Part 26
This gatehouse was apparently the entrance to a court or quadrangle, enclosed by buildings of wood and plaster of the like antiquity. Their guide stood on the bridge, as though to intimate that their wanderings would here terminate.
"I have seen it before," said Ellen, with great solemnity and emotion. Bridget perhaps fancied her mistress's thoughts were wandering strangely, and was just going to recommend rest and a little of the medicine she carried, when Ellen again spoke, as though sensible of some incoherency in her remark:--"In my dreams, Bridget."
"St Bridget and the Virgin be praised! Is this the house you saw when"----
"The very same. I should know it again; nor should I forget it if I were to live to the age of the patriarchs."
"It's an evident answer to my prayers," said Bridget; and here the devout enthusiast began to recite internally some holy ejaculations, which, if they did not possess any positive efficacy, were at least serviceable in allaying the excitement under which she laboured.
Ellen determined to alight and witness the issue of the adventure; so in due time these forlorn damsels were seen advancing over the bridge unto this enchanted castle.
The beldame knocked loudly at the gate, and immediately she sprang back; but when the travellers again looked round she was gone!
Now were they in a precious dilemma. Two females before a stranger's gate; the warder a-coming, when their business would of necessity be demanded. A tread, every footstep of which might have been passing over them, was close at hand. The bolts shrieked; the gate shook, and a curious face peeped forth to inquire their errand. Bridget, whose ready tongue rarely refused its office, replied--
"Is there a Catholic priest hereabout? for we would fain have a word with one of that persuasion."
The grim warder smiled.
"Ye have not far to go for such an one," said he; "but ye be far-off comers, I reckon, or ye would have known Bryn Hall belike, the dwelling-place of the noble house of Gerard, that hath never been without a priest and an altar therein."
He threw the gate wide open, and invited them to follow; after which he led them through a clumsily-ornamented porch into the great hall, at the end of which was a low gallery, supported by pillars and pilasters richly and profusely carved. From these arches were sprung, and a flight of stairs at one end led to the upper chambers.
Their guide preceded them into a small wainscoted room, fitted up as a study, or perhaps an oratory in those days. A wooden crucifix, with a representation of the Saviour carved in ivory, was placed in a recess, occasionally covered by a green curtain. Shelves laden with books occupied the farther end of the room, and writing materials were laid upon an oak trestle or table, before which sat a tall white-haired personage in a suit of sables, to whose further protection the porter left his charge.
Ellen had suffered herself to be led passive hitherto by her maid; but when she saw that they were now fairly committed to the disposal of the priest, for so he appeared, she felt uneasy and anxious to depart. The room and the whole scene were vividly brought to her recollection; for she fancied that, at one time or another, she had been present in a similar place.
Bridget curtsied to the holy father, who, doubting not that either a case of conscience or a need-be for confession brought these strangers to his presence, began the usual interrogatories.
"Here is a sick person, most reverent sir, who would have the benefit of your prayers," said Bridget. The pale and wasting form that was by her side sufficiently corroborated this reply.
"Daughter, the prayers of the church are for the penitent and believing; hast thou made shrift and a clear confession?"
Bridget was prepared for this question.
"She is not of the faith; but, peradventure, if aid be vouchsafed, she shall be reclaimed."
"If she have faith, I will cure her malady. What sayest thou?" He fixed his clear grey eye upon her, and Ellen felt as though some charm were already at work, and a strange tingling went through her frame. She stammered out something like an assent, when the priest carefully proceeded to unlock a little cabinet, inlaid with ivory and gold, from which he took out a white silk bag that diffused a grateful perfume through the chamber. He offered up a prayer before he unloosed the strings; after which, with great formality and reverence, he drew forth a human hand, dried and preserved, apparently by some mysterious process, in all its substance and proportions. Ellen was dumb with astonishment. Bridget could with difficulty refrain from falling on her knees before this holy relic; and her delight would easily have run over in some form of religious extravagance had it been suffered to have free vent. To this relic, doubtless, had the predictions referred: and she doubted not its power and efficacy.
"This rare and priceless thing," said the priest, "was once the right hand of an English Martyr, Father Arrowsmith by name, put to death for his holy profession. In consideration whereof, it is permitted, by the will of the Supreme, that an honourable testimony be rendered to his fidelity by the miracles that it doth and shall work to the end of time. Rub it thrice on the part affected, and mark the result. If thou receive it with humility and faith, trusting in Heaven, from whence alone the healing virtue doth flow--these holy relics being, as it were, but the appointed channels and conduits of His mercy--thou shall assuredly be healed."
But Ellen was at some loss to know the precise situation of her complaint, until she recollected the picture drawn by the dumb fortune-teller, who described the heart alone as touched by this miraculous hand. Yet, in what manner to make the application was a matter of some difficulty.
Bridget again relieved her from the dilemma.
