Chapter 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAP. XII. CHAP. XIII. CHAP. XIV. CHAP. XV. CHAP. XVI. CHAP. XVII. CHAP. XVIII.

CHAP. XII.

The idea of one day withdrawing from the world to prepare for immortality is a very pernicious one; and, like all other worldly hopes and plans, may never he realized. Use the present hour if you would make your calling and election sure. If God has placed you among the pomps and vanities of the world, fear not; do your duty amongst them, nor suppose that you may defer seeking your Creator until you obtain a retired situation.

Fenelon.

The re-union of the family at Oxford furnished ample topics for pious and affectionate gratitude. Barton's praise was re-echoed by every individual except Mrs. Mellicent, who yet went so far as to say, it was a pity he was a roundhead. A friend of Dr. Beaumont's accommodated his family with apartments in one of the colleges; his academical sinecures, and the relics of his private fortune, afforded him a decent support; he was surrounded by people of his own principles; and as all the strength of the King's cause was concentrated about the seat of the court, every apprehension of personal insecurity was at an end. He was now, therefore, in a state of comparative comfort; man is seldom placed in a better; and in times like those I describe, a good subject could not be happy.

Eustace felt much chagrin that all his expectations were not realized. He was indeed at liberty, and with his uncle, but still forbidden "to flesh his maiden sword." His father had again eluded his search, and was still withheld from procuring an explanatory interview with the sovereign whom he faithfully served, which, he determined, should precede his son's taking the field. His troop had been recalled from the royal escort, and ordered to rejoin the Marquis of Newcastle, who, after having long successfully opposed Sir Thomas Fairfax, was in imminent danger of having his laurels blasted by the threatened invasion of the Scots Covenanters, now gathering to assist their English friends, and compel an universal adoption of Presbyterian government, and abjuration of constitutional monarchy. It was impossible, therefore, for Eustace to obtain the permission for which his soul panted; and academic repose ill suited the self-devoted soldier. His retirement was spent in a somewhat similar way to that of Toby Shandy. He read descriptions of battles and sieges; he planned ravelins and counterscarps; and he braced his frame, and exercised his muscles, by every athletic exertion which could inure him to toil, or facilitate his success in arms.

Constantia felt quite happy. She was surrounded by all whom her heart best loved; she had leisure and opportunity to improve her taste in the fine arts; and she was allowed that limited and distant view of the world which informs the mind and polishes the manners without endangering principle. Her exquisite beauty could not fail to attract attention; but the scanty income of her father, and the prudence of Mrs. Mellicent, alike forbade that it should be ostentatiously exposed to the public eye. A few select friends were admitted as intimates, and only these knew that Dr. Beaumont had a superlatively lovely and enchanting daughter. She seldom appeared in public except at church, where her face was so shaded by her hood, that its attractions were rather guessed at than discovered. Thus this fair rose-bud expanded in the soil best suited to perfect its attractions, the sheltered vale of domestic privacy, where, unconscious of its super-eminence, and screened from every blast, it preserved the undying fragrance of modest worth, and the soft elegance of unassuming beauty.

Isabel was almost as happy as usual; her adoration of her father would not permit her to be quite so while he was in danger. Beside, she could not help thinking how shocking it would be, were the chance of war to oppose him to the noble young officer who had so admirably planned and faithfully executed their deliverance. If he should fall by the hand of her father!--the bare possibility of such a cruel return for his goodness often brought tears into her eyes; and she lamented that the incautious impetuosity of Eustace prevented Barton from entrusting them with his name. She fancied the preservation of their deliverer was her only motive for wishing to trace his identity, till she recollected how little could be gained towards that end by knowing who he was. In these perilous times messengers oftener miscarried than arrived in safety; and the sanctity of private correspondence was violated by either party as often as opportunity served. All, but the exemplary Lord Falkland, thought the least doubt of the fidelity of an adherent a sufficient vindication of breaking open his letters; and therefore, since, if she knew the stranger's name, she could not repeat it without endangering his safety, it was better she should remain in ignorance, and trust the event to Providence. She sometimes thought Williams knew him, because he once accounted for Barton's secrecy by observing that his pupil might be sprung from parents whom he was ashamed to own. Isabel answered that the faults of the basest could not contaminate so perfect a character. "Would you say so," returned Williams, "if he were the son of Lord Bellingham?" "I know nothing of Lord Bellingham," said she, "except that when my dear father was discomposed, he often called him by very harsh epithets; but as at these moments he knew neither me nor Eustace, nor even my mother, till her sobbings attracted his notice, and told him she was his faithful wife, I think I should not conclude Lord Bellingham to be a very wicked man on such testimony."

Williams asked her if she ever heard him mentioned while she was with the rebel detachment.

"Our good Barton," returned she, "sometimes spoke of him as one who was reputed too be a godly man, and who filled his house with devout ministers, yet was of a very pleasant companionable humour, steady in the good cause, but willing to come to terms with the King, whom he wished not to be pushed to extremities. Barton seemed to think Lady Bellingham was too much wedded to a vain world."

"And their son----"

"He never mentioned that they had a son." "Nor do I say they have," said Williams; "but I know enough of Lord Bellingham to say, that if he has one, he never ought to own his father without a blush." Isabel could draw no more from Williams; and, on recollecting the conversation, she saw that only a creative imagination could connect it with her deliverer.

Winter now interrupted the operations of the King's armies in most quarters. But the brave Lord Newcastle had to contend at once with English and Scotch rebels. The hardy frames of the latter enabling them to defy the severest season, they passed the boundaries of their own country, and, fixing a label, importing their attachment to the "bloody covenant," in their hats, began the work of desolation in the northern counties, while the mountainous barrier which divides them from the plains of Yorkshire, then covered with snow, reflected the horrible beams of hostile fires. And in Wales, a body of forces, sent to the relief of Ireland, had been recalled by the King, whose urgent necessities compelled him to employ them to support the loyal Welsh, who, with this aid, surprised several Parliamentary holds, and for some time operated as a diversion to the army of Fairfax, preventing him from joining the Scotch to crush the noble Newcastle. The King's cause at this time wore a fair aspect; and no better proof could be given of his having a chance of ultimate success, and of the divisions among his opponents, than that the Lords Bedford and Holland, and other noblemen, who had distinguished themselves as partizans of the Parliament, sought shelter within the royal lines, and even presumed to attempt regaining the confidence of their injured Sovereign.

Lord Holland, who had stood high in the Queen's favour, building upon the prejudices she was known to entertain against many of the King's most faithful adherents, imagined himself secure of regaining the office he had once held through her influence, notwithstanding the unbleached stains of his former treasons. Beauty is too apt to exert a peremptory claim to absolute dominion; and, not content with conjugal affection, requires obsequious dotage. The Queen's views being all limited to the routine of a court, unhappily indisposed her from acting the part of a faithful wife in this critical emergency, and induced her to use all her power to make the King depend more for advice upon herself and her favourites, than on those sages who presided at the council board, or those warriors who contended in the field; in other words, to prefer shallow courtiers, known only for polished manners, habits of dissipation, and an excessive regard to their own interest, to men who knew the strength and disposition of the enemy, who, by deep researches into past times, could judge of the present, and were too noble-minded to build plans of self-aggrandizement on the future. Misled by smooth flatterers, the Queen manifested a fatal dislike to all those whose minds were too much occupied to pay her particular court. Opposition to her opinion, was, in her estimation, high treason. The uxuriousness of the amiable King towards his fascinating Princess (who to all her sex's charms united all their foibles), exceeded justifiable attachment to an engaging and faithful partner. He gave her credit for qualities she did not possess; and the malice of the Parliamentary leaders against her, on account of her religion, increased his eagerness to support and defend her; nor could his most attached friends counteract her fatal influence. Her fidelity and wishes to serve him were indeed unquestioned; but in some characters, a forbearance from interfering in our affairs is the truest test of friendship.

The strange circumstance of noblemen, who had even borne arms against the King, boasting that they possessed the Queen's confidence, suggested a fear that further accommodations with individual traitors were on the tapis, and that Oxford would no longer remain a sacred asylum to a persecuted court, where unblemished loyalty was sure of safety and esteem; but a sanctuary to which terrified iniquity might retreat, and, grasping the horns of the altar, defy justice. The influence that Lady Bellingham once possessed over the Queen's mind was recollected by Dr. Beaumont; and, as Her Majesty had given proof that her friendships were indelible, he could not but apprehend that some project might be formed by that artful woman to secure her husband a retreat, in case his reported moderation should really proceed from his secret alienation from the rebel cause, and from a wish of reconciliation with the King. The conviction that such an adept in treachery could never really serve his Prince, determined Dr. Beaumont to act as the representative of the absent Evellin, request a private audience with his Sovereign, and reveal the secret history of the house of Neville, at the same time presenting young Eustace as its true and lineal heir. The affability and justice of the King prompted him to listen to all his subjects. He heard, with horror, a narration of the arts by which he had been imposed on when he was unversed in the intricacies of government, and too sincere and noble to suspect deceit in others. That Allan Neville, whose person and merit he well remembered, whose rashness and reported criminality he had lamented, and whose supposed death he had deplored, was still alive, and no other than the renowned Colonel Evellin, whose address in forwarding to him the supplies procured from Holland, and whose brave exploits with the Northern army, had endeared his name to him, even while he deemed him a stranger, excited wonder, grief, self-reproach, and admiration. He readily promised Dr. Beaumont that no solicitations should ever induce him to bestow confidence on a man whose crimes marked him out as an outcast from society; and, with the most gracious expressions of sorrow for the past, he as firmly assured him that, in the event of his being again able to exercise his royal authority, one of his first acts should be to re-instate Neville in all his hereditary rights. He offered to put into the Doctor's hands a patent for that purpose; but as that would only bestow title without restoring the estates which De Vallance enjoyed under the protection of the Parliament, Dr. Beaumont declined a mark of favour which would not essentially benefit his friend, but rather point him out to the inveterate malice of his enemies if he should happen to fall into their hands. He only requested a private recognition of Evellin's right; this the King gave in a letter, written by himself, addressing him by the name of Bellingham, expressing his satisfaction at hearing he was alive, and innocent of the crimes laid to his charge, acknowledging the deceits that had been practised upon himself, and avowing his great anxiety to possess the power of redressing his wrongs; then, warmly thanking him for his services, the King concluded in these words, "Your assured friend, Charles R."

Dr. Beaumont now introduced his nephew, after previously stipulating that no hint should transpire of his being the rightful heir of an earldom; but that he should be welcomed only as the son of a gallant officer now fighting in the Royal army. The fine figure and ingenuous manners of Eustace so pleased the King, that he wished him to pay his duty to the Queen also, an honour Dr. Beaumont could not decline. No Princess was a more consummate judge of beauty, grace, and native politeness than Henrietta Maria; they were qualities which ever gained her favour; and she piqued herself on having introduced into the English court the polished manners which had long distinguished that of France. Conversing with Eustace, she found nature had been as liberal to his mind as to his person. Pleased with his wit and gallantry, she asked him, with that air of condescending dignity which seems to confer a favour while it requires a service, to become one of her pages of honour, and a volunteer in her troop of guards. Dazzled with the attention of his Royal mistress, still beautiful, and most fascinating in her affability, Eustace never considered that the request wedded him to her fortunes. He saw in her who made it his sovereign Lady, the consort of that excellent Prince whom he had been taught to reverence in prosperity, and adore in misfortune. Inflamed with the ardent spirit of chivalry, he panted to defend the title of his King, and the beauty and virtue of his Queen, against all impugners. To suffer for her was glorious. Perish the base worldling who thought either of danger or remuneration! He immediately declared his rapturous acceptance of her invitation; and, kneeling, sealed his vows on the fair hand of his illustrious mistress.

Nothing could be more contrary to the wishes and principles of Dr. Beaumont, than this connexion. The Queen's retinue was composed of that refuse of the old court, who not having talents for an active situation, nor virtue enough to make them sensible of the baseness of impoverishing dependence, continued to hang like leeches on the exhausted frame of Royalty, and to drain its decayed resources for their own support. While the King and his counsel were debating how to equip an army without money or credit; while the great and the good were disarraying their noble mansions, parting with every moveable, mortgaging their lands, and alienating even the treasured heir-looms which had for centuries attested their high descent, to support their falling Sovereign; the courtiers, who surrounded the Queen, were engaging their mistress to forward their intrigues for places and titles, and inticing her to pervert the scanty resources of the public treasury to feed their rapacity. Thus, when, after a painful summer spent in martial toils and dangerous conflicts, the King came to his winter-quarters, he found the fatigues of his public duties aggravated by those private cabals which were ever at work to counteract the decisions of his council, and to balance the advantage of a few sycophants against a nation's weal. The faction of whom I speak were incapable of judicious conduct either in prosperity or in adversity, mistaking a few successful enterprises for the former, and thereupon becoming insolent and sanguine, talking of unconditional submission from the rebels, and an intire reinstatement of themselves in the luxurious ease of their former sinecures; yet as easily discouraged by a few adverse events; without resources, without firmness; actuated by the evil spirit of selfishness which forbids any good or noble determination to enter the impure heart, that submits to its influence.

