Fuimus, non sumus.

‘When Elinor arrived in Yorkshire, she found her aunt was dead. Elinor went to visit her grave. It was, in compliance with her last request, placed near the window of the independent meetinghouse, and bore for inscription her favourite text, ‘Those whom he foreknew, he also predestinated,’ &c. &c. Elinor stood by the grave some time, but could not shed a tear. This contrast of a life so rigid, and a death so hopeful, — this silence of humanity, and eloquence of the grave, — pierced through her heart, as it will through every heart that has indulged in the inebriation of human passion, and feels that the draught has been drawn from broken cisterns.

‘Her aunt’s death made Elinor’s life, if possible, more secluded, and her habits more monotonous than they would otherwise have been. She was very charitable to the cottagers in her neighbourhood; but except to visit their habitations, she never quitted her own.

‘Often she contemplated a small stream that flowed at the end of her garden. As she had lost all her sensibility of nature, another motive was assigned for this mute and dark contemplation; and her servant, much attached to her, watched her closely.

‘She was roused from this fearful state of stupefaction and despair, which those who have felt shudder at the attempt to describe, by a letter from Margaret. She had received several from her which lay unanswered, (no unusual thing in those days), but this she tore open, read with interest inconceivable, and prepared instantly to answer by action.

‘Margaret’s high spirits seemed to have sunk in her hour of danger. She hinted that that hour was rapidly approaching, and that she earnestly implored the presence of her affectionate kinswoman to soothe and sustain in the moment of her approaching peril. She added, that the manly and affectionate tenderness of John Sandal at this period, had touched her heart more deeply, if possible, than all the former testimonies of his affection — but that she could not bear his resignation of all his usual habits of rural amusement, and of the neighbouring society — that she in vain had chided him from her couch, where she lingered in pain and hope, and hoped that Elinor’s presence might induce him to yield to her request, as he must feel, on her arrival, the dearest companion of her youth was present — and that, at such a moment, a female companion was more suitable than even the gentlest and most affectionate of the other sex.

‘Elinor set out directly. The purity of her feelings had formed an impenetrable barrier between her heart and its object, — and she apprehended no more danger from the presence of one who was wedded, and wedded to her relative, than from that of her own brother.

‘She arrived at the Castle — Margaret’s hour of danger had begun — she had been very ill during the preceding period. The natural consequences of her situation had been aggravated by a feeling of dignified responsibility on the birth of an heir to the house of Mortimer — and this feeling had not contributed to render that situation more supportable.

‘Elinor bent over the bed of pain — pressed her cold lips to the burning lips of the sufferer — and prayed for her.

‘The first medical assistance in the country (then very rarely employed on such occasions) had been obtained at a vast expence. The widow Sandal, declining all attendance on the sufferer, paced through the adjacent apartments in agony unutterable and unuttered.

‘Two days and nights went on in hope and terror — the bell-ringers sat up in every church within ten miles round — the tenantry crowded round the Castle with honest heartfelt solicitude — the neighbouring nobility sent their messages of inquiry every hour. An accouchement in a noble family was then an event of importance.

‘The hour came — twins were born dead — and the young mother was fated to follow them within a few hours! While life yet remained, Margaret shewed the remains of the lofty spirit of the Mortimers. She sought with her cold hand that of her wretched husband and of the weeping Elinor. She joined them in an embrace which one of them at least understood, and prayed that their union might be eternal. She then begged to see the bodies of her infant sons — they were produced; and it was said that she uttered expressions, intimating that, had they not been the heirs of the Mortimer family — had not expectation been wound so high, and supported by all the hopes that life and youth could flatter her with, — she and they might yet have existed.

‘As she spoke, her voice grew feebler, and her eyes dim — their last light was turned on him she loved; and when sight was gone, she still felt his arms enfold her. The next moment they enfolded — nothing!

‘In the terrible spasms of masculine agony — the more intensely felt as they are more rarely indulged — the young widower dashed himself on the bed, which shook with his convulsive grief; and Elinor, losing all sense but that of a calamity so sudden and so terrible, echoed his deep and suffocating sobs, as it she whom they deplored had not been the only obstacle to her happiness.

‘Amid the voice of mourning that rung through the Castle from vault to tower in that day of trouble, none was loud like that of the widow Sandal — her wailings were shrieks, her grief was despair. Rushing through the rooms like one distracted, she tore her hair out by the roots, and imprecated the most fearful curses on her head. At length she approached the apartment where the corse lay. The servants, shocked at her distraction, would have withheld her from entering it, but could not. She burst into the room, cast one wild look on its inmates — the still corse and the dumb mourners — and then, flinging herself on her knees before her son, confessed the secret of her guilt, and developed to its foul base the foundation of that pile of iniquity and sorrow which had now reached its summit.

‘Her son listened to this horrible confession with fixed eye and features unmoved; and at its conclusion, when the wretched penitent implored the assistance of her son to raise her from her knees, he repelled her outstretched hands, and with a weak wild laugh, sunk back on the bed. He never could be removed from it till the corse to which he clung was borne away, and then the mourners hardly knew which to deplore — her who was deprived of the light of life, or him in whom the light of reason was extinguished for ever!