"If it so please your reverence, the seat of the complaint is not visible. Suffer us to use it privately. We will not carry forth nor misuse this precious keepsake; for I have been brought up in the nurture of the Holy Church, and am well instructed in her ceremonies."
"I fear not for the harm that can happen to it, by reason of ungodly or mischievous devices. If taken away, it would assuredly return hither. Should the lady have some inward ailment, let her lay it as near as may be to the part where she feels afflicted, and keep it there for a space, until she findeth help."
The two visitors were then shown into another chamber; and here Bridget, with great devoutness, and a firm faith in its efficiency, placed the dead cold hand upon her mistress's heart. Ellen shuddered when she felt its death-like touch. It was either fancy, or something more, but she really felt as though a load were suddenly taken away--an oppression, an incubus, that had continually brooded over her, was gone. Surprised, and lightened of her burden, she returned into the oratory, and gave back the relic, along with a liberal offering into the hands of the priest. He said there would scarcely be occasion for a repetition of the act, as it was evident the faith of the recipient had wrought its proper work.
The day by this time being far spent, the priest begged permission to introduce Ellen to Lady Gerard, who, he said, would be much gratified to afford them entertainment, and, if need were, shelter for the night. On hearing the name of her visitor, this kind lady would take no denial, but expressed herself warmly on the folly and imprudence of an invalid being exposed to the night air; and Ellen, delighted with the change she felt, was all compliance and good-nature. After a little hesitation, she suffered her first refusals to be overcome, and the night wore on with pleasant converse. By little and little Lady Gerard gained the confidence of Ellen, who seemed glad that she could now speak freely on the subject nearest to her heart.
"It is marvellous enough," continued Lady Gerard, "that you should have been conducted hither; for in this house there is a magic mirror, which may, peradventure, disclose what shall relieve your anxiety. On being looked into, after suitable preparations, it is said--for I never tried the experiment--to show wondrous images within its charmed surface; and like the glass of Cornelius Agrippa, of which we have a tractate in the library chamber, will show what an absent person is doing, if the party questioning be sincere, and anxious for his welfare."
"I have long wished," said the blushing Ellen, "that I might see him of whom our evening's discourse hath, perchance, been too much conversant. I would not for worlds that he knew of my wish; but if I could see him once more, and know the bearing of his thoughts toward me, I could now, methinks, die content."
"This very night, then, let us consult the oracle," said Lady Gerard; "but there must not be any witness to our exploit; so while away your impatience as best you may until I have made the needful preparations for our adventure."
Ellen could not repress her agitation when, after waiting alone for a little time, her kind hostess came to summon her to the trial. She was conducted up the staircase before mentioned, and through a corridor of some length. The lamp grew pale and sickly in the cold wind of the galleries they trod. Soon, however, they paused before a low door. Lady Gerard pressed her finger on her lip, in token of silence. She then blew out the light, and they were involved in total darkness. Taking hold of Ellen's arm, which trembled excessively within her own, she opened the door, but not a ray was yet visible. She was conducted to a seat, and Lady Gerard whispered that she should be still. Suddenly a light flashed forth on the opposite side, and Ellen saw that it came from a huge antique mirror. A form, in male attire, was there discernible. With a slow and melancholy pace he came forward, and his lips seemed to move. It was--she could not be mistaken--it was her cousin William! She thought he looked pale and agitated. He carried a light which, as it glimmered on his features, showed that they were the index of some internal and conflicting emotion. He sat down. He passed one hand over his brow, and she thought that a sigh laboured from his lips; but as she gazed the light grew dim, and ere long the mirror, ceasing to be illuminated, again left them in total darkness. A few minutes elapsed, which were swollen to long hours in the estimation of the anxious and wondering inquirer. Her companion again whispered that she should await the result in silence. Suddenly the light flashed out as before, and she saw the dumb fortune teller instead of the individual she expected. Her features were more writhen and distorted than ever; and she seemed to mutter, it might be, some malignant spell, some charm, the operation of which was for some unknown and diabolical intent. Ellen shuddered as the weird woman took a paper-roll from her bosom. Unfolding it, there was displayed the figure of her lover, as she supposed, kneeling, while he held out his hands toward the obdurate heart which he in vain attempted to grasp.
"I have wronged him," said Ellen, in a whisper to her companion; "if I interpret these images aright, he now sighs for my favour; and--would that we had known each other ere it was too late!"