To these summer-flies which infest royalty, and often turn greatness to corruption, were added the gay, volatile, voluptuous part of the officers, who had obtained leave of absence from their respective cantonments, and who thought the hardships of a soldier excused the excesses of a libertine. These were chiefly young men of high birth, neglected education, and unsound principles; unacquainted with the nature of the church and government for which they professed to fight, and so ignorant of religion and morality, as to be perpetually confounding them with fanaticism and hypocrisy, those constant topics of their abuse and ridicule. With them to be a republican or a sectary, was to be a knave, a cut-throat, nay, a devil; and to fight for the King conferred the privilege of violating those laws, which his supremacy was designed to guarantee. How dangerous was such society to the impetuous Eustace Evellin, whose passions unfolded with an ardour, proportioned to his quick vivacious temper. Dr. Beaumont would have preferred seeing his charge in the field of battle, to beholding him in this scene of moral peril, particularly if he could have placed him under the command of the noble Lord Hopton, who was alike skilled to subdue the enemies of his King, and to suppress his own resentment at the injuries which he suffered from those who should have been his coadjutors.

But the die was cast, and there was no retreating; Eustace had accepted the Queen's invitation, and now complained, with less deference than he usually shewed for his uncle's judgment, of the superfluous caution which kept him wrapped up like a shivering marmoset, and even refused to expose him to the slight hazard of an holiday soldier. Could he not mount guard, go through the manual exercise, or gallop at a review without endangering his precious life? Isabel, who had parted with some valuable trinkets, to purchase materials for his regimentals, and was now busy in working his ruff, declared it would be hard to restrain him. Constance had embroidered a scarf, which she tied around him; and after seeing him in his hat and plume, thought he looked so like a hero, that he might be indulged in just such a circumscribed sphere of glory as Andromache would have allowed to Hector, namely, to brace on his arms, and defend the walls of the city. Even Mrs. Mellicent observed, that her nephew made a very comely soldier. Dr. Beaumont, therefore, finding that he could not withhold Eustace from the temptations which surrounded him, had only to counsel him to resist them.

He did not commence his instructions with general invectives against a court-life; but admitted that good and wise men were often called to it by duty. He observed, that injunctions against entering into that or any other public station, savoured more of monastic or puritanic austerity than true piety. The concerns of government must be performed by human agents, and in representing eminent stations as incompatible with honesty, what do we but leave public business in the hands of unprincipled persons, and thus really encourage the depravity and knavery we affect to deplore. A nation must suffer, as well in a political as in a moral sense, when its rulers are weak or wicked; and how dare we pray that the will of God may be done upon earth, when we discourage those from directing worldly affairs, who feel a true zeal for his glory? This is, indeed, to accomplish the lying boast of Satan, who said that the kingdoms of the world were his, and he gave them to whom he chose.

The Doctor further observed, that every situation had its temptations. The Hermit in his cell is haunted by spiritual pride, and even when we perform those active duties of benevolence which our religion requires, we must beware lest we are guilty of ostentation. If, when we rise from our knees, we have judged harshly of our brother, the volume of inspiration assures us, that we have sinned in our prayers. The same vigilant examination and lowliness of heart which Christians in private life require, will prevent those who inhabit courts and camps from displeasing their Creator. Or admit that the latter have greater temptations to offend, are they not amenable to a judge, who determines actions by relative circumstances, who awards brighter crowns to those who have endured sharper conflicts, and pardons the offences of over-tried frailty. From the private citizen, who is blessed with leisure and security to consider his ways, he requires those passive virtues, that humble and grateful spirit, which in evil times are yet more rarely seen, than integrity and ability in rulers, who, walking among briars and thorns, harassed by public and private enemies, calumniated and misrepresented, exposed to numerous temptations, dangers, and snares, will, doubtless, if guided by singleness of heart, receive from God that pardon for their errors, which is denied them by those who reap the fruits of their labours.

"We may," continued he, "live in the world[1], without either shewing a haughty contempt for its enjoyments, or being devoted to its delights; without being intoxicated with its flattery, or depressed by its misfortunes. A court-life must, at your age, seem pleasant, but should you in future become weary of it, and regret that you have not sufficient time to devote to God, and to cherish the thought of him in your heart, recollect that wherever he places you, you are as sure of his favour and acceptance, as if you passed every hour of your life in meditation and prayer. God is served, not merely with the words of the mouth or the bending of the knee; it is the pure and upright heart which he requires, and with which alone he will be satisfied; with this upright frame of mind we may live in the world, without either singularity or affectation, and cheerfully conform to its customs and amusements, yet preserve the most strict subjection and duty to the Almighty."

"Suffer not, dearest Eustace, pleasure or business to prevent the solemn duties of self-examination and prayer. These are spiritual antidotes, which preserve an endangered soul from the contamination of evil customs and loose society. When leisure permits, add religious reading, and above all the study of the Holy Scriptures. Never allow this world to be balanced against the next: eternity outweighs all that time can offer; be it pleasure, wealth, advancement, or glory. Keep these things in mind; serve thy Creator in thy youth; remember innocence is preferable to repentance, and I shall then see thee like assayed gold purified by trial."

Eustace promised a strict observance, and Dr. Beaumont now esteemed it his duty to send the faithful Williams to Colonel Evellin to acquaint him with what had passed, and to receive further directions for the disposal of his son. He also privately informed the King of the solemn promise he had made to Evellin, and obtained an assurance that the service of Eustace should never be required so as to incur a breach of that obligation; and further, that if no other restrictions could prevail, his own commands should confine the volunteer to the defence of Oxford, which was now threatened with a siege by the advancing armies of the Earl of Essex and Sir William Waller.

When we contemplate the miseries incident to civil war in a remote age, our views are fixed on the effects of discord, as visible in the contentions of two great opposing parties; we do not consider either the minor factions into which each body is split, or the distracted counsels and inefficient measures which constantly occur, when it is known that the restraint of prescriptive authority is necessarily relaxed, and that he who ought to govern and reward, is compelled to submit to controul and to sue for favour. When the head of a community is humbled, every member thinks he has a right to pre-eminence; and thus a war, begun under the pretence of subduing a tyrant, eventually creates multitudes of petty despots, only contemptible, because their sphere of oppression is small. In the King's council, the wisdom of Southampton, the moderation of Falkland, and the integrity of Hyde, had to contend with the pride and petulance of those who would not lower their own pretensions in deference to the public good, or forgive a private wrong for the sake of that unity which alone could secure the whole. In the army discord was equally prevalent; the generals accusing each other on every mischance, panting for superiority, and all offended at the hauteur of Prince Rupert, and jealous of the influence of Lord Digby. The Parliament was still more divided; in it that party was now ripening, which finally overturned every branch of the constitution, and founded a most oppressive but vigorous tyranny on its ruins.

The old republican leaders, or commonwealth's men, as they were called, began to see that self-preservation required their re-union with the King; but the aspiring Cromwell and his crafty adherents, relying on their numbers and influence in the army, resolved to clog every proposal of peace with terms which they knew the Sovereign must from conscience refuse. Of the generals who commanded their armies, the Earl of Essex was already known to have seen his error, in suffering pique at supposed slights and unintentional negligence to stimulate his pride into that rebellion which his principles condemned; and it was believed, even by his own party, that nothing but a dread of having sinned beyond sincere forgiveness, induced him to reject all overtures from the King. The disorderly bands commanded by Sir William Waller were like their general, distinguished only by greater insolence to their Prince, and even by personal attempts on his life; but this army had been dispersed early in the summer, and the leader had fallen into contempt. "The Earl of Manchester was of their whole cabal the most unfit for the company he kept, at first induced to join, what was then called, the patriotic party by filial piety, and led step by step to countenance those disorganizing counsels, which ravaged the country he loved with too unskilful a tenderness:" yet, unwilling to oppress any, he used the power his ill-acquired authority gave him, to preserve individuals from the distress which his fatal victories occasioned. This moderation ruined him in the eyes of his employers; and about this time there appeared in his army that dark malignant spirit, whose subtile machinations soon deprived him of all power of restraining the torrent, which, when he helped to raise the flood-gates of contention, he hoped he should always be able to direct and control. Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary general in the north, was, by nature, a lover of moderation, and by education enlightened and liberal. He also strove, as far as his influence extended, to lessen the miseries of civil war; but that influence soon sunk under the daring preponderance of Cromwell, whose ultimate designs he wanted penetration to discover, and whose dark machinations he was always too late in his efforts to counteract.

Such was the state of the kingdom, when the Queen, terrified at the apprehension of being besieged in Oxford, fled to the west of England, and soon after to France, her native country, leaving an infant daughter to increase the anxieties of her Royal husband, but relieving him from the perplexities originating in the contentious faction, by whom she was surrounded. Through the injunctions of the King, Eustace had been prevented from accompanying his Royal mistress, and by enrolling his name among the bands who garrisoned Oxford, he in some degree discharged his sense of duty. Dr. Beaumont, besides, allowed him to take part in the enterprizes by which those vigilant warriors shewed their zeal and fidelity, as soon as they were relieved from their apprehensions for the safety of that important post, by the retreat of the rebel army.

As Williams did not return with an answer from Colonel Evellin, it was concluded that he had fallen into the hands of the enemy, a misfortune too common to the Royal expresses. One however arrived from the north, charged with most dolorous tidings of the fatal overthrow at Marston-Moor, the loss of York, and of its whole province, which had for so long a space resisted the incursions of the republican party, under the auspices of the Marquis of Newcastle. These direful events, which resulted from want of concord between the King's generals, were followed by Lord Newcastle's quitting the kingdom in a hasty sally of passionate despair, and by the dispersion of the army which his influence had raised, and his munificent loyalty had maintained. Only one small band of Loyalists under the command of Sir Thomas Glenham remained, who, after the reduction of York, threw themselves into Carlisle, and bravely defended it eleven months against a victorious enemy, without prospect of assistance. To this fragment of a powerful army Colonel Evellin attached himself. He sent a letter by the same person who brought the dispatch to the King, informing his friends that he was unwounded either in his person or his reputation, and ready to suffer every thing but dishonour for his injured Monarch. He gave a lively description of the respective armies, and of the misfortunes of the Royal cause, in being intrusted to men who suffered passion to prevail over judgment, and chose to sacrifice their King sooner than quell their private resentments. But he complained in the tone of a man who had made his choice, and though hopeless of success resolved to persevere, and welcomed self-denial and sorrow. He assured Dr. Beaumont that the rebels had gained no victory over his principles; his enmity to their undertakings remained the same; "and if," said he, "the little remnant of my days is cut off in the next engagement, I shall live in my children; and they will, I doubt not, see the destruction of these 'covenanters', who cause the ruin of families and the decay of common honesty; changing the former piety and plain dealing of this nation into cruelty and cunning. When I see all they have done, I thank God that he prevented me from being one of the party which helped to bring in these sad confusions[2], and I pray him to preserve my son to see their just punishment."

As this letter proved that the Colonel had not met with Williams, it operated as a renewed inhibition on Dr. Beaumont to prevent Eustace from rushing into the field, for which he had now a fresh incentive in the friendship he had formed with Major Monthault, a young man of birth and fortune, who had been attached, like himself, to the Queen's suite. This youth had seen actual service, and spoke with enthusiasm of the character of Lord Goring, then just appointed general of the horse in the west. He described him as the soldier's darling; a Mars in the field; an Apollo at mess; a Jove in council, and a Paris among the fair. It was evident that Monthault piqued himself on being the counter-part of the excellence he commended, especially in the last particular. His intimacy with Eustace allowed him to visit Dr. Beaumont's family, and his attentions to the fair Helen of the group were certainly more marked than delicate, and would have excited the fears of Eustace, had he not taken care to inform the Major that he was betrothed to his lovely cousin with the entire approbation of herself and their mutual friends, though their union was deferred until a riper age and happier period. To admire and praise, or even to gaze passionately on the promised wife of a friend, as Monthault did on Constantia, seemed to Eustace an implied commendation similar to that bestowed on a house, gardens, or any other beautiful and valuable possession, innocent in itself and flattering to the taste of the owner. He knew not that there existed such a character as a seducer, who could teach an unsuspecting mind to despise solemn engagements; he felt no tendency to treachery in his own heart. No one was more susceptible than he of the power of beauty, but he thought honour was the only means by which its favour could be won, and even his ardent passion for heroic fame derived an additional stimulus from his love to the amiable and innocent Constantia.

