Delusion, or The Witch of New England Part 6

Edith was startled, for the woman's expression was very wild, but she answered mildly, "Is that so great a boon, mother, that I should deserve to lose it?"

"Ask her," she said, "whose brain is burning, and whose heart is like lead, what she would give for one moist tear. O G.o.d! I cannot weep."

Whatever timidity Edith felt when she first saw the malignant expression of the old woman's countenance, was now lost in pity. She knew that the poor creature's reason was impaired, and she thought this might be one of her wild moments.

She laid her hand gently on her arm, and said, with a smile, "Nanny, I have come on purpose to visit you. Let us go into the house, and you shall tell me what you think, and all you want to make you comfortable for the winter."

Nanny looked at Edith almost with scorn. "Tell you what I think!" she said. "As well might I tell yonder birds that are hovering with white wings in the blue sky. What do you know of sorrow? but you will not always be strangers. Sorrow is coming over you; I see its dark fold drawing nearer and nearer."

A slight shudder came over Edith, but she smiled, and said, soothingly, "I came to talk with you about yourself; let my fate alone for the present."

"Ah! no need to shake the gla.s.s," answered Nanny; "grief is coming soon enough to drink up your young blood. The cheek that changes like yours, with sudden flus.h.i.+ng, withers soonest; not with age, no, not, like mine, with age, but blighted by the cold hand of unkindness; and eyes, like yours, that every emotion fills with sudden tears, soon have their fountains dry, and then, ah! how you will long and pray for one drop, as I do now!"

They had entered the poor hovel, and the old woman, who had been speaking in a tone of great excitement, now turned and looked full at Edith: her beauty seemed to awake a feeling of envious contempt.

The contrast between them was indeed great. Edith stood in the narrow door, blooming with youth and health. Her dark hair, which contrasted so beautifully with her soft blue eye, had lost its curl by the damp air, and she had taken off her bonnet to put back the uncurled tresses.

The old woman had seated herself in an old, high-backed chair, and, with her elbows on her knees, looked earnestly at Edith. Her face might once have been fair; but it was now deeply wrinkled, and bronzed with smoke and exposure. Her teeth were gone, and her thin, shriveled lips had an expression of pain and suffering; while her eyes betrayed the envy and contempt she seemed to feel towards others.

"Ah," she said, "gather up your beautiful s.h.i.+ning locks. How long, think you, before they will be like mine? But mine were once black and glossy as yours; and now look at them."

She took down from under her cap her long, gray hair, and spread it over her breast. It was dry and coa.r.s.e, and without a single black hair. She laid her dark, bony hand on Edith's white arm.

"Sorrow has done this," she said,--"not time: it has been of this color for fifty years."

"And have you then suffered so much?" said Edith,--and her eyes filled with tears.

The old woman saw that she was pitied, and a more gentle expression came into her eyes, as she fixed them on Edith.

"My child," she said, "we can learn to bear sorrow, bereavement, the death of all that are twined with our own souls, old age, solitude,--all but remorse--_all but remorse_;" and the last word was p.r.o.nounced almost in a whisper.

"And cannot you turn to G.o.d?" said Edith; "cannot you pray? G.o.d has invited all who are sinners to come to him."

She stopped; for she felt her own insufficiency to administer religious consolation.

"And who told you I was so great a sinner?" said the old woman, all her fierceness returning immediately.

Edith had felt herself all the comfort of opening her heart in prayer to G.o.d; but she was abashed by the old woman: she said only timidly and humbly, "Why will you not confide in my father? Tell him your wants and your misery, and he will pray for you, and help you."

"Tell him! and what does he know of the heart-broken? Can he lift the leaden covering from the conscience? Can he give me back the innocence and peace of my cottage home in the green lanes of England, or the blessing of my poor old father?" And, while an expression of the deepest sadness pa.s.sed over her face,--"Can he bring back my children, my beautiful boys, or bid the sea give up its dead? No, no; let him preach and pray, and let these poor ignorant people hear him; and let me,--ah, let me lie down in the green earth."

Edith was shocked; and the tears she tried in vain to suppress forced themselves down her cheeks.

"Poor child!" said the old woman; "you can weep for others, but yours is the fate of all the daughters of Eve: you will soon weep for yourself.

With all your proud beauty and your feeling heart, you cannot keep your idols: they will crumble away, and you will come at last to what I am."

Edith tried to direct her attention to something else. She looked around the cottage, which had not the appearance of the most abject poverty.

The few articles of furniture were neat, and in one corner stood a comfortable-looking bed. A peat fire slumbered on the hearth, and many dried and smoked fish were hanging from the beams.

She said, very mildly, "I came, Nanny, to see if you did not want something to make you comfortable for the winter. My father sent me, and you must tell me all you want."

"I want nothing," said the old woman; "at least for myself. All your blankets cannot keep the cold from the heart."