"He knows now," said Lady Gerard; and immediately the dumb prophetess was at her side. She threw off a disguise, ingeniously contrived, and Ellen beheld her cousin William! The magic mirror was but an aperture through the wainscot into another apartment, and the plot had been arranged in the first place by Mrs Bridget, who had been confederate with the handsome but somewhat haughty wooer, having for his torment a maiden as haughty and intractable as himself. Thus two loving hearts had nigh been broken for lack of an interpreter. William's absence had taken deeper hold on Ellen's finely-tempered frame than was expected; and it was with sorrow and alarm that he heard of her illness. His distant relative, Lady Gerard, to whom he had retired for a season, spake of the marvellous hand, which, he was sure, being a devout and pious Catholic, would cure any disease incident to the human frame. It was absolutely needful that a cure should be attempted, along with some stratagem, to conquer the yet unbroken obstinacy in which, as with a double panoply, Ellen had arrayed herself. The result of the experiment has been shown. She was united to her cousin ere a few months were old, and the "merrie spring" had melted in the warm lap of summer.
THE LOST FARM;
OR, THE HAUNTED CASKET.
"And when of me his leave he tuik, The tears they wat mine ee, I gave tull him a parting luik, 'My benison gang wi' thee; God speed thee weil, mine ain dear heart, For gane is all my joy; My heart is rent, sith we maun part, My handsome Gilderoy.'
"Of Gilderoy sae 'fraid they were, They bound him mickle strong, Tull Edenburrow they led him thair, And on a gallows hung. They hung him high aboon the rest, He was sae trim a boy; Thair dyed the youth whom I lued best, My handsome Gilderoy."
On the flat, bare, sandy coast, near to Southport, now a modern bathing-place of great resort, described in the first series of this work, might be seen, some few years ago, a ruined barn, cottage, and other farmyard appurtenances, around which the loose and drifting sand was accumulated, covering, at the same time, some acres of scanty pasture, once held under lease and occupation by an honest fisherman, who earned a comfortable, if not an easy subsistence, from his amphibious pursuits. The thatched roofs were broken through--the walls rent and disfigured--all wore the aspect of desolation and decay. Long grass had taken root, flourishing luxuriantly on the summit, though surrounded by a barren wilderness, a wide and almost boundless ocean of sand. The ruin was the only fertile spot in this dreary waste. Though painful and melancholy the aspect, still, as the sea-breeze came softly over, sighing gently on its time-worn furrows, and on the nodding plumes that decorated the crest of this aged and hoary relic of the past, the sensation, though pleasing, became mournful; the heart seemed linked with the unknown, the mysterious events of ages that are for ever gone--feelings that make even a luxury of grief, prompted by that within us, "the joy of sorrow;" something more hallowed, more cherished in the heart's holiest shrine, than all the glare and glitter of enjoyment--the present bliss--which we prize only when it departs.
[Illustration: THE LOST FARM, NEAR SOUTHPORT. _Drawn by G. Pickering._ _Engraved by Edw^d Finden._]
Many years ago, this humble tenement was the abode of George Grimes, the fisherman to whom we have just alluded. It was a dwelling one story only from the ground, as the general use was in these regions, ere modern edifices, staring forth in red, white, and green--their bold and upstart pretensions outfacing and supplanting the lowly but picturesque abodes of the aboriginal inhabitants--had overtopped and overshadowed these meek, rural, and primitive displays of architectural simplicity.
Grimes, we repeat, was of that amphibious class, common upon every coast, combining the occupations incident to land and water in his own proper person. Half-fisherman, half-farmer, he ploughed the seas with his keel, when upon land his coulter was out of use. He was nigh sixty, and had long settled down into that quiet nap-like sort of existence, when the passions are lulled, scarcely visible, as they creep over the stagnant current of life. He was hale and hard featured; the lines on his visage betokening, if need were, a stern, decisive, and obstinate bent in his disposition, that might have issued in deeds of high and noble daring had its possessor been thrown into circumstances favourable to the display. As matters stood, George was master of his own household. Here none questioned his authority; no profane, irreverent approach ever awakening the dormant energies of his character, or thwarting the current, visible only by opposition.
His wife was a round, brown, heavy-cheeked, dark-eyed dame, with a cap white as the whitest goose of the flock that marched every morning from her barn-doors to the common, where, by some little pool, a scanty and close-bitten herbage formed their daily subsistence. She wore a striped apron; the blue lines would have vied with the best Wigan check for breadth and distinctness. Her good-humoured mouth, reverse from her husband's, was usually puckered up at the corners into an expression of kindness, benignity, and mirth--the contrast greatly aided by proximity; for though George Grimes was benevolent and kind-hearted at the bottom, yet he was by no means apt to let these gentler feelings rise to the surface.