The circumstances of my narrative oblige me again to recur to the state of public affairs. The treaty of Uxbridge was now pending; the necessities of the King compelled him to enquire on what terms his subjects would sheath the sword, and the rapid ascendancy of the fanatic party in Parliament, added to the mutual accusations and recriminations of their generals, induced the moderate Presbyterians to try if, by reconciliation with their Sovereign, they could gain strength to oppose the power which openly threatened their destruction and his. The artifices of Cromwell and his adherents need not be minutely detailed in a work intended only to give an admonitory picture of those times. In one point those men differed from the majority of modern Reformers, or rather the manners of that age were different from ours. Religion was then the mode; men and women were in general expounders and preachers; ordinary conversation was interlarded with Scripture phrases; common events were providences; political misconstructions of the sacred story were prophecies; and a fluency of cant was inspiration. No man (to borrow one of their favourite terms) was more _gifted_ this way than Cromwell; he had discerned the current of the public humour, and could adopt the disguise which suited his ambition. Every step which led him to the summit of power was prefaced by what he called seeking the Lord; that is, attending sermons and prayers, by which the suborned performers of those profane and solemn farces prepared their congregations to desire what their employers had previously determined to do; thus giving an air of divine inspiration to the projects of fraud, murder, and ambition. By such a perversion of public worship, joined with an affectation of disinterested purity, that celebrated preparative for military despotism, the self-denying ordinance was introduced into the Commons. After numerous prayers and sermons, intreating Providence to strengthen the hands of the faithful, by choosing new instruments to carry on the godly work, an agent of Cromwell's inferred, that the Lord had indeed prompted their counsels, and proposed that henceforth no peer or member of Parliament should hold any public office. By these means, every man of rank and eminence who had been distinguished by a constitutional struggle against arbitrary acts of power, and afterwards reluctantly led into open rebellion, was cashiered and dismissed from the army and from all official situations, which were thus left open to the fanatical party.

Alarmed at the high hand with which this ordinance was carried, the old commonwealth's men strained every nerve to renew a pacificatory intercourse with the King, which they effected; but their power extended no further; the preliminaries were clogged with terms wholly destructive of the church, and virtually tending to abolish regal power. The ruin or death of all the King's adherents was resolved on; and in proof that the fanatics could not only threaten but act, the venerable Archbishop Laud, after suffering a long imprisonment, was dragged to the scaffold. Thus the Parliamentary commissioners set out for Uxbridge with their banners dipped in the blood of the highest subject in the realm, the head of the Anglican church, and His Majesty's personal friend.

No true Englishman could have expected, or indeed wished, that the King should purchase permission to become a state-puppet, shackled in all his movements, obliged to sanction the cruel and illegal acts of his enemies by a breach of his coronation-oath, and compelled to abandon the established church and the lives of his faithful friends to their inveterate animosity. In vain was it privately suggested by the most moderate of the Parliamentary commissioners, that it was expedient to close on any terms, and unite with than to humble a party whose desperate purposes, supported by the popularity of their pretensions, threatened destruction to all their opponents. The King determined never to seem to barter his conscience for personal safety. He at that time foresaw what he afterwards so affectingly expressed in a letter to his nephew Prince Rupert, "that he could not flatter himself with an expectation of success more than to end his days with honour and a good conscience, which obliged him to continue his endeavours, not despairing that God would, in due time, avenge his own cause. Yet he owned, that those who staid with him must expect and resolve either to die for a good cause, or, which is worse, to live as miserable in the maintaining it as the violence of insulting rebels could make them." The treaty terminated without hope of being again renewed. Cromwell carried his ordinance; the army and the state were governed by his own creatures; while, by a master-piece of cunning, he contrived to be exempted from the restrictions of his own decree, and continued to act as general and legislator without a rival. Afterwards, when his packed representatives had effected all the purposes for which he kept them together, he put himself at the head of a file of soldiers, destroyed the engine by which he had overthrown the constitution, and turned the pantomimic Parliament out of doors, laden with the odium of his crimes as well as of their own.

The melancholy presentiments of the King, when he found all hopes of honourable reconciliation futile, confirmed his determination to send the Prince of Wales into the west of England, where his arms still triumphed, that in case either of them fell into the hands of the rebels, the freedom of the other might tend to secure their mutual safety. To preserve the principles of the royal stripling, the King parted with several of his most faithful advisers. He constituted Lord Hopton commander in chief of the western district, but by fixing him more peculiarly about the person of his son, he unhappily gave too much power to the subaltern generals, among whom the apple of discord seemed to have been thrown, for they agreed in nothing but hatred of each other, and mismanagement of their trust.

Major Monthault belonged to the western army, and was ordered to leave Oxford in the Prince's suite. He had employed the leisure season of winter in cultivating an intimacy with the Beaumonts, and not being one of those who can look at beauty with disinterested admiration, he employed every art to ensnare Constantia. Simple, innocent, and mildly gay, she saw no danger in conversing with the friend of Eustace. He had spent much time in foreign courts; she led him to talk of celebrated beauties whom he had there seen; he found in all of them some glaring defect which forfeited their claims to supremacy. She laughed at his fastidiousness, and bade him describe what he would admit to be an irresistible charmer; he drew her own portrait, but she so rarely consulted her glass, that she knew not the likeness. He once advised her to arrange her tresses in what he deemed a more becoming braid; she did so, and then immediately asked Eustace if he approved the alteration; when, finding he disliked it, she resumed her former costume, and frankly avowed her reason for so doing. Monthault was piqued, and made several sharp remarks on the versatility of women.

"I fancy," said Constantia, "your's is a most invulnerable heart; we poor women are in your eyes either destitute of attractions to gain, or of merit to retain your affections. But don't be too sure of always keeping your boasted liberty. Aunt Mellicent says, men begin to doat at fifty, and then they do not love but idolize."

"The age of dotage and adoration begins earlier," answered Monthault, with a look which crimsoned the cheeks of Constantia; "but while you falsely accuse me of being invulnerable, have I not cause to deplore your impenetrability? I find it is impossible to agitate that tranquil bosom with so impetuous a guest as love."

Constantia was offended at the suggestion. "You know," replied she, "I am engaged to Eustace; and do you think I would marry him if I viewed him with indifference?"

Monthault observed, that a contract made at a premature age must originate in indifference, and never could be considered as indissoluble.

"I consider it so," answered Constantia; "nothing can dissolve it but death, or some palpable proof of gross unworthiness."

"Suppose," said Monthault, "a more enlarged view of mankind should discover to you a worthier lover; one whose passion for you is founded on discriminating preference, not the cold impulse of satiated habit; one who could give distinction to beauty, and lead it from obscurity into the splendour it deserves; should such a one sue for the favour of the divine Constantia:"----

"I would answer, if I aim perfidious to Eustace, I cannot be divine."

"But love is a potent and untameable passion, disdaining the narrow limitations of preceptive constancy. The acknowledged privilege of sovereign beauty is to inspire and encourage universal love."

Constance looked offended, and expressed a hope that she might never possess an empire which could only gratify vanity and pain sincerity.

Monthault found he had gone too far, and tried by badinage to divert her resentment. "If," said he, "praise is only timeable to your ear when uttered by one voice, I must not tell you, even if I heard our young Prince, who is an acknowledged worshipper of beauty, speak in raptures of the unparalleled loveliness of Dr. Beaumont's daughter."

"No," said she, sternly, "indeed you must not. My humble station prevents him from saying any thing of my person but, what would be offensive for me to hear; and I wish not to have the loyal attachment I feel for my Sovereign's son diminished, by knowing that he indulges in any improper licence of conversation."

"Nay," replied Monthault, "what he observed was only in reply to one who is your most devoted slave, predicting that the chains you formed never could be broken."

"I perceive," answered she, rising to leave the room, "that if I give you more time for the fabrication you will contrive a very amusing fiction. I must therefore silence you by saying, that, little as I know of court-gallantry, he who talks to me in this style, cannot be the friend of Eustace."

Monthault flew into heroics, and struggled to detain her. "Cruel Constantia," said he, "know you not that love is an involuntary passion which reason vainly tries to subdue? Cannot you, who see the conflict in my soul, pity me without doubting my friendship or my honour?"

"I confess I do doubt both," was her reply; "but provided you no more offend me with such language, I will not mention my suspicions to Eustace. I am, 'tis true, a simple girl, yet not so weak as to value myself on an extrinsic appendage which, if I possess, I share with the butterfly. If beauty renders me more amiable in the eyes of those I love, it is a welcome endowment; but I never will patiently hear it commended at the expence of any better quality."

It is probable that, after this repulse, Monthault would never more have thought of Constance if some other pursuit had intervened. But, in the leisure of suspended warfare, a vacant understanding and depraved appetite sees no resource from _ennui_ but gallantry. He had tried flattery; but it failed to excite vanity, or to lead his intended prey into the toils of ambition. He resolved to pursue another scheme, by which he hoped that beauty might be separated from its plighted love.

While Oxford resounded with preparations for the removal of the Prince and the commencement of the campaign, Monthault affected regret at leaving Eustace. "I wish," said he, "you could accompany me to see actual service; you would then feel a just contempt for military martinets and parade exercise. Goring would, I know, delight in bringing forward a spirit like yours. But it is impossible. The barriers which detain you are insuperable. I myself know too well the power of beauty; yet, if you knew all that was said, even for Constantia's sake you might resolve, for a few months, to tear yourself from her arms."

"I cannot understand you," answered Eustace. "True, I am contracted to Constantia; but it is not she who detains me at Oxford. We are not to be married till we are both at full age; nor even then unless the times wear a happier aspect."

"Her character!" retorted Eustace; "can that need any other vindicator than my honour? or rather, does any man impugn it? We have loved from our childhood; but it has been with that innocence which enables us to look forward to years of happiness, unembittered by reproach."

Monthault smiled, said he rejoiced at this expurgation, but added, "Can you wonder Oxford is now the metropolis of slander, since it is full of court-ladies who have now no revels or maskings to amuse them, and never leave reputations in quiet when they are out of humour. But, to put a stop to defamation, let me advise a military excursion."

Eustace explained, that it was the will of an absent father, and not amorous dalliance, which kept him from the field. It was doubtful whether that father lived; for he was engaged in most severe service. "Meantime," added he, "my uncle is bound by a promise to keep me from dangerous enterprises; but as I now begin to think it is disloyal for any one on the verge of manhood to refuse rallying round the King at his greatest need, I trust the prohibition will soon be removed. The last time that I urged Dr. Beaumont on the subject, he answered, that it was not courage, but bravado, to buckle on the sword, while the discussion of a pending treaty afforded a prospect of its being speedily ungirded. But as the Parliamentary commissioners are returned to London, I am determined again to ask leave to join the army."

"And if refused," said Monthault, "would you stay at Oxford, like a tame lion in a chain, caressed by old women, and wondered at by spectacled fellows of colleges." Eustace paused. "I see, my brave fellow," resumed the tempter, "you are determined to be one of us. I know your heart, and can predict that the consciousness of positive disobedience will make you miserable. Go, then, in the hope that your uncle would not have restrained you. Are you not old enough to judge for yourself? They have permitted you to chuse a wife; why not also choose your profession?"

"You have determined me," said Eustace, "I will only bid adieu to Constantia."

"A most lover-like determination!" was Monthault's reply, "and made with a right prudent command of the impulses of valour. I anticipate the result. In another hour you will return; press me to your heart; look a little ashamed; wish me good success; and then sigh out, 'I cannot bear to leave her.'"

"No," said Eustace; "to prove that I am not a woman's slave, I will only look the adieu, which may be our last, without telling her my purpose. Had you a treasure, Monthault, which you valued more than life, would you not bathe it with a parting tear as you placed it in a casket, while about to enter on a dangerous undertaking, where your first step may be to meet death?"

Monthault answered, that soldiers never thought of dying. They separated; Eustace, to bid a mental farewel to his kindred, home, and love; and Monthault, to prepare the Prince and Lord Goring to welcome a pleasant addition to their party in a spirited youth, who had resolved to escape from the restrictions of austere friends, and to try the agreeable freedom of a military life. In this view these defenders of the Crown and the Church of England looked on the last resources which a falling King committed to their care.

[1] This paragraph is copied from Fenelon.

[2] Walton's Lives.

CHAP. XIII.

O! holy men! Ye are the sons of piety and peace; Ye never felt the sharp vindictive spur That goads the injured warrior; the hot tide That flushes crimson on the conscious cheek Of him who burns for glory; else indeed Ye much would pity me.

Mason.

Eustace kept his promise, and rejoined Monthault, at the time and place appointed, equipped for service. His friend commended his heroism. "And did you," said he, "obtain Constantia's permission?" "No," answered Eustace; "I felt unequal to such a trial. I only pressed her hand with greater tenderness, and more earnestly implored Heaven to take her into his especial care."

