to the latter, it would still
    have been inconsistent with Morton's generosity of disposition to disturb
    their arrangements, by attempting the assertion of a claim proscribed by
    absence, never sanctioned by the consent of friends, and barred by a
    thousand circumstances of difficulty. Why then did he seek the cottage
    which their broken fortunes had now rendered the retreat of Lady Margaret
    Bellenden and her granddaughter? He yielded, we are under the necessity
    of acknowledging, to the impulse of an inconsistent wish which many might
    have felt in his situation.

    Accident apprised him, while travelling towards his native district, that
    the ladies, near whose mansion he must necessarily pass, were absent; and
    learning that Cuddie and his wife acted as their principal domestics, he
    could not resist pausing at their cottage to learn, if possible, the real
    progress which Lord Evandale had made in the affections of Miss Bellen
    den--alas! no longer his Edith. This rash experiment ended as we have
    related, and he parted from the house of Fairy Knowe, conscious that he
    was still beloved by Edith, yet compelled, by faith and honour, to
    relinquish her for ever. With what feelings he must have listened to the
    dialogue between Lord Evandale and Edith, the greater part of which he
    involuntarily overheard, the reader must conceive, for we dare not
    attempt to describe them. An hundred times he was tempted to burst upon
    their interview, or to exclaim aloud, "Edith, I yet live!" and as often
    the recollection of her plighted troth, and of the debt of gratitude
    which he owed Lord Evandale (to whose influence with Claverhouse he
    justly ascribed his escape from torture and from death), withheld him
    from a rashness which might indeed have involved all in further distress,
    but gave little prospect of forwarding his own happiness. He repressed
    forcibly these selfish emotions, though with an agony which thrilled his
    every nerve.

    "No, Edith!" was his internal oath, "never will I add a thorn to thy
    pillow. That which Heaven has ordained, let it be; and let me not add, by
    my selfish sorrows, one atom's weight to the burden thou hast to bear. I
    was dead to thee when thy resolution was adopted; and never, never shalt
    thou know that Henry Morton still lives!"

    As he formed this resolution, diffident of his own power to keep it, and
    seeking that firmness in flight which was every moment shaken by his
    continuing within hearing of Edith's voice, he hastily rushed from his
    apartment by the little closet and the sashed door which led to the
    garden.

    But firmly as he thought his resolution was fixed, he could not leave the
    spot where the last tones of a voice so beloved still vibrated on his
    ear, without endeavouring to avail himself of the opportunity which the
    parlour window afforded to steal one last glance at the lovely speaker.
    It was in this attempt, made while Edith seemed to have her eyes
    unalterably bent upon the ground, that Morton's presence was detected by
    her raising them suddenly. So soon as her wild scream made this known to
    the unfortunate object of a passion so constant, and which seemed so
    ill-fated, he hurried from the place as if pursued by the furies. He
    passed Halliday in the garden without recognising or even being sensible
    that he had seen him, threw himself on his horse, and, by a sort of
    instinct rather than recollection, took the first by-road in preference
    to the public route to Hamilton.

    In all probability this prevented Lord Evandale from learning that he was
    actually in existence; for the news that the Highlanders had obtained a
    decisive victory at Killiecrankie had occasioned an accurate look-out to
    be kept, by order of the Government, on all the passes, for fear of some
    commotion among the Lowland Jacobites. They did not omit to post
    sentinels on Bothwell Bridge; and as these men had not seen any traveller
    pass westward in that direction, and as, besides, their comrades
    stationed in the village of Bothwell were equally positive that none had
    gone eastward, the apparition, in the existence of which Edith and
    Halliday were equally positive, became yet more mysterious in the
    judgment of Lord Evandale, who was finally inclined to settle in the
    belief that the heated and disturbed imagination of Edith had summoned up
    the phantom she stated herself to have seen, and that Halliday had, in
    some unaccountable manner, been infected by the same superstition.
    Meanwhile, the by-path which Morton pursued, with all the speed which his
    vigorous horse could exert, brought him in a very few seconds to the
    brink of the Clyde, at a spot marked with the feet of horses, who were
    conducted to it as a watering-place. The steed, urged as he was to the
    gallop, did not pause a single instant, but, throwing himself into the
    river, was soon beyond his depth. The plunge which the animal made as his
    feet quitted the ground, with the feeling that the cold water rose above
    his swordbelt, were the first incidents which recalled Morton, whose
    movements had been hitherto mechanical, to the necessity of taking
    measures for preserving himself and the noble animal which he bestrode. A
    perfect master of all manly exercises, the management of a horse in water
    was as familiar to him as when upon a meadow. He directed the animal's
    course somewhat down the stream towards a low plain, or holm, which
    seemed to promise an easy egress from the river. In the first and second
    attempt to get on shore, the horse was frustrated by the nature of the
    ground, and nearly fell backwards on his rider. The instinct of
    self-preservation seldom fails, even in the most desperate circumstances,
    to recall the human mind to some degree of equipoise, unless when
    altogether distracted by terror, and Morton was obliged to the danger in
    which he was placed for complete recovery of his self-possession. A third
    attempt, at a spot more carefully and judiciously selected, succeeded
    better than the former, and placed the horse and his rider in safety upon
    the farther and left-hand bank of the Clyde.

    "But whither," said Morton, in the bitterness of his heart, "am I now to
    direct my course? or rather, what does it signify to which point of the
    compass a wretch so forlorn betakes himself? I would to God, could the
    wish be without a sin, that these dark waters had flowed over me, and
    drowned my recollection of that which was, and that which is!"
    The sense of impatience, which the disturbed state of his feelings had
    occasioned, scarcely had vented itself in these violent expressions, ere
    he was struck with shame at having given way to such a paroxysm. He
    remembered how signally the life which he now held so lightly in the
    bitterness of his disappointment had been preserved through the almost
    incessant perils which had beset him since he entered upon his public
    career.

    "I am a fool!" he said, "and worse than a fool, to set light by that
    existence which Heaven has so often preserved in the most marvellous
    manner. Something there yet remains for me in this world, were it only to
    bear my sorrows like a man, and to aid those who need my assistance. What
    have I seen, what

    [Prev][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][Next]