第50章 Volume 2(14)

Deep and fervent as must always be my gratitude to heaven for my deliverance,effected by a chain of providential occurrences,the failing of a single link of which must have ensured my destruction,I was long before I could look back upon it with other feelings than those of bitterness,almost of agony.

The only being that had ever really loved me,my nearest and dearest friend,ever ready to sympathise,to counsel,and to assist--the gayest,the gentlest,the warmest heart--the only creature on earth that cared for me--HER life had been the price of my deliverance;and I then uttered the wish,which no event of my long and sorrowful life has taught me to recall,that she had been spared,and that,in her stead,_I_were mouldering in the grave,forgotten and at rest.

THE BRIDAL OF CARRIGVARAH.

Being a Sixth Extract from the Legacy of the late Francis Purcell,P.P.of Drumcoolagh.

In a sequestered district of the county of Limerick,there stood my early life,some forty years ago,one of those strong stone buildings,half castle,half farm-house,which are not unfrequent in the South of Ireland,and whose solid masonry and massive construction seem to prove at once the insecurity and the caution of the Cromwellite settlers who erected them.

At the time of which I speak,this building was tenanted by an elderly man,whose starch and puritanic mien and manners might have become the morose preaching parliamentarian captain,who had raised the house and ruled the household more than a hundred years before;but this man,though Protestant by descent as by name,was not so in religion;he was a strict,and in outward observances,an exemplary Catholic;his father had returned in early youth to the true faith,and died in the bosom of the church.

Martin Heathcote was,at the time of which I speak,a widower,but his house-keeping was not on that account altogether solitary,for he had a daughter,whose age was now sufficiently advanced to warrant her father in imposing upon her the grave duties of domestic superintendence.

This little establishment was perfectly isolated,and very little intruded upon by acts of neighbourhood;for the rank of its occupants was of that equivocal kind which precludes all familiar association with those of a decidedly inferior rank,while it is not sufficient to entitle its possessors to the society of established gentility,among whom the nearest residents were the O'Maras of Carrigvarah,whose mansion-house,constructed out of the ruins of an old abbey,whose towers and cloisters had been levelled by the shot of Cromwell's artillery,stood not half a mile lower upon the river banks.

Colonel O'Mara,the possessor of the estates,was then in a declining state of health,and absent with his lady from the country,leaving at the castle,his son young O'Mara,and a kind of humble companion,named Edward Dwyer,who,if report belied him not,had done in his early days some PECULIAR SERVICES for the Colonel,who had been a gay man--perhaps worse--but enough of recapitulation.

It was in the autumn of the year 17-- that the events which led to the catastrophe which I have to detail occurred.

I shall run through the said recital as briefly as clearness will permit,and leave you to moralise,if such be your mood,upon the story of real life,which I even now trace at this distant period not without emotion.

It was upon a beautiful autumn evening,at that glad period of the season when the harvest yields its abundance,that two figures were seen sauntering along the banks of the winding river,which Idescribed as bounding the farm occupied by Heathcote;they had been,as the rods and landing-nets which they listlessly carried went to show,plying the gentle,but in this case not altogether solitary craft of the fisherman.One of those persons was a tall and singularly handsome young man,whose dark hair and complexion might almost have belonged to a Spaniard,as might also the proud but melancholy expression which gave to his countenance a character which contrasts sadly,but not uninterestingly,with extreme youth;his air,as he spoke with his companion,was marked by that careless familiarity which denotes a conscious superiority of one kind or other,or which may be construed into a species of contempt;his comrade afforded to him in every respect a striking contrast.He was rather low in stature--a defect which was enhanced by a broad and square-built figure--his face was sallow,and his features had that prominence and sharpness which frequently accompany personal deformity--a remarkably wide mouth,with teeth white as the fangs of a wolf,and a pair of quick,dark eyes,whose effect was heightened by the shadow of a heavy black brow,gave to his face a power of expression,particularly when sarcastic or malignant emotions were to be exhibited,which features regularly handsome could scarcely have possessed.

'Well,sir,'said the latter personage,'I have lived in hall and abbey,town and country,here and abroad for forty years and more,and should know a thing or two,and as I am a living man,Iswear I think the girl loves you.'

'You are a fool,Ned,'said the younger.

'I may be a fool,'replied the first speaker,'in matters where my own advantage is staked,but my eye is keen enough to see through the flimsy disguise of a country damsel at a glance;and Itell you,as surely as I hold this rod,the girl loves you.'

'Oh I this is downright headstrong folly,'replied the young fisherman.