"You will both thank me for projecting this separation," replied the Major. "Seeing the world with your own eyes will improve you, brush off that home-bred air which makes you bashful, and enlarge your ideas and powers of conversation. I promise ourselves a spirited, agreeable campaign. Hopton's office in the council will confine him about the person of the Prince, who must be kept at some distance from the scene of action; and Goring is no rigid disciplinarian. The enemy is not in force in the west; Cromwell and Fairfax are both to play at King-hunting; so we shall have time to divert ourselves and do our duty too."

From Bristol, Eustace wrote to his uncle and Constantia, excusing his absence by the uncontrollable avidity he felt to engage in the cause of his injured Prince, to whose commands he promised a strict obedience, and vowed to be sedulously attentive to all his new duties. To Constantia he added that he hoped to return worthier of her, and to feel in future the glorious consciousness of having contributed to restore his virtuous persecuted Sovereign, and give peace to his afflicted country. There was so much loyalty, honour, love, and gratitude in these letters, that they must have softened the Doctor's displeasure at his elopement, had they come to hand; but they were confided to the care of Monthault, and, either through forgetfulness or treachery, were never forwarded. It was therefore only from the vague testimony of an accidental passenger that the family knew Eustace had taken the road to Bristol; and, from his being in company with Major Monthault, they guessed his destination.

Constantia had now the twofold anguish of fearing for the safety and apologizing for the faults of her beloved. The latter task was by far the most painful. She could only urge that he had a bad adviser, and that it was his first offence. Every day she flattered herself that she should receive a letter, deprecating her father's anger, and assuaging her own fears. The summer passed away, and they heard nothing from Eustace. Had he forgot her, as well as the ties of duty and gratitude? It was impossible! letters might be lost, but her plighted Eustace must be good and faithful.

I have before remarked that Lord Hopton was the officer under whom Dr. Beaumont would have wished his nephew to learn "the noble game of war;" but there were circumstances in his present appointment which made it differ widely from that of the preceding year, when, with his compatriot, Sir Bevil Greenvil, he drew a cordon across the western peninsula, and preserved, in that happy spot, the laws, the virtues, and the honour of England. He was now, indeed, to be the ruling head; but his former associates in arms lay cold in earth, and the persons to whom the execution of his plans was to be intrusted, were the avowed votaries of Bacchus and Comus. It was with gay voluptuaries, freethinkers, and revellers, that Eustace must converse; at a distance from those whose wisdom might govern his impetuosity, and whose steady principles would correct his backslidings. Contemplating the dangerous situation of a generous, but indiscreet stripling, Dr. Beaumont now wished him in the army which the King was leading northward, to collect the remains of Lord Newcastle's forces, as that route might have afforded him a chance of joining his father in Carlisle, which held out with unexampled firmness, enduring the most incredible privations, and repelling the most vigorous assaults. The event of the fatal battle of Naseby, which palsied all the King's efforts to preserve the constitution, and ended all the hopes of his friends, would have made Dr. Beaumont rejoice that Eustace did not swell the list of noble and illustrious persons left on that bloody field, had not his sorrow for a "King and kingdom lost" been too acute and overwhelming to receive any diminution from private considerations. The infantry, cannon, ammunition, baggage, and all the resources of the King, were there wrested from his grasp by victorious rebels; and England virtually exchanged the government of the religious, conscientious descendant of her ancient Princes, for that of a low-born, cruel hypocrite, who ruled her with a rod of iron. The King indeed escaped from the battle with a small body of horse; but it was only to fly from place to place before his unwearied enemies, pursued into every corner of his kingdom, without knowing where to rest his head, allowed no pause, even to ruminate on his misfortunes, till at last, trusting that his own countrymen would not betray the Prince who flew, like a bird hunted by the hawk, to their bosoms, he appealed to the pretended loyalty of the Scotch Covenanters; and they sold him to those who thirsted for his blood.

Yet neither the desperate state of the kingdom, nor the ruin of their own fortunes, long since embarked in the same vessel with his rights, could compose the feuds of the western generals, or induce them to attend to the directions of the Prince's council, or to the discipline and behaviour of their troops. The latter, from their intolerable insolence and rapine, became formidable only to their friends; and the approach of Fairfax was hailed, even in the best-disposed districts, as a signal of deliverance from the galling yoke of military extortion. Goring, the soldier's darling, who combined all the alluring qualities of a demi-god, was found to want the distinguishing marks of a Christian hero. Possessed neither of self-command, obedience, nor fortitude, he was ever ready to dash at splendid actions, but was without resources in the day of peril. He was too vain of his wit and companionable talents to submit to the command of others, and too supine, dissipated, and rash, either to improve opportunities of action, or to defeat the views of the enemy. Such was the leader under whom Eustace hoped to serve his king, and learn the art of war. His friend, Monthault, was a transcript of all Lord Goring's faults, to which he added the most cool and determined treachery, under the garb of blunt simplicity and unguarded frankness.

It had been previously settled by the two friends, that their common wants should be supplied from the purse of Major Monthault, in case the Royal exchequer was inadequate to the supply of the army. That purse was either soon exhausted, or closed by the sinister designs of the owner. "It is his own fault if a soldier wants," was his answer to the urgent requests of Eustace for a small supply. "We are now," returned the other, "quartered among friends, to whom we ought to be not only punctual but liberal, lest we indispose them to the service. You see the Royal funds are scarcely adequate to the maintenance of the Prince. You are aware that I must depend on you, as the circumstances under which I left Oxford prevent my asking my uncle to assist me." "Certainly you must not," answered Monthault; "and I say again, a word will always carve a dinner. This, I own, is called a well-affected district; but there are many corrupted parts in it. Your host, for instance--a vile republican, a Presbyterian round-head--I saw him pelt the bishops when they appeared at the bar of the Lords, and join in a clamorous petition to behead Lord Strafford. Give him a hint of this, and make him bleed. Tell him we will inform Sir Richard Greenvil of his behaviour; and talk of Launceston gaol."

Eustace had long thought that every man concerned in either of those proceedings deserved the gallows, and fancied he could perform the office of executioner. He therefore made less scruple to require a pecuniary commutation for those offences, but thought the proceeds should be carried to a public account. Monthault laughed at this suggestion, said that self-preservation was the soldier's motto, and begged he would only bring the sum total to him, and his receipt should be a full discharge.

Eustace met Monthault next morning with a blank aspect. The accused had not only protested his innocence, but offered to bring testimony that he was in Devonshire at the time. Alarmed, however, at the impending charge, and knowing that riches were in these cases construed into a proof of guilt, he offered half the sum demanded as a present, provided Monthault would be his friend and protect him from further contribution.

Monthault held out his hand carelessly, and only said, "Disburse." Eustace protested that his principles would not permit him to take a commutation for offences from a person whom he believed innocent. Monthault flew into a rage, asked Eustace if, in a battle, or when storming a town, he would stop to ask those he met, "Pray, Sir, are you in heart a rebel? Good Master, were you pressed into the service?" before he hewed them down with his broad-sword? The very proposal of a bribe implied guilt. Eustace acknowledged there was weight in that remark; the offered sum was taken; Eustace carried it to his superior, and received the jackall's share.

Indignant at the wrong, the plundered Loyalist, for such indeed he was, appealed to the Prince's courts. The Lords Hopton, Capel, and the incorruptible Hyde, formed part of that body; and it will be anticipated, that only a want of ability to redress the wrong, prevented immediate reparation. The power of Lord Goring protected his favourite, Monthault; but it was thought proper to reprove the youth, who had acted as his agent. Eustace was summoned before the council. Shame and self-reproach bowed his erect head, and cast a gloom over his ingenuous features. The President explained how greatly such actions endangered the fugitive King, whose life now depended on the fidelity of his subjects, as he flew from post to post, seeking to hide his proscribed head. Eustace burst into tears. "I need proceed no further," continued Lord Hopton, "tell me what urged you to this base action."--"Necessity," replied Eustace, with a look of deep contrition. "That is a bad plea," returned the nobleman, "and urged with a bad grace, by those who refuse to admit it as an excuse for the crimes of rebels. In this instance too, I fear it is a false one. I know you are one of the party, who distinguish themselves by their midnight carousals in Major Monthault's quarters. The necessity which arises from dissipation, can never be urged to excuse peculation."

"Place me in the forlorn hope," said Eustace, "the first time you have any desperate service, and let me expiate my crime."

"So keen a sense of it," resumed Lord Hopton, "is its own punishment. Your name is Eustace Evellin. I have heard of a youth so called.--At Oxford he was said to be one of uncommon hope, the son of a noble Loyalist, distinguished alike for honour and valour; the nephew of a learned divine, a confessor in the cause of monarchy and episcopacy. Are you that person?"--Eustace answered by a burst of agonized grief.--Lord Hopton took him aside, and slided a purse into his hands; "Use this frugally," said he; "'tis the mite of one, whom duty has stripped of superfluities, yet apply again to the same source, rather than give your own heart the pangs which I see it now endures."

"But I am disgraced," said Eustace, with a look which at once bespoke intolerable anxiety and ardent gratitude. Lord Hopton answered, "I blush while I tell you that your fault is too general, to stigmatize those who commit it; but I mistake your character, if you find in its frequency an apology for repeating the crime."

Eustace retired; his dejected heart was warm with approbation of his excellent reprover; yet burning with impatience to obliterate all remembrance of his error, by some brave action which should prove that he was not unworthy the clemency and confidence which his appearance had excited. He told Monthault what had passed. "The old Prig worded it bravely," said he, "but in one respect he is better than most of your precise moralists. Come turn out the pieces--share and share alike you know; and just now they are quite convenient, as there is not a single doit in my purse." Eustace hesitated, knowing that its contents had been left at the billiard-table, but at length complied, with a secret determination that the partnership should immediately terminate.

While his mind still ruminated on the blight which his budding laurels had received, it occurred to him that it would be possible to surprise an advanced post of Sir Thomas Fairfax's army, which lay at a small distance from the town of which Monthault was intrusted with the command. When Eustace suggested the plan to his friend, the latter encouraged the attempt. It had many recommendations to his treacherous heart. The design was so full of danger, that it was most likely to end in the destruction of the whole party, and next to the disgrace, the death of Eustace was what he secretly desired. Nor did he forget that incursions into the energy's quarters could not be made, without hazarding the safety of the town where he was posted, and which Lord Goring told him was of the utmost importance to preserve the line of defence that covered the Royal army. With the true spirit which actuated the western commanders in this disastrous campaign, Monthault cared little what detriment the King received, so he might ruin a rival. He however, took care to shift the responsibility from himself. "If you ask me whether it is feasible," said he to Eustace, "I confess, I think that nothing but great valour, joined to great good fortune, can accomplish the design. But if you pant for glory, you know the adage, 'success attends the brave.' The glory shall be all your own, for as the letter of my orders forbids all hazards, I must officially be ignorant of your undertaking; though, as a friend, I will allow the night-guard to consist of picked men, whom you may dispose of as you think proper."

To succeed in a desperate enterprise, required more experience and better intelligence than Eustace possessed.--Brave in vain, he only led his followers to death or captivity. He was rescued from sharing their fate by a trooper, who, seeing him fainting from loss of blood, lifted him on his own horse, and galloped with him to the head-quarters. The post where Major Monthault was stationed, being weakened by the loss of this detachment, fell into the enemy's hands.

Miscarriages were too frequent to excite long clamour; but the disobedience of a positive command was, in this instance, too marked to be passed over in silence. Monthault, on being examined, denied having commanded the enterprize. Had he advised, or permitted it, was a question put by one of the council; it was over-ruled as inadmissible by Lord Goring; and Monthault made a specious appearance, by talking loudly of the gallantry and excellent intentions of his friend. Pale, wounded, and dejected, Eustace was unable to raise his eyes, fearing nothing so much as the calm severity of Lord Hopton's aspect. The hopes he had formed were blasted; his promised course of glory and success was turned to shame and misfortune; nay, worse, he had materially injured the Prince, whom he would have died to serve.--He stood almost senseless while he heard himself ordered under an arrest, and to be kept from duty for a fortnight. That time was indeed scarce sufficient to heal his wounds; but Eustace could not separate in his mind the restrictions imposed by kindness from the punishment of disobedience.

His extreme agitation moved the compassion of the centinel who was placed over him, and who was indeed the same brave trooper who had saved his life. "Courage, noble Captain," said he; "Their Honours, the Lords of Council, only lock you up to give you time to get well. When they asked me about the business, I told them you was as true a heart as ever lifted broad-sword, only a little too hot--that's all; and one of them, the old Lord, with white hair, that looked at you so, wished that true hearts were more common. Your wounds will be well by the time you are let out; and then we'll cut and slash the round-heads again. Shall we not do them a good one, as we say in Lancashire?"

