About this time, her Puritan aunt made a strong effort to recover Elinor out of the snare of the enemy. She wrote a long letter (a great exertion for a woman far advanced in years, and never in the habits of epistolary composition) adjuring her apostate niece to return to the guide of her youth, and the covenant of her God—to take shelter in the everlasting arms while they were still held out to her—and to flee to the city of refuge while its gates were yet open to receive her. She urged on her the truth, power, and blessedness of the system of Calvin, which she termed the gospel.—She supported and defended it with all the metaphysical skill, and all the scriptural knowledge she possessed—and the latter was not scanty.—And she affectingly reminded her, that the hand that traced these lines, would be unable ever to repeat the admonition, and would probably be mouldering into dust while she was employed in their perusal.
Elinor wept while she read, but that was all. She wept from physical emotion, not from mental conviction; nor is there such an induration of heart caused by any other power, as by that of the passion which seems to soften it most. She answered the letter, however, and the effort scarce cost her less than it did her decrepit and dying relative. She acknowledged her dereliction of all religious feeling, and bewailed it—the more, she added with painful sincerity, because I feel my grief is not sincere. “Oh, my God!” she continued, “you who have clothed my heart with such burning energies—you who have given to it a power of loving so intense, so devoted, so concentrated—you have not given it in vain;—no, in some happier world, or perhaps even in this, when this ‘tyranny is overpast,’ you will fill my heart with an image worthier than him whom I once believed your image on earth. The stars, though their light appears so dim and distant to us, were not lit by the Almighty hand in vain. Their glorious light burns for remote and happier worlds; and the beam of religion that glows so feebly to eyes almost blind with earthly tears, may be rekindled when a broken heart has been my passport to a place of rest. …
“Do not think me, dear aunt, deserted by all hope of religion, even though I have lost the sense of it. Was it not said by unerring lips to a sinner, that her transgressions were forgiven because she loved much? And does not this capacity of love prove that it will one day be more worthily filled, and more happily employed. …
“Miserable wretch that I am! At this moment, a voice from the bottom of my heart asks me ‘Whom hast thou loved so much? Was it man or God, that thou darest to compare thyself with her who knelt and wept—not before a mortal idol, but at the feet of an incarnate divinity?’ …
“It may yet befall, that the ark which has floated through the waste of waters may find its resting-place, and the trembling inmate debark on the shores of an unknown but purer world.” …
XXXI
There is an oak beside the froth-clad pool,
Where in old time, as I have often heard,
A woman desperate, a wretch like me,
Ended her woes!—Her woes were not like mine! …… Ronan will know;
Home’s Fatal Discovery
When he beholds me floating on the stream,
His heart will tell him why Rivine died!
The increasing decline of Elinor’s health was marked by all the family; the very servant who stood behind her chair looked sadder every day—even Margaret began to repent of the invitation she had given her to the Castle.
Elinor felt this, and would have spared her what pain she could; but it was not possible for herself to be insensible of the fast-fading remains of her withering youth and blighted beauty. The place—the place itself, was the principal cause of that mortal disease that was consuming her; yet from that place she felt she had less resolution to tear herself every day. So she lived, like those sufferers in eastern prisons, who are not allowed to taste food unless mixed with poison, and who must perish alike whether they eat or forbear.
Once, urged by intolerable pain of heart (tortured by living in the placid light of John Sandal’s sunny smile), she confessed this to Margaret. She said, “It is impossible for me to support this existence—impossible! To tread the floor which those steps have trod—to listen for their approach, and when they come, feel they do not bear him we seek—to see every object around me reflect his image, but never—never to see the reality—to see the door open which once disclosed his figure, and when it opens, not to see him, and when he does appear, to see him not what he was—to feel he is the same and not the same—the same to the eye, but not to the heart—to struggle thus between the dream of imagination and the cruel awaking of reality—Oh! Margaret—that undeception plants a dagger in the heart, whose point no human hand can extract, and whose venom no human hand can heal!”
Margaret wept as Elinor spoke thus, and slowly, very slowly, expressed her consent that Elinor should quit the Castle, if it was necessary for her peace.
It was the very evening after this conversation, that Elinor, whose habit was to wander among the woods that surrounded the Castle unattended, met with John Sandal. It was a glorious autumnal evening, just like that on which they had first met—the associations of nature were the same, those of the heart alone had suffered change.
