第58章 Volume 2(22)

But,be this as it may,the melancholy circumstances connected with Ellen Heathcote had reached him,and his conduct towards her proved,more strongly than anything else could have done,that he felt keenly and justly,and,to a certain degree,with a softened heart,the fatal event of which she had been,in some manner,alike the cause and the victim.

He evinced not towards her,as might have been expected,any unreasonable resentment.On the contrary,he exhibited great consideration,even tenderness,for her situation;and having ascertained where his son had placed her,he issued strict orders that she should not be disturbed,and that the fatal tidings,which had not yet reached her,should be withheld until they might be communicated in such a way as to soften as much as possible the inevitable shock.

These last directions were acted upon too scrupulously and too long;and,indeed,I am satisfied that had the event been communicated at once,however terrible and overwhelming the shock might have been,much of the bitterest anguish,of sickening doubts,of harassing suspense,would have been spared her,and the first tempestuous burst of sorrow having passed over,her chastened spirit might have recovered its tone,and her life have been spared.But the mistaken kindness which concealed from her the dreadful truth,instead of relieving her mind of a burden which it could not support,laid upon it a weight of horrible fears and doubts as to the affection of O'Mara,compared with which even the certainty of his death would have been tolerable.

One evening I had just seated myself beside a cheerful turf fire,with that true relish which a long cold ride through a bleak and shelterless country affords,stretching my chilled limbs to meet the genial influence,and imbibing the warmth at every pore,when my comfortable meditations were interrupted by a long and sonorous ringing at the door-bell evidently effected by no timid hand.

A messenger had arrived to request my attendance at the Lodge--such was the name which distinguished a small and somewhat antiquated building,occupying a peculiarly secluded position among the bleak and heathy hills which varied the surface of that not altogether uninteresting district,and which had,I believe,been employed by the keen and hardy ancestors of the O'Mara family as a convenient temporary residence during the sporting season.

Thither my attendance was required,in order to administer to a deeply distressed lady such comforts as an afflicted mind can gather from the sublime hopes and consolations of Christianity.

I had long suspected that the occupant of this sequestered,I might say desolate,dwelling-house was the poor girl whose brief story we are following;and feeling a keen interest in her fate--as who that had ever seen her DID NOT?--I started from my comfortable seat with more eager alacrity than,I will confess it,I might have evinced had my duty called me in another direction.

In a few minutes I was trotting rapidly onward,preceded by my guide,who urged his horse with the remorseless rapidity of one who seeks by the speed of his progress to escape observation.Over roads and through bogs we splashed and clattered,until at length traversing the brow of a wild and rocky hill,whose aspect seemed so barren and forbidding that it might have been a lasting barrier alike to mortal sight and step,the lonely building became visible,lying in a kind of swampy flat,with a broad reedy pond or lake stretching away to its side,and backed by a farther range of monotonous sweeping hills,marked with irregular lines of grey rock,which,in the distance,bore a rude and colossal resemblance to the walls of a fortification.

Riding with undiminished speed along a kind of wild horse-track,we turned the corner of a high and somewhat ruinous wall of loose stones,and making a sudden wheel we found ourselves in a small quadrangle,surmounted on two sides by dilapidated stables and kennels,on another by a broken stone wall,and upon the fourth by the front of the lodge itself.

The whole character of the place was that of dreary desertion and decay,which would of itself have predisposed the mind for melancholy impressions.My guide dismounted,and with respectful attention held my horse's bridle while I got down;and knocking at the door with the handle of his whip,it was speedily opened by a neatly-dressed female domestic,and I was admitted to the interior of the house,and conducted into a small room,where a fire in some degree dispelled the cheerless air,which would otherwise have prevailed to a painful degree throughout the place.

I had been waiting but for a very few minutes when another female servant,somewhat older than the first,entered the room.She made some apology on the part of the person whom I had come to visit,for the slight delay which had already occurred,and requested me further to wait for a few minutes longer,intimating that the lady's grief was so violent,that without great effort she could not bring herself to speak calmly at all.As if to beguile the time,the good dame went on in a highly communicative strain to tell me,amongst much that could not interest me,a little of what I had desired to hear.Idiscovered that the grief of her whom I

had come to visit was excited by the sudden death of a little boy,her only child,who was then lying dead in his mother's chamber.

'And the mother's name?'said I,inquiringly.