The name of his native county threw the thoughts of Eustace into a train, no less painful than the wounded feelings of a soldier.--Its dear emigrants, what would they now think of him! Even Constantia would abjure him:--surely she would never hear of his being reproved as a peculator, and ordered under an arrest for insubordination.

"You are too brave a gentleman to mind a few slashes and thumps," continued the talkative centinel; "the surgeon says they will heal up, and you'll have a whole skin again presently; so it must be some other sorrow which casts you down so. And nothing cuts a man up like sorrow, as I have heard good Dr. Beaumont say."

The name roused Eustace to enquire how he knew the opinions of Dr. Beaumont, and the eclaircissement proved the centinel to be Ralph Jobson, the same person who refused to take the covenant at Ribblesdale in the beginning of the civil war, and had ever since felt such a reverence for the Doctor, as to connect with his name every sentiment to which he affixed peculiar importance.--To have rescued his nephew from death or captivity, was a most gratifying event to Jobson's honest heart; and he readily offered to do Eustace any service, even so far as to pass through the enemy's quarters, and inform the Doctor of his misfortunes. "Not for the universe," replied Eustace, "in the present situation of affairs."--"True," answered Jobson, "we must not rob the King of one brave heart just now; and though I was only a poor carter, and am now a trooper and quarter-master's man, mine is as true a heart as that old Lord's with white hair, that I liked the look of. So by way of passing the time, shall I tell you how I got away from the constables, sent by Squire Morgan to take me to Hull, and went to Nottingham and listed under the King; aye, and fought for him too, when Lord Lindsey was killed at Edgehill; and helped to bury Lord Falkland, and the young Earl of Sunderland at Newbury; and saw Lord Newcastle's lambs dye their fleeces in their own blood; aye, and was taken prisoner with the learned Mr. Chillingworth, who wrote against Popery at Arundel-castle, and tended him when he lay sick, and was catechised by Waller's chaplains for being a Papist. He could have talked them all dumb, only he was speechless; and so at last they killed him with their barbarous usage. Why, Captain, I have seen the King of England dining on a hard crust, under a hedge, like a gipsey-stroller. How could you have stood such sights? Why your heart would have broke, instead of being alive and merry to drub the round-heads, as I am."

Jobson's narrative was interrupted by a visit from Lord Hopton. "Once more, Captain Evellin," said he, "I come to reprove you. That I do so, is a proof of your repeated errors, and of my conviction that they proceed rather from inexperience, than a bad disposition." Eustace expressed his sincere gratitude and deep contrition. "On the former subject," replied His Lordship, "since it relates to myself, I may command silence, and you must feel that your contrition cannot restore to us the brave fellows we lost last night, or regain the post with which Major Monthault was entrusted. But I wish to ask if you knew that positive orders were given, to act only on the defensive?"

Eustace was silent. The manner in which Monthault spoke of his orders, intimated that their letter and spirit were at variance, and how could he throw the shadow of blame on one who had so eloquently defended his behaviour before the council. "I see," resumed Lord Hopton, "there is a mystery in this business; and as the desperate state of our affairs leaves me no power to punish breach of orders, we must endeavour to correct the past. Lord Goring has fled to France; despairing, I presume, of his master's cause. We have now to try to extricate ourselves from the difficulties into which discord and insubordination have plunged us. The Prince has this day required me to take the entire command of the army. 'I have not told His Highness, as hath of late been the fashion, that my honour would not permit me to accept it; but I have said that I knew I could not take it at this time, without resolving to lose my honour; yet since His Highness thinks fit, I am ready to obey him.' I can now therefore do you a real service, by taking you out of ill hands. I will make you my military secretary, and keep you about my person. The past is forgot. As soon as you are able, come to my quarters; but remember, I require a positive estrangement from your past connexions."

The transport of Eustace, at such a proof of confidence, may be readily conceived, and he now felt assured that he should expunge all the stains on his reputation. But ill-fortune and misconduct still attended him, as indeed they did the army to which he was attached. The bands of discipline had been too long relaxed. The general of the infantry refused to obey Lord Hopton, and was committed to prison, to intimidate other mutineers; and though his rapine and extortion had excited universal odium, so low was the general feeling of justice, that his punishment caused yet greater discontent than his rapacity had done. The troops were as corrupted as their leaders; only a small body of horse and a few companies of volunteers, chiefly composed of gentlemen, could be depended upon, in an army drawn up in the extremity of the kingdom, to defend the last holds of Royalty, and protect the heir of the crown from sharing the fate of his father, who was at this time a prisoner in the Scotch army at Newcastle, and scarce treated with the decency of external respect.

Whatever intrepidity, activity, and foresight could perform, was done by Lord Hopton and his faithful coadjutors; but from the hour when he undertook the charge to that of the army's dispersion, "scarce a party of guard appeared with half their appointed numbers, or within two hours of the time they ought." On such enemies Fairfax rushed with the concentrated forces of triumphant rebellion; yet if treachery had not aided his progress, the veteran's bands were again so strongly posted, that the victors would not have reaped bloodless laurels. But Goring's brigade (to which Monthault still belonged), being stationed to guard a down in front of the army, drew off without staying for orders, or intrenched Loyalists, before they had the least previous notice. Defeat and dispersion were the consequence. All efforts to rally the flying troops were vain, the officers cried out that their men could not be brought to face the enemy, and Lord Hopton in vain endeavoured to avail himself of the chances that might result from delay, by proposing to send to the Prince for directions how he should act. "Treat, treat," was the universal cry of the soldiers. Scorning to yield to such base clamour, he indignantly bade them treat for themselves, and retiring with the faithful few who adhered to his fortunes, to Pendennis Castle, falsified his own prediction by losing every thing but his honour, and the last ebbing sands of a long life, wasted by toils and sorrows, that left him merely strength enough to attend the Prince, who had been committed to his trust, to a foreign country, where, exiled from his large possessions, the country and the friends he loved, he found a refuge from triumphant guilt and undeserved misfortune in the grave.

To return to Eustace. The desertion of the post at Bodmin bore such evident marks of treachery, that it could not be attributed to the general trepidation and disorder which possessed the army, and circumstances proved that a correspondence subsisted between Monthault and the Parliamentary general, which the farce of taking him prisoner and committing him to close custody, when the King's forces were generally permitted to disband and return to their houses, strongly confirmed. Lord Hopton recollected that his designs had been counteracted by Fairfax, in a manner which implied previous acquaintance with his purposes. A moment of extreme irritation and anguish, such as a general must feel when he finds all his resources cut off, is not favourable to candour or calm investigation. The connexion between Eustace and Monthault was not dissolved. Notwithstanding the injunctions of the General to hold no intercourse with his late associate, Eustace had been seen in his company, and even detected in the act of writing him a letter. Monthault corresponded with Fairfax; his (Lord Hopton's) own secretary held a private correspondence with Monthault; thus the course of treachery seemed developed. Lord Hopton felt that he had been deceived by the ingenuous countenance of a handsome youth. He rejected his offer of accompanying him to Pendennis, and even demanded from him his sword. "Go," said he, "and when one is again given you, serve your employer with fidelity."

Eustace was thunder-struck, and rushed after his commander to enquire the cause of such severe treatment. "I forgave your extortion and licentiousness," said the General, with a stern austere look which pierced him to the soul; "I pardon the rashness which broke our line of defence, and weakened us by the loss of a brave detachment. After this I took you into a confidential situation, and you betrayed your General and your Prince.

"Never, never," was the exclamation of the tortured Eustace. "I own my other offences, but with my latest breath I deny being a traitor."

"Have you not held a secret and prohibited correspondence?--Guilt chains your tongue. I hoped better things from Eustace Evellin. Farewell, repent and reform." These words were spoken as Lord Hopton mounted his horse. Eustace threw himself on the ground, and in a frantic moment thought self-destruction allowable. Before principle had time to allay this agony of acute feeling, a sob, that seemed to issue from a breaking heart, made him raise his head to see if there were any as wretched as himself. A pale war-worn figure stood beside him, leaning on a carbine; his hat drawn over his eyes, and his body wrapped in a tattered roquelaure. Eustace would have felt ashamed at yielding to such expressions of poignant distress before any observer, had not the more painful consideration that this person had been a witness of his disgrace suppressed every other thought.

"Did you hear the General speak to me?" enquired Eustace in a perturbed accent. After a long pause the stranger answered, "I did."--Those words were uttered in a well-known voice; and at a moment of indelible shame and public ruin, Eustace saw the long-desired features of his father: that father, by whose side he hoped to have fought manfully, in defence of his King and in pursuit of glorious renown, was the witness of an accusation which even mercy could not pardon, and beheld him sinking under the consciousness of acknowledged offences. Dignified in misery, Colonel Evellin stood gazing at the youth on whose virtues his fondest hopes had reposed, now sunk far below even his own desperate fortunes. Eustace held his hands before his face, not daring even to ask a blessing, nor presuming to enquire how they happened to meet at this awful crisis.

Colonel Evellin first broke silence. "You are Eustace Evellin, my only son, for whom I cherished the remnant of my unfortunate life.--Boy, I was plundered of wealth, title, and reputation, by a perfidious friend. I submitted to obscurity and poverty, for I was blessed with a faithful wife in your angel-mother. Thanks be to Heaven, she lives not to see this day!--I have fought and bled for my King. I have endured hardships which would paralyze your pampered niceness to hear described. For eleven months I fed on carrion, reposed on filth, deafened with the sound of battering cannon, the shouts of besieging rebels, and the groans of dying comrades. I have swam across rivers, warding the broken ice from my wounded body. I have, like a hunted wolf, dressed those wounds in mountain-fastnesses, shunning the abode of man, and eluding pursuers whose mercy I disdained to ask. I have seen my King a prisoner, without power to redress his wrongs; my country a prey to tyrants; all her hallowed institutions overturned; but never till now, Eustace, was I completely wretched; for never did anguish, in its most desperate forebodings, whisper that I could be the parent of a traitor."

"Oh, my father!" replied Eustace; "kill me with your weapon rather than your words. By the unimpeached honour of my blessed mother, I am no traitor."

"Who spoke the accusation," returned the Colonel, "which I returned to hear, and to curse the hour of thy birth?--'Twas not the light reproach of petulant folly, anxious to shift the shame of defeat from its own misconduct.' The speaker was the wise, magnanimous Hopton."

"But even wisdom and magnanimity may mistake."

"Was there any intercourse which he interdicted, and you clandestinely continued?"

"There was one who wound himself round my heart by ties which I wanted firmness to dissolve, and I greatly fear he has been a traitor to his country and me."

"No expletives; no qualifying terms; no diminutive appellations, for crimes that involve a kingdom's fate. Under the influence of this man, you have been rapacious, licentious, rash, regardless of subordination."

"I have."

"And not a traitor!--Gracious Author of my existence, do I live to hear such perversion of language from my Eustace? When all depended on the honour and discipline of those who maintained the King's cause, my son commits crimes which disgrace his religion, his profession, and his principles, yet tells me he is no traitor."

"I never betrayed the confidence of Lord Hopton," said Eustace, attempting to clasp his father's knees. "The correspondence I carried on was to relieve the necessities of one who I thought had served me: not to disclose the secret plans of my General."

"Off! thy touch is contamination;" said the stern soldier. Yet Eustace perceived he melted as he spoke. "By our common wretchedness," continued he, "permit me to follow you. Let us throw ourselves into some garrison, where we may dearly sell our lives. I ask for nothing but to die defending you. Let me but combat by your side, and you shall find, though I have greatly sinned, I can also greatly repent."

"Oh, last of a noble stock!" said Evellin, while tears streamed fast down his furrowed cheeks, "if thou dost repent, save thy life for better times."--"Keep me but with you," returned Eustace, "and I shall become all you wish." "I mean to make for Oxford," said the Colonel; "darest thou go with me thither?" "No, no," replied the unhappy youth; "I dare not see Constance till I have erased my shames."--"The soul of thy parents spoke in that sentiment," said the Colonel, unable longer to restrain his arms from clasping his son; but the embrace was accompanied with that groan of woe, which spoke unsubdued repugnance and careless anguish, yet it seemed to restore the half-expiring Eustace to life, at the same time that it confirmed his resolution never to give occasion for such another groan.

Filial piety, which, in despite of all his errors, was a predominant sentiment in the mind of Eustace, soon pointed out to him, that though the sight of his injured but beloved Constance, and her offended father, would, in his present circumstances, be insupportable, it was highly desirable that his father should shelter his infirm frame under the roof of domestic friendship; and perceiving with joy that such was his design, he forbore to persevere in his request of never more separating from him. He knew that a few garrisons in the west still held out for the King, and his sanguine temper taught him to hope, that some happy occurrence might enable him to purify his blemished fame. Colonel Evellin encouraged this hope. Dearly as he prized his son's life, anxious as he was to preserve the true branch of the house of Neville from extermination, a dead son, fallen in the cause of honour, was infinitely better than a living one stamped with the stigmas of traitor and villain.