At this moment, a little girl about five years old came running into the cottage, with a basket of blackberries she had been picking on the cliffs above the house. Edith was well known to her, as she was to all the children of the parish. The little girl went up to her and presented the blackberries, and then ran to her grandmother with the air of a favored child, as if she were sure of a welcome.

An expression that Edith had never seen, a softened expression of deep tenderness, came over the face of the old woman.

"I was going to speak of this child," she said. "I feel that I shall soon be _there_,"--and she pointed towards the earth,--"and this child has no friend but me."

The little girl, meantime, had crept close to the old woman, and laid her head on her shoulder. The child was not attractive: her feet and legs were bare, and her dress was ragged and much soiled; but covering her eyes and forehead was a profusion of golden-colored ringlets; and, where her skin was not grimmed with dirt and exposure to the sea air, it was delicately white.

There was something touching in the affection of the poor orphan for the old woman; and the contrast, as they thus leant on each other, would have arrested the eye of a painter.

Edith promised to be a friend to her grandchild, and then entreated Nanny to see her father, and confide her sorrows to him. This she steadily refused; and Edith left her, her young spirits saddened by the mystery and the grief that she could not understand. As she walked home, she thought how little the temper of the old woman was in harmony with the external beauty that environed her. The beauty was marred by sin and grief. And even in her own life, pure as it was, how little was there to harmonize with the exquisite loveliness around her!

Edith was not happy: the inward pulse did not beat in harmony with the pulse of nature. She was not happy, because woman, especially in youth, is happy only in her affections. She felt within herself an infinite capacity of loving, and she had few to love, Her heart was solitary. Her affection for her father partook too much of respect and awe; and that for Dinah had grown up from her infancy, and was as much a matter of habit as of grat.i.tude. She longed for the love of an equal, or rather of some one she could reverence as well as love. How she wished she could have been the companion of the Lady Ursula!

Edith was beginning to feel that she had a soul of infinite longings; but she had not yet learnt its power to create for itself an infinite and immortal happiness; and the beauty of nature, that excited without filling her mind, only increased her loneliness.

It is after other pursuits and other friends have disappointed us, that we go back to the beautiful teachings of nature; and, like a tender mother, she receives us to her bosom.

"O, nature never did betray The heart that loved her."

She alone is unchangeable. We may confide in her promises. I have planted an acorn by a beloved grave: in a few years I returned, and found a beautiful oak overshadowing it.

Nature is liberal and impartial as she is faithful. The green earth offers a home for the eyes of the poorest beggar; the soft and purifying winds visit all equally; the tenderly majestic stars look down on him who rests in a bed of down, and on him whose pallet is the naked earth; and the blue sky embraces equally the child of sorrow and of joy.

The teachings of nature are open to all. The poor heart-broken mother sees, in the parent leaves that enfold the tender heart of the young plant, and in the bird that strips her own breast of its down to shelter her young from the night air, the same instinct that teaches her to cherish the child of sorrow. He who addressed the poor and illiterate drew his ill.u.s.trations from nature: the lily of the field, the fowls of the air, and the young ravens, he made his teachers to those who, like him, lived in the open air, and were peculiarly susceptible to all the influences of nature.

To return from this digression. Perhaps my readers will wish to know more of poor Nanny, as she was called.

Nothing was known of her early history. She had come from the mother country four years before, with this little child, then an infant, and had taken a lodging in the poor fisherman's hut. She said the little girl was her grandchild, and all her affections were centred in her. She was entirely reserved as to her previous history, and was irritated if any curiosity was expressed about it, though she sometimes gave out hints that she had been an accomplice and victim of some deed for which she felt remorse. As she was quite harmless, and the inhabitants were much scattered, she was unmolested, and earned a scanty living by picking berries, fis.h.i.+ng, and helping those who were not quite as poor as herself. Edith visited her often, and Mr. Grafton, though she would not acknowledge him as a spiritual guide, ministered to all her temporal wants.

CHAPTER IX.

Thou changest not, but I am changed, Since first thy pleasant banks I ranged; The visions of my youth are past, Too bright, too beautiful, to last.

BRYANT.

More than two years had pa.s.sed since Edith's visit to the old woman of the cliff. Changes had taken place in all the personages of my little tale; but in Edith they were most apparent. She who had sung all day as the birds sing, because she could not help it, at nineteen had learned to reflect and to a.n.a.lyze; a sensitive conscience had taken the place of spontaneous and impulsive virtue; and the same heart that could be happy all day long in nursing a young chicken, or watching the opening of a flower, or carrying food to a poor old woman, now closed her days with _thinking_, and moistened her pillow with unbidden tears.

It is the natural course of womanhood. Ah! that we could always be children. We have seen that after Edith had learned the story of the Lady Ursula, she began to solve some of the mysteries of life. She had since turned over many of its leaves, all fair with innocence and truth, but she had not yet found an answer to the question, "Why do we suffer?"

The change that had taken place in young Seymore was deeper and sterner, but not so apparent. Externally, he was the same beautiful youth that he was when we introduced him to our kind readers, in his attic.