University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

Such were the persons, such the dispositions
of the fair heiresses of Ingleborough
at the time when they had attained the
ages I have specified; and certainly, although
their spheres of usefulness would
have appeared, at first sight, circumscribed,
and the range of their enjoyments very
narrow, there rarely have been seen two
happier or more useful beings than Annabel
and Marian Hawkwood, in this wide
world of sin and sorrow.

The care of their bereaved and hapless
parent occupied, it is true, the greater portion
of their time; yet they found many
leisure hours to devote to visiting the
poor, aiding the wants of the needy, consoling
the sorrows of those who mourned,
and sympathizing with the pleasures of
the happy, among their humble neighbors.
To them this might be truly termed
a work of love and pleasure; for it is
questionable whether from any other
source the lovely girls derived a higher or
more satisfactory enjoyment, than from
their tours of charity among their village
pensioners.

Next in the scale of happiness stood,
doubtless, the society of the old vicar of
that pastoral parish; a man who had been
their father's friend and counsellor in those
young days of college friendship, when
the fresh heart is uppermost in all, and
selfishness a dormant passion; a man old
enough almost to have been their grandsire,
but with a heart as young and as
cheery as a boy's—an intellect accomplished
in the deepest lore of the schools,
both classical and scientific, and skilled
thoroughly in all the niceties and graces
of French, and Spanish, and Italian literature—a
man who had known courts and
camps, too, for a short space in his youth;
who had seen much and suffered much,
and yet enjoyed, not a little, in his acquaintance
with the world; and who,
from sights, and sufferings, and enjoyments,
had learned that if there is much
evil, there is yet more of good, even in this
world—had learned, while rigid to his
own faults, to be most lenient to his neighbor's
failings—had learned that charity
should be the fruit of wisdom!—and had
learned all this only to practise it in all
his daily walks, to inculcate it in all his
weekly lessons.

This aged man, and his scarce less aged
wife, living hardly a stone's throw from
the Hall, had grown almost to think themselves
a portion of the family; and surely
no blood kindred could have created
stronger ties of kindness than had the
familiarity of long acquaintance, the confidence
of old hereditary love. Lower yet
in the round of their enjoyments, but still
a constant source of blameless satisfaction,
were their books, their music, and their
drawings; the management of their household,
the cultivation of their lovely garden,
the ministering to the wants of their loved
birds and flowers. Thus, all sequestered
and seclnded from the world, placed in
the midst of onerous duties, and solicitudes
almost innumerable, though they had
never danced at a ball, nor blushed at the
praise of their own beauty flowing from
eloquent lips, nor listened to a lover's suit,
queens might have envied the felicity, the
calm pure peaceful happiness of Annabel
and Marian.

They were, indeed, too happy! I do
not mean too happy to be virtuous, too
happy to be mindful of and grateful to the
Giver of all joy—but, as the common
phrase runs, too happy for their happiness
to be enduring. This is a strange belief
—a wondrous superstition!—and yet it
has been common to all ages. The Greeks,
those wild poetical dreamers, imagined
that their vain gods, made up of moral attributes,
envied the bliss of men, fearing
that wretched earthlings should vie in
happiness with the possessors of Olympus.
They sang in their dark mystic choruses,

and, though their other doctrines of that
insuperable destiny—that absolute necessity,
to resist which is needless labor—and
of ancestral guilt, through countless generations,
would seem to militate against
it, there was no more established faith,
and no more prevalent opinion, than that
unwonted fortunes were necessarily followed
by most unusual woe. Hence, perhaps,
the stern self-mortification of the
middle ages—hence, certainly, the vulgar
terror prevalent more or less among all
classes, and in every time and country,
that children are too beautiful, too prematurely
clever, too good to be long-lived—
that happiness is too great to be lasting—
that mornings are too fine to augur stormless
days!

And we—aye! we ourselves—we of a better
faith, and purer dispensation—we half
believe all this, and more than half tremble
at it, although, in truth, there is no
cause for fear in the belief—since, if there
be aught of truth in the mysterious creed,
which facts do in a certain sense seem to
bear out, we can but think, we cannot but

perceive, that this is but a varied form of
care and misery, vouchsafed by the Great
All-perfect toward his frail creatures—that
this is but a merciful provision, to hinder
us from laying up for ourselves “treasures
upon earth, where moth and rust do corrupt,
and where thieves break through and
steal”—a provision to restrain us from
forgetting, in the small temporary bliss of
the present, the boundless and incomparable
beatitude of the future—to warn us
against hartering, like Esau, our birthright
for a mess of portage!

But I am now called to follow out this
train of thought, suggested by the change
in the fortunes of those to whom I am
performing the part of historian; by the
change, I say, in their fortunes—a change,
too, arising from the very circumstances,
as is frequently the case, which seemed to
promise the most fairly for their improvement
and their permanence. Oh! how
blind guides are we! even the most farsighted
of us all!—how weak and senseless
judges, even the most sagacious!—
how false and erring prophets, even the
wisest and the best!