The advancing divisions of the enemy terminated the interview. Neither could bear to witness the King's troops laying down their arms, or the triumphant rejoicings of the Parliamentary forces. Colonel Evellin took the route to Oxford, which he hoped to gain by the most unfrequented ways; and Eustace intreating his father, if possible, to conceal his disgrace from his dear kindred, turned westward, determining to make every effort to rejoin Lord Hopton.

CHAP. XIV.

Where you are liberal of your loves, and counsels, Be sure you be not loose; for those you make friends, And give your hearts to, when they once perceive The least rub in your fortunes, fall away Like water from ye, never found again, But where they mean to sink ye.

Shakspeare.

The evil genius of Colonel Evellin still pursued him. He had not travelled far before he fell into the power of the rebels, who carried him prisoner to London. He was recognized as one who had done wonders for the King; and, in an enemy every where triumphant, to spare his life was an act of mercy. He was, however, kept in rigorous confinement, and his name excepted out of every act of amnesty. Whether the Presbyterians or Independents gained a temporary ascendancy; whether the Rump or the army struggled to get the King's person into their hands, to give a colourable pretext to their most unrighteous proceedings, a high-minded Loyalist was alike dangerous and opposite to the vacillating humours of men, who, under the pretence of worshipping the God of truth and mercy, served the abominations of perverted understandings and corrupted hearts.

Eustace, accompanied by the faithful Jobson, reached Pendennis Castle, and joined its brave defenders; but Lord Hopton left it before their arrival, to follow his royal charge, who, in compliance with his father's commands, quitted England, which now had only chains to bestow on its Princes. In this strong fortress, celebrated for being the last that held out for the King, Eustace distinguished himself for patient bravery and active courage. But he no longer fought in a conspicuous scene of action, under the eye of a renowned commander, whose praise was glory, and whose reproof was disgrace. He gained indeed the esteem of the venerable Arundel, who, at the age of fourscore, bound his silver-locks with an helmet, and kept the Royal standard flying, till the enemy, astonished at his fortitude and resources, acceded to the most honourable capitulation. But as soon as terms were granted, and the garrison dispersed, Eustace lost all hope of again signalizing himself, nor could the renown gained within the walls of a fortress expunge the disgrace which had been promulgated at the head of an army.

While undetermined how to act, or which way to employ the unvalued life he was bound to preserve in proof of his repentance, Eustace heard of his father's captivity. Another report at the same time reached him, which, as any one who has fondly loved in early youth, when every idea is most likely to be engrossed by the ardent susceptibility of one predominant passion, will readily believe, excited still keener anguish. He was assured that Monthault was at that time an inmate in Dr. Beaumont's family, high in the estimation of all, and even believed to be an accepted lover of Constantia.

To refute a rumour so injurious to loyal faith and female truth, I must remind the reader, that immediately after Lord Hopton's defeat, Major Monthault was ostentatiously pointed out as an object of Parliamentary vengeance, and thrown into confinement. This was done to give him credit with the Loyalists, preparatory to his being sent to Oxford, where it was proposed he should act as a spy, and convey intelligence to the beleaguering army, specifying also such of the inhabitants as were too zealous and determined to make safe citizens in the projected commonwealth. He was soon permitted to break from durance, and arriving at Oxford under the character of a confessor in the Royal cause, he was kindly welcomed by Dr. Beaumont. He brought Constantia the first certain intelligence that Eustace was alive, and had passed through the dangers of a disastrous campaign with little injury.

The voice of fame, alike busy in circulating good and evil tidings, soon informed the family of the public censure which Lord Hopton cast on that unfortunate fugitive, and Monthault would have gained great credit with the Beaumonts for not having been the first to disclose it, had not his own conduct been implicated in the same accusation. Isabel eagerly clung to the visible proofs of his loyalty as an implicit evidence that her brother had been most basely aspersed. "The misery of these times," said she, "is surely sufficient; we need not aggravate the misfortunes of our fellow-sufferers, or the cruelty of our enemies, by crediting the calumnies of malice, or the unfounded fabrications of busy tatlers. Our dear Eustace is accused of treason, and his friend and constant associate is involved in the same charge. Yet if imprisonment and forfeiture of his estates are not testimonials of loyalty, where shall we seek more certain attestations? After having fought and bled for his King, he breaks from captivity and seeks an asylum among us at Oxford. Equally inconsistent is the charge aimed at my gallant brother. Dearest Constantia, surely you cannot believe Eustace to be a traitor; yet your cold looks and marked indifference to poor Monthault, and the care with which you avoid your lover's name, lest his friend should attempt his exculpation, indicate, that either you suffer this futile charge to dwell too much upon your mind, or that you mistook the mere attachment of kindred for devoted affection."

"Isabel," returned Constantia, with a look of mild expostulation, "I know not how far to trust rumour, but this I know, that the tongue of Monthault will corrode the fame of Eustace, either in censuring or commending him. Do not imagine there is any change in me, or that I mistook the nature of my own feelings. Whether Eustace deserves reproach or renown, my heart will never own another possessor. It is either wedded to his deserts, or so estranged by his faults, that love may as well light his fire on a monumental tablet as make me again admire in man, that fair semblance of generous integrity, by which Eustace won me to select him as the partner of my future life. Him I shall ever love, or ever mourn. But were he proved guilty of every base crime laid to his charge, this extortioner, this debauchee, this refractory soldier, nay, even this traitor, must not be placed by the side of Monthault, unless it be right to compare the guilt of frail man with the impious desperation of Satan. My greatest grief and torment proceed from a fact which I cannot dispute: true, as you say, Eustace selected Monthault for his constant associate and particular friend."

These remarks of Constance will disprove the rumour which had reached the ears of her fugitive lover, and prove that Monthault did not succeed in one of the designs which brought him to Oxford; with regard to the other, his intended services to the Parliament during the siege were frustrated by an order extorted from the captive King, requiring that his garrisons should be immediately surrendered to the ruling party. Oxford therefore admitted a detachment of the rebel army, but for some time a spirit of moderation was visible in the treatment bestowed on this honourable asylum of loyalty and learning. The covenant and other oaths were indeed sent down, but as they were not enforced, the conscientious possessors of ecclesiastical and collegiate situations were not ejected for contumacy. The captivity of the King imposed the most scrupulous moderation and quiet submission on all his adherents, and many persons hoped, from this apparent calm, that the national wounds would speedily be healed.

But the suspended fury of two powerful contending parties, concentrating their terrors, and perfecting their deep designs to crush each other before they entirely annihilate a fallen foe, bears no more resemblance to the wise lenity of a regular government towards the refractory subjects it has subdued, than the fearful stillness which is the precursor of a thunder-storm does to the serene tranquillity of a summer's day. No sooner were the Presbyterian republicans subdued by the fanatics, who had gained the entire command of the army, than the murder of the King, and the vindictive persecution of loyalty and episcopacy, plainly shewed that, in the nomenclature of these men, forbearance and liberty meant self-aggrandizement and most merciless oppression of all who dissented from their opinions.

Major Monthault had sufficient political versatility and natural baseness to be a busy actor in these scenes of perfidy and depravity; but his talents were too limited to acquire distinction among men of deep penetration, profoundly skilled in the art of fomenting and managing the malignant passions; besides, the open scandal of his profligate manners ill suited the decorous exterior of seeming saints. His treachery to the Royal cause, therefore, only purchased him the liberty of compounding for his estate at a less fine than was extorted from persons of untarnished fidelity; and he was laid by as an instrument equally mean and vile, incapable of further use. A bad heart can never taste the pleasures which belong to tranquillity; and inaction is torture to those who must shun reflection. Monthault had no resource but in the indulgence of his brutal appetites. The beauty of Constantia excited desire, while the avowed contempt with which she treated him convinced him that the blandishments of flattery and persevering assiduity would never remove the impressions which she had conceived to his disadvantage. The licence of these disorderly times was favourable to deeds of violence. Monthault formed the project of carrying off his mistress by force, and securing her in his parental castle; and disbanded soldiers were easily found, alike daring and lawless, to execute such an atrocious design.

The only difficulty attendant on this undertaking seemed to consist in wresting her from the protection of her friends; for though courts of law no longer afforded relief to injured loyalists, a police was still preserved, and the precincts of a college could not be violated with impunity, or indeed with a prospect of success. He resorted, therefore, to stratagem, invented a tale of distress, and disguised a female accomplice to pass as the widow of a soldier who had fallen at Naseby. A story of sick children perishing for want was likely to operate on the feelings of humane young women. Constantia and Isabel were soon drawn beyond the walls of Oxford, and conducted along the banks of the Charwell, in search of this scene of misery. When they were at such a distance from the city as to preclude the chance of assistance, several men, masked and disguised, rushed out of an inclosure, seized their fainting prey, and bore her from her shrieking companion to a carriage which waited to receive her. The horses set off at full speed, and Isabel, in an agony of despair, ran after it till it was out of sight, invoking the interposition of Heaven, and casting many a vain look around to see if any human succour was at hand. Tired and exhausted, she at last recollected, that to return to the city and relate the event, describing to the municipal officers the road the fugitives had taken, would afford the most probable means of rescue; and, though it would be unspeakable agony to meet her bereaved uncle and aunt, she yet considered that her being with them would afford them some consolation, beside the advantage of her testimony for the recovery of her dear companion.

When Constantia revived from the state of insensibility into which the suddenness of the assault had hurried her weak spirits, she found herself in a chaise with Monthault, who watched the return of her senses to pour out some passionate encomiums on her beauty, and protestations of his insurmountable, though hopeless love. "I will speak this once," said she, "and then for ever be silent. Hear, abandoned man and perfidious friend! I would sooner die than yield to your wishes; and I know my father would weep less over my corpse, than if he saw me contaminated by your embraces. Restore me to him; nay, only give me liberty to fly back to his dear arms, and I will never disclose that you were the ravisher; but if you persist in your cruelty, it will be of no other avail than to plunge your soul in additional guilt."

Alarmed by the determined firmness of her manner, Monthault changed his tone. He protested she misunderstood his expressions; for that, though he never should cease to adore her, he had merely engaged in this enterprize as the agent of Eustace, to whom he was going to carry her. Hopeless of obtaining her father's consent (since he knew his disgrace had reached Oxford), and incapable of living without her, they had projected this scheme; and he besought her to be calm, as a few hours would bring her to her plighted love. "Surely, beautiful Constantia," said he, "you would not wish to escape from your faithful, though dishonoured Eustace." "The Eustace I knew and loved," returned she, "was faithful and honourable. Base seducer, and slanderer of unsuspecting innocence, this subterfuge cannot deceive me a moment; and I once more warn you to let me go, or dread my desperation."

A disposition like Monthault's is rarely threatened out of its deliberate purpose; but, happily for Constantia, the skill of the driver was not proportioned to the expedition he was commanded to use, and he overturned the carriage at the entrance of a small village. Constantia's cries soon drew several people to her assistance, who, supposing her distress proceeded from her alarm at the accident, assured her that the gentleman who lay senseless on the ground was only stunned by the fall, and that the blood which streamed from her own face was caused by a very slight wound. "It is from him," said she, "that I entreat to be preserved; only hide me from him. Let him suppose I escaped in the moment of confusion, and every kind office I can do you in the course of my life will be too little to shew my gratitude. Beside my own prayers, I will promise you those of my dear father, the worthiest and best of men; these he will daily offer to Heaven for the preservers of his only child."

The rustic witnesses of this scene listened with stupid surprise to this address. The women busied themselves in binding up the deep gash in Constantia's forehead; the men, in raising Monthault, and lifting up the carriage. By this time the out-riders were come up, who, faithful to their commission, prepared to place Constantia on one of the horses, when her loud shrieks, the bustle, and crowd, attracted the attention of two gentlemen who were travelling on the road, to whose inquiries of what was the matter, one of Monthault's gang brutally answered, a carriage had been overturned and a gentleman much hurt. "But he is quiet enough," said he; "whereas his wife, who is only a little scratched, screams as if she would raise the dead."

"Her distress at least requires tender treatment," said one of the gentlemen. "Why are they lifting her on that horse?" "To take her to a surgeon, your honour." "What! from her lifeless husband, while she herself is but slightly injured? Something must be wrong here." At the moment Constantia thought herself lost, a strenuous hand grasped the bridle of the horse on which she was placed; and a commanding voice called to the man who held her in his arms to stop at his peril. The villain drew his sword, and attempted to hew down his opposer; but at that instant Constantia had sufficient strength to loosen his clasp and throw herself upon the ground, from which she was raised by the other gentleman, who assured her she should be protected, in a voice which, with rapture, she recognized to be that of the worthy Barton.

"Oh my guardian angel," said she, "are you come to save me again? My second father, hold me in your sheltering arms till you can restore me to my kindred. I have been forced away by brutal ravishers. There lies the master ruffian senseless; and," continued she, waving her hand, "there are his cruel accomplices."

