The hour arrived, and an express was dispatched from London to Mortimer Castle with intelligence, in which King Charles, with that splendid courtesy which half redeemed his vices, announced himself most deeply interested, inasmuch as it added to the honours of the loyal family, whose services he appreciated so highly. The victory was complete—and Captain John Sandal, in the phrase which the King’s attachment to French manners and language was beginning to render popular, had “covered himself with glory.” Amid the thickest of the fight, in an open boat, he had carried a message from Lord Sandwich to the Duke of York, under a shower of balls, and when older officers had stoutly declined the perilous errand; and when, on his return, Opdam the Dutch Admiral’s ship blew up, amid the crater of the explosion John Sandal plunged into the sea, to save the half-drowning, half-burning wretches who clung to the fragments that scorched them, or sunk in the boiling waves; and then—dismissed on another fearful errand, flung himself between the Duke of York and the ball that struck at one blow the Earl of Falmouth, Lord Muskerry, and Mr. Boyle, and when they all fell at the same moment, wiped, with unfaltering hand, and on bended knee, their brains and gore, with which the Duke of York was covered from head to foot. When this was read by Mrs. Ann Mortimer, with many pauses, caused by sight dim with age, and diffused with tears—and when at length, finishing the long and laborious read detail, Mrs. Ann exclaimed—“He is a hero!” Elinor tremblingly whispered to herself—“He is a Christian.”
The details of such an event forming a kind of era in a family so sequestered, imaginative, and heroic, as that of the Mortimers, the contents of the letter signed by the King’s own hand were read over and over again. They formed the theme of converse at their meals, and the subject of their study and comment when alone. Margaret dwelt much on the gallantry of the action, and half-imagined she saw the tremendous explosion of Opdam’s ship. Elinor repeated to herself, “And he plunged amid the burning wave to save the lives of the men he had conquered!” And some months elapsed before the brilliant vision of glory, and of grateful royalty, faded from their imagination; and when it did, like that of Micyllus, it left honey on the eyelids of the dreamer.
From the date of the arrival of this intelligence, a change had taken place in the habits and manners of Elinor, so striking as to become the object of notice to all but herself. Her health, her rest, and her imagination, became the prey of indefinable fantasies. The cherished images of the past—the lovely visions of her golden childhood—seemed fearfully and insanely contrasted in her imagination with the ideas of slaughter and blood—of decks strewed with corses—and of a young and terrible conqueror bestriding them amid showers of ball and clouds of fire. Her very senses reeled between these opposite impressions. Her reason could not brook the sudden transition from the smiling and Cupid-like companion of her childhood, to the hero of the embattled deep, and of nations and navies on fire—garments rolled in blood—the thunder of the battle and the shouting.
She sat and tried, as well as her wandering fancy would allow her, to reconcile the images of that remembered eye, whose beam rested on her like the dark blue of a summer heaven swimming in dewy light—with the flash that darted from the burning eye of the conqueror, whose light was as fatal where it fell as his sword. She saw him, as he had once sat beside her, smiling like the first morning in spring—and smiled in return. The slender form, the soft and springy movements, the kiss of childhood that felt like velvet, and scented like balm—was suddenly exchanged in her dream (for all her thoughts were dreams) for a fearful figure of one drenched in blood, and spattered with brains and gore. And Elinor, half-screaming, exclaimed, “Is this he whom I loved?” Thus her mind, vacillating between contrasts so strongly opposed, began to feel its moorings give way. She drifted from rock to rock, and on every rock she struck a wreck.
Elinor relinquished her usual meetings with the family—she sat in her own apartment all the day, and most of the evening. It was a lonely turret projecting so far from the walls of the Castle, that there were windows, or rather casements, on three sides. There Elinor sat to catch the blast, let it blow as it would, and imagined she heard in its moanings the cries of drowning seamen. No music that her lute, or that which Margaret touched with a more powerful and brilliant finger, could wean her from this melancholy indulgence.
“Hush!” she would say to the females who attended her—“Hush! let me listen to the blast!—It waves many a banner spread for victory—it sighs over many a head that has been laid low!”
Her amazement that a being could be at once so gentle and so ferocious—her dread that the habits of his life must have converted the “angel of her wilderness” into a brave but brutal seaman, estranged from the feelings that had rendered the beautiful boy so indulgent to her errors—so propitiatory between her and her proud relatives—so aidant in all her amusements—so necessary to her very existence.—The tones of this dreamy life harmonized, awfully for Elinor, with the sound of the blast as it shook the turrets of the Castle, or swept the woods that groaned and bowed beneath its awful visitings. And this secluded life, intense