It was, as I have said already, somewhere
late in the summer, wherefrom
Annabel reckoned her twentieth and Marian
her nineteenth year—very late in the
last month of summer, an hour or two before
the sunset of as beautiful an evening
as ever smiled upon the face of the green
earth. The sky was nearly cloudless,
though a thin gauze-like haze had floated
up from the horizon, and so far veiled the
orb of the great sun, that the eye could
gaze undazzled on his glories; and the
whole air was full of a rich golden light,
which flooded the level meadows with its
lustre, except where they were checkered
by the long cool blue shadows projected
from the massive clumps of noble
forest trees, which, singly or in groups,
diversified the lonely vale, and gilded the
tall slender steeple of the old village
church, and glanced in living fire from the
broad oriel windows of the Hall.

Such was the evening, and so beautiful
the prospect, with every sound and sight
in perfect harmony—the sharp squeak of
the rapid swifts, wheeling their airy circles
around the distant spire, the full and
liquid melodies of thrush and blackbird
from out the thorn bushes upon the lawn,
the lowing of the cows, returning from
their pasture to pay the evening tribute,
the very cawing of the homeward rooks,
blended by distance into a continuous and
soothing murmur, the rippling music of
the stream, the low sound of the west
wind in the foliage of the sycamores, the
far shout of the children, happy at their
release from school, the carol of a solitary
milk-maid, combining to make up a music
as sweet as can be heard or dreamed of
by the sleeping poet. That lovely picture
was surveyed, and that delicious melody
was listened to, by eyes and ears well
fitted to appreciate their loveliness, for at
an open casement of a great parlor in the
Hall, with furniture all covered with those
elegant appliances of female industry—
well executed drawings, and books, and
instruments of music, and work-baskets,
and frames for embroidery—which show
so pleasantly that the apartment is one
not of show, but of calm home-enjoyment
—at an open casement sat Annabel, alone
—for the presence of the frail paralytic
being, who dozed in her arm-chair, at the
further end of the room, cannot be held to
constitute society. Marian, for the first
time in her life, was absent from her home,
on a visit, which had already endured
nearly six weeks, to the only near relative
of the family who was yet living—a younger
sister of her mother—who had married
many years ago a clergyman, whose piety
and talents had raised him to a stall in the
Cathedral Church of York, where he resided
with his wife—a childless couple.

This worthy pair had passed a portion
of the summer at the Hall, and when returning
to the metropolis of the county
had prevailed on their younger niece, not
altogether without difficulty, to go with
them for a few weeks, and see a little society
on a scale something more extended
than that which her native vales could
offer. It was the first time in their lives
that the sisters had been parted for more
than a few days, and now the hours were
beginning to appear very long to Annabel;
as weeks were running into months, and
the gorgeous suns of summer were fast
preparing to give place to the cold dews
and frosty winds of autumn. The evening
meal was over, and a solitary thing was
that meal now, which used to be the most
delightful of the day; and hastily did the
lonely sister hurry it over, thinking all the
while what might be Marian's occupation
at the moment, and whether she too was
engaged in thoughts concerning her far
friends, and the fair home of her childhood.

It was then, in a mood half melancholy
and half listless, that Annabel was gazing
from her window, down the broad valley
to the eastward, marvelling at the beauty
of the scenery, though she had noted
every changing hue that flitted over the
far purple hills a thousand times before;
and listening to every sweet familiar

sound; and yet, at the same time, pondering,
as if she were quite unconscious
of all that met her senses, about things
which she fancied might be happening at
York, when on a sudden, her attention
was aroused by a dense cloud of dust,
rising beyond the river, upon the line of
the high road, and sweeping up the valley,
with a progress so unusually rapid as to
indicate that the objects, which it veiled
from view, must be in more than commonly
quick motion. For a few moments
she watched this little marvel narrowly,
but without any apprehension or even
any solicitude; until, as it drew nearer,
she could at times see bright flashes, as if
of polished metal, gleaming out through
the murky wreaths, and feathers waving
in the air.

The year was that, in which the hapless
Charles, all hopes of reconciliation with
his parliament being decidedly frustrated,
displayed the banner of civil war, and
drew the sword against his subjects. The
rumors of the coming strife had circulated,
like the dread subterraneous rumblings
which harbinger the earthquake, through
all the country far and near; sad omens
of approaching evil! and more distinctly
were they bruited through Yorkshire, in
consequence of the attempt which had
been made by the royal party to secure
Hull, with all its magazines and shipping
—frustrated by the energy and spirit of the
Hothams—so that, as soon as she perceived
that the dust was beyond all doubt
stirred up by a small party of well-appointed
horse, Annabel entertained no
doubts as to the meaning, but many serious
apprehensions as to the cause of the
present visitation.