By this time the other stranger had disarmed his antagonist, pulled him from his horse, and committed him to custody. "My Lord," said Barton to him, "this is a most providential adventure. We have again rendered a signal good service to one of those pretty maidens whom you assisted at Halifax." "To which of them?" eagerly inquired the young nobleman. "Mistress Constantia Beaumont," returned Barton. "But where is Isabel?" "Safe at Oxford, and consoling my friends, I trust," replied Constantia. "Oh, Sir! I know not by what name to address you; but if you are the pupil of the excellent Barton, you will, like him, defend the friendless who has been forced away from her natural protectors."

"Most willingly," answered the unknown; "but if that man is your husband, how can I take you out of his power?" Constantia then briefly told her story; her morning walk with Isabel; her seizure; Monthault's protestations; the overthrow of the chaise, and the attempt of the myrmidons to force her away. The rest of these wretches had now made their escape, leaving the one who was in custody and their employer, who began to shew signs of life, to answer for their crimes.

Barton then took upon himself the office of restoring Constantia to her friends, and begged his companion to remain with Monthault to see that he had proper treatment, and was secured from escaping. They drove back to Oxford with such rapidity as to precede the return of Isabel, who had the happiness of seeing the beloved friend, whose loss she came to announce, restored to the embraces of her affectionate family.

While Mr. Barton and Dr. Beaumont were exchanging those sentiments of cordial esteem which mutual worth is sure to inspire, Isabel's eyes inquired if the gallant officer, who had so much interested her, had given no signs of reciprocal recollection. She was dissatisfied that he was not her cousin's escort; and though, in wishing to see him again, she thought she had no other motive than to thank him for past services, she never before felt so much pain from unacknowledged gratitude. Constance was too much overpowered by the remembrance of her own preservation to attend to the silent perplexity of Isabel, whom a secret consciousness of what she could scarce believe to be a fault restrained from a thousand inquiries which she would not have scrupled to make after one to whom she was wholly indifferent.

The transport which Dr. Beaumont felt at the restoration of his daughter was checked by a discovery of the most agonizing kind. Monthault still continued in a languishing condition; but his accomplice underwent an examination as to the purpose of his attempt, and the name of his employer. On promise of pardon the miscreant offered to make a full discovery. His conditions were accepted; and he then named Eustace Evellin as the person who was to receive the advantage of the nefarious action. He asserted, that being overcome with despair at the thought of having forfeited his uncle's favour by his bad conduct, Eustace determined to possess his cousin at any hazard, and that Major Monthault had been wrought upon, by his earnest entreaties, to become his agent. The woman who had personated a trooper's widow, and drawn the two ladies to the retired spot where Eustace was seized, gave such a description of the stranger who bribed her to fabricate a tale of distress as exactly tallied with the person of Eustace, but bore no resemblance to Monthault. Another was brought to swear that he had seen Dr. Beaumont's nephew in Oxford since its surrender to the Parliament. His long silence to his family was an inexplicable mystery; but to visit Oxford without throwing himself at his uncle's feet, and imploring pardon, was such a tacit acknowledgement of conscious unworthiness, as even the candour of Dr. Beaumont could not controvert. In an agony of mind, far exceeding all that he had endured for his despoiled fortunes, and only equalled by what he felt for his persecuted King; he requested Mr. Barton to discharge the accomplices, and hush up the business. He then returned home, clasped the trembling Constantia in his arms, and conjured her never to name her unworthy cousin. "I would bid you not think of him," said he; "but the viper will be remembered by its sting, after we have discovered it to be a poisonous reptile with a beautiful outside. And much gratitude is due to Heaven, that the base infection of his nature has been fully disclosed, before you were bound to him by indissoluble ties." Constantia asked if Monthault was the accuser of Eustace. "Monthault," replied the Doctor, "is silent. A chain of evidence confirms, that he was merely an agent in this iniquitous design of tearing you from me."--"Impossible," replied Constance, "never did agent embark with such eager passion in the views of another. It was for himself, the monster pleaded; and it was only a mean attempt to quiet my cries for assistance, when he talked of carrying me to Eustace.--Fortunate dissembler, how well he contrives to throw the guilt of his own treasons on that ill-fated youth."

"Dear, credulous girl," returned the Doctor, "I have often bid you love young Evellin, and do not wonder that you find it hard to unlearn that lesson. Yet, rest assured, it is not on dubious testimony, that I found my conviction of his being corrupted by the lax morality of these evil times, in which one party deems an attachment to the antient constitution an excuse for debauchery, and the other uses the verbiage of religion as a commutation for obedience to its precepts. It is most true, Eustace was publicly disgraced by Lord Hopton, accused of crimes to which he pleaded guilty, suspected of others which he faintly denied. With horror I must tell you that his unfortunate honourable father had the anguish of witnessing his shame."

Constance raised her streaming eyes and clasped hands to Heaven, exclaiming, "If his crimes have been any thing worse than the precipitation of thoughtless youth, there is no truth in man. Till his fame is cleared I will not name him. But I shall never cease to think of him till this heart ceases to beat, or rather till my intellects are too clouded to discern the difference between error and depravity. You have often said that one of the sorest calamities of this turbulent period is the celebrity acquired by successful wickedness, which encourages offenders to traffic largely in iniquity; but the fate of poor Eustace continues to exhibit the severity of retributive justice. Discarded by both his fathers, and divorced from his love, where has the pennyless outcast funds to feed the craving avarice of criminal associates, to suborn accomplices, and to bribe witnesses? A destitute exile has at least presumptive evidence that he is innocent of stratagems which wealth alone could attempt; and surely wealth is always too selfish to forego the indulgencies which it pawns its soul to purchase."

The sensibility of Constantia Beaumont was as permanent as it was acute; her sense of honour was refined and delicate; but her high-seated love was fixed on those unalterable properties which not only rejected every light surmise to her lover's disadvantage, but also clung to the conviction of his integrity with a confidence which, in the present state of things, looked like obstinate credulity. No chain of circumstances, no concurring testimony could induce her to think Eustace treacherous or depraved. By his own mouth alone could he be condemned. She must see his misdeeds and hear his confession before she would determine to recall her vows. With all the vivid hope of youthful inexperience, she continued to believe that he would return and confute his accusers. Months, nay, years, rolled away; the hope grew fainter. No certain tidings of his proceedings reached them after the fatal battle of Dartmoor, when Lord Hopton precipitately doomed him to ignominy. She had heard that his father commanded him to live and redeem his lost fame; and she often fancied he was busily employed in obeying that command. Indulging this idea, she hoped that his glory would burst upon them with such unquestionable splendour, that every tongue would applaud, while she took her hero by the hand, and asked her father to rescind the injunction which forbade her to avow her unchangeable affection.

CHAP. XV.

The zeal of the true Christian for Christ and his Gospel is never accompanied with those flaming contentions and oppositions, which, though engaged in the best of causes, certainly testify a corrupt mind. They had rather obey than dispute, follow than have the pre-eminence.

Southgate's Sermons.

The year 1648 produced events, that were alike the glory and the shame of England. It was first signalized by the illustrious stand which the university of Oxford made against successful usurpation, by appointing delegates to examine the oaths they were now required to take, and to state why, in reason and conscience, they could not submit to the imposition. These delegates, to their eternal renown, and to the honour of those for whom they acted, "though then under the power of a strict and strong garrison put over them by Parliament, the King in prison, and their hopes desperate, passed a public act and declaration against the covenant, with such invincible arguments of the illegality, wickedness, and perjury contained in it, that no man of the contrary opinion, nor even the assembly of divines, which then sat at Westminster, ever ventured to make any answer to it." And the publication of their reasons, "must remain to the worlds end, as a monument of the learning, courage, and loyalty of that excellent place, against the highest malice and tyranny that ever was exercised in or over any nation."

Resistance of such a pure and steady character, conducted with meek fortitude, and supported by unimpeachable wisdom, was too dangerous an offence to be forgiven. Ejection of the members from the scanty subsistence which they derived from their collegiate endowments, was the first punishment. To this, banishment from Oxford was immediately added, and, in many cases, imprisonment. The obnoxious oaths were tendered to all the members of the university, and those who refused to compromise their consciences for bread, were commanded to quit the happy asylum of their age, or to renounce all their youthful studies and hopes in twenty-four hours, by beat of drum, on pain of being treated as spies. Few were found so selfish as to submit to the alternative of perjury; and thus the venerable sages and generous youth of England went forth like the confessors of antient times, "of whom the world was not worthy; afflicted, destitute, tormented, they wandered in deserts, in mountains, in caves, and dens of the earth." At one time they were forbidden to earn a subsistence as private tutors in families; at others, restricted from performing any ministerial functions, even so much as administering the sacrament to dying persons, who yet, by the arbitrary regulations of many of the new parochial ministers, might not receive it from them, unless they also first took the covenant.

Dignified clergymen were at this time travelling on foot, nearly destitute of common necessaries, and relying on the charity of casual passengers for support[1]. Cathedrals had long been converted into barracks for horse-soldiers, and bishop's palaces into prisons for the ejected clergy, whose families, now deprived of the last pittance, and actually in want of bread[2], became earnest supplicants that the moiety of the benefices, of which their fathers were deprived, (and which the Parliament had agreed should be appropriated to their support,) should be regularly paid. "But these applications oftener produced vexatious and expensive suits than effectual relief."

As the clerical associates of the party who now reigned triumphant, rushed in crowds to fill the vacant seats, the aspect of Alma Mater was completely changed. As much sanctity as possible was thrown into the face, and mirth and pleasantry were avoided as marks of a carnal mind. The young competitors for academical learning were led to examination, through rooms hung with black, and illuminated by so faint a taper, that it only served to make darkness visible. This obscurity was a prelude to a fearful questioning by a Saint, "with half a dozen night-caps on his head, and religious horror in his countenance"[3], who asked him whether he abounded in grace,--the state of his soul,--if he was of the number of the elect--the occasion of his conversion, and the exact period when it happened. Such was the general aspect of manners, and such the state of learning; many respectable exemptions were, however, found in men who placed religion in something more essential than lecturing out of Calvin's institutes, pointing Scripture-texts at political opponents, or assuming the vinegar aspect of puritanical monachism. Some also have been recorded, who shewed that they were dissenters from purely conscientious motives, who refused to enrich themselves with the plunder of episcopacy, and, considering the clergy of the desolated church as men and brethren, stretched out the hand of humanity to alleviate their afflictions.

Such was the good Barton. By one of the sports of Fortune, he was nominated to the stall which Dr. Beaumont was expected to vacate, by refusing the prescribed oaths. Among the foibles of this worthy man, must be ranked a high opinion of his own spiritual attainments; but this being qualified by the technical phrases of his sect, did not alarm his really tender conscience, for though he would have considered the same inordinate degree of self-esteem as sinful, in one who did not hold the same religious tenets; yet, by changing the term disposition into gift, he thought himself permitted to talk of his present piety, knowledge, perseverance, diligence, and success in the ministry, as of a vessel filled with grace, and ordained to honour. Still, when he spoke of himself as man, he used the strongest terms of self-abasement. He had no doubt he should be able to foil Dr. Beaumont in argument, and convince him that the Anglican church was really anti-christian. His benevolence and liberality urged him to undertake this office at this time, in hopes that, since the Doctor's subsistence depended upon his acquiescence, expediency would facilitate conviction. The noble disinterestedness of this intention must attract admiration; and though there were abler advocates in the cause of Presbytery, it would have been difficult to select one whose motives were so commendable.

When Barton visited his friend, with a view to effect his conversion, he took care to conceal the interest he himself had in the business. With many encomiums on the Doctor's learning and moral conduct, he urged him to that conformity which would preserve him in a state of usefulness. He spoke of the differences between moderate members of the Lutheran and Reformed churches as including no essential doctrines; and mentioned the friendly intercourse which Calvinistical congregations on the continent had ever maintained with the church of England, assisting her in her troubles, and receiving her persecuted members with open arms. He observed, that what was not evidently of divine origin should never be made binding to the souls of men, that it was never too late to retract errors, and if, in the first hurry of separation, some remains of popish impurity adhered to a new-born church, it behoved its members to remove the defilement, as soon as a more simple and scriptural view of the subject allowed them to complete the work of reformation.