‘The wretched, guilty mother, (but for her fate no one can be solicitous), a few months after, on her dying bed, declared the secret of her crime to a minister of an independent congregation, who was induced, by the report of her despair, to visit her. She confessed that, being instigated by avarice, and still more by the desire of regaining her lost consequence in the family, and knowing the wealth and dignity her son would acquire, and in which she must participate, by his marriage with Margaret, she had, after using all the means of persuasion and intreaty, been driven, in despair at her disappointment, to fabricate a tale as false as it was horrible, which she related to her deluded son on the evening before his intended nuptials with Elinor. She had assured him he was not her son, but the offspring of the illicit commerce of her husband the preacher with the Puritan mother of Elinor, who had formerly been one of his congregation, and whose well-known and strongly-expressed admiration of his preaching had been once supposed extended to his person, — had caused her much jealous anxiety in the early years of their marriage, and was now made the basis of this horrible fiction. She added, that Margaret’s obvious attachment to her cousin had, in some degree, palliated her guilt to herself; but that, when she saw him quit her house in despair on the morning of his intended marriage, and rush he knew not whither, she was half tempted to recall him, and confess the truth. Her mind again became hardened, and she reflected that her secret was safe, as she had bound him by an oath, from respect to his father’s memory, and compassion to the guilty mother of Elinor, never to disclose the truth to her daughter.

‘The event had succeeded to her guilty wishes. — Sandal beheld Elinor with the eyes of a brother, and the image of Margaret easily found a place in his unoccupied affections. But, as often befals to the dealers in falsehood and obliquity, the apparent accomplishment of her hopes proved her ruin. In the event of the marriage of John and Margaret proving issueless, the estates and title went to the distant relative named in the will; and her son, deprived of reason by the calamities in which her arts had involved him, was by them also deprived of the wealth and rank to which they were meant to raise him, and reduced to the small pension obtained by his former services, — the poverty of the King, then himself a pensioner of Lewis XIV., forbidding the possibility of added remuneration. When the minister heard to the last the terrible confession of the dying penitent, in the awful language ascribed to Bishop Burnet when consulted by another criminal, — he bid her ‘almost despair,’ and departed.

‘Elinor has retired, with the helpless object of her unfading love and unceasing care, to her cottage in Yorkshire. There, in the language of that divine and blind old man, the fame of whose poetry has not yet reached this country, it is

‘Her delight to see him sitting in the house,’

and watch, like the father of the Jewish champion, the growth of that ‘God-given strength,’ that intellectual power, which, unlike Samson’s, will never return.

‘After an interval of two years, during which she had expended a large part of the capital of her fortune in obtaining the first medical advice for the patient, and ‘suffered many things of many physicians,’ she gave up all hope, — and, reflecting that the interest of her fortune thus diminished would be but sufficient to procure the comforts of life for herself and him whom she has resolved never to forsake, she sat down in patient misery with her melancholy companion, and added one more to the many proofs of woman’s heart, ‘unwearied in well-doing,’ without the intoxication of passion, the excitement of applause, or even the gratitude of the unconscious object.

‘Were this a life of calm privation, and pulseless apathy, her efforts would scarce have merit, and her sufferings hardly demand compassion; but it is one of pain incessant and immitigable. The first-born of her heart lies dead within it; but that heart is still alive with all its keenest sensibilities, its most vivid hopes, and its most exquisite sense of grief.

‘She sits beside him all day — she watches that eye whose light was life, and sees it fixed on her in glassy and unmeaning complacency — she dreams of that smile which burst on her soul like the morning sun over a landscape in spring, and sees that smile of vacancy which tries to convey satisfaction, but cannot give it the language of expression. Averting her head, she thinks of other days. A vision passes before her. — Lovely and glorious things, the hues of whose colouring are not of this world, and whose web is too fine to be woven in the loom of life, — rise to her eye like the illusions of enchantment. A strain of rich remembered music floats in her hearing — she dreams of the hero, the lover, the beloved, — him in whom were united all that could dazzle the eye, inebriate the imagination, and melt the heart. She sees him as he first appeared to her, — and the mirage of the desert present not a vision more delicious and deceptive — she bends to drink of that false fountain, and the stream disappears — she starts from her reverie, and hears the weak laugh of the sufferer, as he moves a little water in a shell, and imagines he sees the ocean in a storm!

‘She has one consolation. When a short interval of recollection returns, — when his speech becomes articulate, — he utters her name, not that of Margaret, and a beam of early hope dances on her heart as she hears it, but fades away as fast as the rare and wandering ray of intellect from the lost mind of the sufferer!

‘Unceasingly attentive to his health and his comforts, she walked out with him every evening, but led him through the most sequestered paths, to avoid those whose mockful persecution, or whose vacant pity, might be equally torturing to her feelings, or harassing to her still gentle and smiling companion.

‘It was at this period,’ said the stranger to Aliaga, ‘I first became acquainted with — I mean — at this time a stranger, who had taken up his abode near the hamlet where Elinor resided, was seen to watch the two figures as they passed slowly on their retired walk. Evening after evening he watched them. He knew the history of these two unhappy beings, and prepared himself to take advantage of it. It was impossible, considering their secluded mode of existence, to obtain an introduction. He tried to recommend himself by his occasional attentions to the invalid — he sometimes picked up the flowers that an unconscious hand flung into the stre............