An only daughter was now passing within the precincts of womanhood. Her complexion, red, and--not white, reader--but of that rich, healthy, and wholesome tinge, perfect as an example of the real English brunette. Her face exhibited a beautiful modification of her father's hard and determined expression, blended with her mother's gentleness and placidity. A smile of thrilling sweetness would sometimes pass upon her calm and thoughtful countenance, always beautiful--if such a term can be allowed in speaking of a brown, rosy, plump, and well-conditioned girl, of good stature, whose form had not been squeezed into shape, nor her linsey woolsey flourished into flounce and farthingale. Her hair hung in bright clusters on her brow; fresh from Nature's toilet, their wild untutored elegance was singular and bewitching. Indeed, Katherine, or "Kattern," as she was more generally called, was the cynosure of this clime--a jewel, that needed not the foil of its homely setting; the envy and admiration of the whole neighbourhood--well known at church, and at Ormskirk market, where she attended weekly--at the latter place to dispose of her produce. Here she was the torment of many a rustic, unable to conquer, or even to understand, the power by which his heart was taken captive.
Avarice was the besetting sin of her father. He was always fearful of becoming poor, and "not paying his way," as he called it. Yet was it suspected that George Grimes had a "powerfu'" hoard, concealed both from his family and friends. Money he doated on. It was an undoubted fact that many a shining face went into the coffer of old Grimes that was never again seen performing the common everyday functions of currency and traffic.
He was always a-dreaming, too, that he had found treasure. Often he would spend the greater part of a morning tide in pacing the brink of the boiling waves, hoping to find there some coinage of his brain that had been his dream on the preceding night. Southport then existed not, at least in name. No gay and laughing crowds fluttered on the margin of the deep. No lines of well-trimmed "green-eyed" houses looked on, nor boats with their dancing pennons and bright forms shone gallantly on the waves. All was bleak, bare, and unappropriated. The very air seemed tenantless, save when the solitary gull came sailing on heavily with the approaching tide, screaming over the gorge she beheld rising on the billows. The loud lunge of the sea was interrupted solely by the cry of the fisherman, and the "cockler's" whistle, plying his scanty trade among the shoals and sandbanks about the coast. It is scarcely possible to conceive a situation more desolate and uninviting. Hills of arid sand skirting the beach, without vegetation or enclosure, except where the withered bent and little golden-starred stone-crop gave their own wild and peculiar aspect to the scene. The shore is flat and unbroken to the very horizon, where the tide, retreating to its extreme verge, throws up a dim sparkle in the distance--Nature even here displaying her never-ceasing round of reproduction and decay, of advance and retrocession.
We had almost forgotten that there was another inmate of the household--a tall, thick-browed, high-cheeked menial, whose coarse habiliments displayed a well-proportioned shape, and shoulders of an athletic width. He had been engaged at the farm barely twelve months before the date of our narrative; and, at the first, a more egregious simpleton, as to farming and fishing operations, never drew a net or whistled at the plough-tail. Yet he came well recommended by a Catholic gentleman in the neighbourhood as a stout servant of all work, who would serve Grimes honestly and for moderate wages. He had one excellence or defect, as it might be--that which we impute to one dumb from his birth, but not deaf. He perfectly understood what was spoken, though, to make known his wishes, he was obliged to have recourse to signs or writing. In the former accomplishment he seemed to be well skilled, for he often elucidated his meaning by rude sketches in chalk upon the floor and table. There was a mystery about his appearance he cared not to divulge. His country and connections, too, were equally unknown. By the neighbours it was often suspected that he dealt with the Evil One. The "evil eye" was sometimes attributed to him; and the signs and chalkings were supposed to be mystic emblems of the future, into the hidden secrets of which he had the power of directing his inquiries.
He was apt in learning, and served George Grimes diligently and faithfully. He soon became acquainted with the various duties of the farm; and could unreef a sail or make a net with the best labourer in the parish.
His only companion was Katherine. She taught him to knit, and to make nets; directed him how to find the best peats, and showed him where the rabbits burrowed and the larks and lapwings made their nests. Sometimes the instructress and her pupil would sit on the sandhills, and watch the sun sink down upon the ocean; sometimes they would gather shells, when the day's work was over, and string them in fantastic chaplets, which "_Dummy_" was very expert in contriving. He could converse with Kattern without difficulty. He had taught her his vocabulary of signs, and the maiden liked to observe his strange remarks and inquiries on passing events.
In the forenoon of a dark, threatening, and squally day, just before high tide, Grimes and his assistant had trudged towards the beach, intending to go out with the boat for a little while. The weather having been stormy of late, supplies were becoming scanty, and he wanted a few fish for their own use. They proposed to take the smaller boat only, hoping to be back with the next flood.
Toiling through the sand-drifts, they came to an opening between the hills, which looked immediately on the beach. The sky was black and heavy on the horizon towards the south-west. Round hard-edged clouds rode on from the main body, like flying squadrons, "grim couriers" of the storm. Here and there, through an opening in the clouds, the sky was of a deep, vivid, and intense blue, contrasting wildly with the rolling forms that tumbled about in turbulent confusion over the whole hemisphere. The sea was rising in breakers over the banks, hillocks of white foam riding on the crest of the billows, while the margin of the waves boiled and frothed like some vast cauldron.