So far Dr. Beaumont, in general, agreed with Mr. Barton; but, adverting to the learning and talents of the fathers of the Anglican church, he conceived it attributable to their moderation and wisdom, and not to their want of sincerity or of clear spiritual views, that they endeavoured, not to build a new church, but to purify and reform their old one. Hence, in reply to the taunt of the Romanists, "Where was your religion before Luther?" they could say, "Our religion preceded your corruptions, and ever was in the Bible;" thus claiming for their founder, neither Luther, nor Calvin, nor Melancthon, nor Zuinglius; but the Saviour of the world. As to the remark, that what was not of divine institution should not be made a condition of communion, it applied with full force against the new-fangled covenant, and he clearly proved the injustice of an imposition, which could never be called law, while it wanted the essentials which the constitution required; namely, the assent of the three legislative powers. It threw a grievous burden upon the conscience of those who took it, because, not content with binding them to the new form of worship, it also required them to endeavour to extirpate Prelacy, classing it with Popery, superstition, heresy, schism, and profaneness. These may all be proved contrary to the word of God; whereas, allowing that episcopacy is not actually prescribed by Scripture, its greatest maligners have never been able to shew that it is contrary to any rule or precept expressed or implied. No conscientious man, therefore, could take this covenant, unless he thought that Prelacy ought to be interdicted, and its maintainers persecuted to extirpation.

On other branches of the oath, such as its pretext of defending the King's person, while it justified raising armies to deprive him of his lawful rights, and accusing the faithful adherents of the King as being malignant incendiaries, and the cause of the nation's misfortunes, Dr. Beaumont forbore to expatiate; as a clergyman, he was required chiefly to look at the ecclesiastical tendency of this obligation, and on that account he preferred poverty, bonds, or even death, to subscription.

Barton acknowledged that his party had gone too far, and hoped time would soften their asperity, and reclaim those who had so loudly complained of persecution, from continuing to be persecutors. He enlarged on the beautiful simplicity of primitive worship, as described in Scripture; talked of the mistakes which had proceeded from a misapplication of the word Bishop in our translations, and complained that the church was profuse in her ceremonies; that her forms were too copious, redundant, and evidently copied from the Romish missal; and that her terms of subscription were too minute and galling to tender consciences.

Dr. Beaumont acknowledged that, like all human institutions, the church of England, its Liturgy, and its authorised translation of Scripture, were imperfect; but unless we admit fallibility as a justifiable motive for rejecting whatever is of human origin, and withholding our obedience to all governments, because there is something defective in them, this objection must fall to the ground. The very nature of man, which prevents him from devising what is perfect, enables him to discover those defects in the labours of others, which his self-love will not let him perceive in his own; and thus it has ever been easy to detect and censure abuses, but difficult to correct them. He proved, that no congregation of Christians could be maintained, without observing various forms and arrangements not mentioned in Scripture, in which there is no fuller description of public service, than that they met together, with _one accord_, for the purpose of prayer, praise, singing hymns, reading and expounding the word of God. The rule, "Let all things be done in order," coupled with the injunction, "to obey those who have rule over you," justified every national church in framing articles of concord, and a formulary for public worship; and he thought private Christians could not be vindicated for disobeying their spiritual superiors, unless the required terms included something contrary to divine laws. He inferred from Acts, chap. iv. v. 24, and the following verses, that a form of prayer was early used in the Christian church, as it had been in the Jewish; and he stated that the divine compendium prescribed by our Lord was, indeed, a selection of passages from Jewish prayers. He observed, that without a service, previously known to all the congregation, only the minister could be said to pray, the rest were auditors, not a congregation; listeners to their orator, and judges of his eloquence; not petitioners in their own name, begging mercy of God.--Seceders generally pleaded that they put confidence in their minister; but he would tell them, this was being more Popish than the church of England could be, in retaining some of the dresses, Liturgies, and hierarchical orders used by the Romanists; for it was an error of that church, against which our reformers most vehemently protested, to give undue importance to the officiating minister, on whose intention and purpose the value of the sacred ordinance depended. If we change the word Intention to Gift, is the absurdity less glaring? The Papists believe, that their priest in the mass can, if he so wills it, change a wafer into flesh; and that his coinciding purpose is necessary to make any means of grace effectual. The Anti-formalists call it serving God, to stand while their minister utters extemporary prayers, the propriety and suitableness of which must depend on his wisdom and elocution. The resemblance between the lower classes of secular preachers, and the mendicant Friars, whose conduct was the disgrace and ruin of Popery, is most evident; especially in their abuse of the parochial clergy, from whom they completely estranged the minds of the people, and then led them into all the absurdities of fanaticism. He shewed that it was preserving the worst parts of Popery to make a merit of attending religious assemblies, instead of considering and hearing the word, as a help to right action; and that in uncharitable judgment of others, with respect to their spiritual state, and a pertinacious persuasion that salvation is confined to their own church, the strict Calvinist and the strict Papist were as one. And he bade Mr. Barton to join with him in praying God, that there might not be a still closer resemblance; for the crime of King-killing was of Popish origin, and was defended under the plea, that to promote the cause of God by cutting off his enemies was our duty, thus investing themselves with the right of judging who were God's enemies, and what was truly his cause.

In saying that the discipline and Liturgy of the English church was copied from that of the church of Rome, the case was unfairly stated. Her reformers endeavoured, in all things, to go back to the earliest and purest models. With singular modesty of judgment, they thought invention and discovery ill-sounding names in religion. The usages she kept in common with Rome were those she copied from the primitive churches, and were therefore uncontaminated with her errors.

In respect to the word _bishop_, admitting there was a misapplication of the term, in its present sense, to the ministers of the Ephesian and Cretan churches, whom Timothy and Titus were commissioned by St. Paul to select and appoint, yet it was to Timothy and Titus themselves, and to the authority they were commanded to exercise over these bishops or presbyters, that we were to look for the scriptural precedent of Episcopacy. The word Bishop did not come into the use to which we now apply it during the lives of the apostles, who possessed the same species of superintendence. But after the death of St. John, the apostolical fathers, who succeeded as governors of the church of Christ, modestly declined assuming the name of Apostle, as sanctified by the peculiar appointment of their heavenly Lord. As Christianity spread, each tract of country, or large city, had its bishop or overseer, who ordained the subordinate presbyters and deacons, and administered the rite of confirmation. Such, without exception, was the government of the church for nearly sixteen hundred years; and during that period scarce any objections were started against its utility. What St. Paul appointed Timothy to be at Ephesus, and Titus in Crete, that was Clement at Rome, Ignatius at Antioch, and Polycarp at Smyrna; each the ecclesiastical superintendent of his respective congregation, and a bond of union among dispersed societies of Christians.

As to the hardship of the terms of communion required by the Church, and the unscriptural tendency of some of her forms, Dr. Beaumont wished that the objectors would agree in stating what they wanted to have altered, in such a manner that unity might indeed be promoted. "But while," said he, "every one conceives himself at liberty to find fault, and no two agree in what you would have changed; while some of your most learned and pious bring forth new liturgies[4], framed according to their own peculiar fancy, without the least reference to ancient forms, or any even plausible pretence why their inventions should supplant what has been long in use; while others run into metaphysical subtleties and nice definitions of abstract doctrines[5]; and others inveigh against all forms as subversive of Christian liberty, are we not justifiable in retaining what we have till you agree in producing something better? And as to the multiplicity of our institutions, even with our fearful example to teach you brevity and simplicity, you have not found the drawing up of the constitution of a church so simple a thing. The Directory which was fashioned by your divines took almost a day to read over; and it is with a bad grace that you object to our using words not found in holy writ, which we say are rendered necessary by the present state of theological controversy, when your divines adopted many new-coined, indefinite words, for which neither Scripture, precedent, nor significance, could be pleaded."

Mr. Barton forbore replying to many points in dispute; he acknowledged that the assembly of divines "had disappointed the hopes of their employers;" but, recurring to episcopacy, he said, that admitting the existence of a superintending order among the primitive clergy, how could we reconcile the poverty and lowliness of the antient bishops with the splendour, wealth, and temporal power of their successors? and he added, that the ruin of the church was greatly owing to the secular lives of the clergy.

To this Dr. Beaumont replied, that in different states of the church different duties were required of her ministers. And if (as experience proved) in a state of persecution, the head of the flock was first called to suffer, it followed that in prosperous times those who occupied that station should also be admitted to an upper seat at "the shearer's feast." Wealth, power, and splendour, are not of necessity sinful. They did indeed often afford temptations to offend, and so did poverty; a low servile condition, a life of austerity and mortification, nay, even religious observances, for the Pharisee sinned in an act of worship, by boasting himself to be righteous, and despising others. "It must ever be," said he, "while the Christian priesthood is filled by men subject to infirmity, that in prosperous times the ministry will, in numerous instances, be formed of worldly-minded persons, who follow their Lord for the bread he distributes, and care little for the bread of life. Such persons being active, ambitious, practised in those habits which bring their possessors into notice, endowed with much worldly wisdom, and perhaps supported by powerful interest, must, according to the ordinary course of things, climb to eminent stations, and by the publicity of their conduct give occasion to scandal. But no sooner does the church appear in danger, than these mock supporters desert her; either changing their party for that which, they think, will eventually predominate, or seeking personal security in concealment. But then the true servants of God appear in view; they who, meek and humble, pious and learned, claim only the distinction of defending or suffering for a calling which they embraced with a view of fulfilling its duties, not of engrossing its rewards. All this results, not from the discipline of our church, but from human nature; and which-ever of your sects finally gains the ascendancy, the worldly-minded man will find in it the same expedients to help him to obtain the secular objects at which he aspires."

"As to your charge, Mr. Barton, that the lives of our clergy gave occasion to the downfall of our church, you cannot prove it, unless, invested with the attribute of omniscience, you can look into the hearts of men, and estimate the comparative worth of two numerous communities. The claims of our church to apostolical purity rest on her doctrines, constitution, and services. These are capable of proof and investigation, and are not affected by the unworthiness of her ministers. The pretensions of those sects who reject all creeds, forms, and canons, rest solely on the qualities of their members; and those who deny that human institutions can be binding, seem to adopt the common language of reformers, intimating, that they who pull down the old temple must be a wiser and worthier race of beings than those who supported it. Now as each man takes a personal interest in the triumph of his party, he thinks it his duty, not only to give his neighbour credit for whatever portion of graces and abilities he lays claim to, but also makes the same claim for himself; and he must be a bad caterer who cannot make a savoury compound of spiritual delicacies, when he thus traffics in them by barter. Yet I often wonder how they, who positively insist on the absolute depravity of mankind, can reconcile it to consistency, to make so many of their own brethren absolutely saints. They call themselves in the aggregate, the vilest of sinners; yet, when they come to describe particulars, they employ language which even the most eminent of all the Apostles had too humble a sense of his defects to adopt. But on the contrary, we who do not found our claims on the superiority of the earthen vessels in which the heavenly treasure is lodged, are not solicitous to describe the church militant in terms appropriate only to the church triumphant. We see and deplore the vices and errors of each other; and after that acknowledgment, do not, worthy Barton, call us uncandid if I add, we also discover yours. I will go further, and own, that we record that as a blemish which you produce as a beauty; I mean your zeal to promote separation, so plainly contradictory, not merely to a dubious text, a difficult chapter, or even an epistle hard to be understood, but to the whole tenor of the New Testament, which, from St. Matthew to the Revelations, preaches concord, brotherly love, candour, humility, lenity in judgment, meekness, submission, unity in belief, in worship, in our conduct on earth, and in final hope of an eternal reward in heaven."

Mr. Barton admitted the use and necessity of an establishment, notwithstanding the errors which must at first mix with it, and the inert supineness it must afterwards introduce; but he saw little danger in schism, and doubted if it could indeed be counted a sin. He enlarged on those texts which permitted Christian liberty, and laid it down as a fundamental rule for the only difference allowable in a state, that one church should be approved and all the rest tolerated. The approved church should be that which had most members, and it should afford public maintenance and greater encouragement to its pastors; but all opinions might be promulgated with equal freedom, and every person left at liberty to interpret Scripture as he pleased, and to serve God in his own way.

Dr. Beaumont conceived the adoption of this plan would give occasion to much talk about religion, but would ripen none of its fruits. The attention of most men would be too much engrossed by temporal pursuits to exercise this privilege of choice, till sickness or calamity urged them to think of a future world. Weak minds, he said, would be "ever learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth," and the best disposed would be most apt to fall into error from extreme solicitude to be right. The differences between Christians chiefly consist in mysterious or speculative points; hence the perpetual controversies of those who were struggling to enlarge their communities, would divert the attention of mankind from moral duties. Every preacher would become, as it were, a religious prize-fighter, drawing round him an auditory as a means of subsistence, instead of instructing a congregation in their duty to God. So there would be endless dispute, nice sifting of abstract ideas, and censorious inquisitiveness into the spiritual state of our neighbours, but little humility, charity, or true piety; which consist in grateful adoration of, and sincere obedience to our Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, and not in speculations on the incomprehensible nature and unfathomable purposes of God. From such unedifying pursuits our church, in her articles, dissuades even her riper members; how much more then must she, in her elementary instructions, avoid exciting a taste for them in the tender minds of her catechumens.

"Respecting the texts which require us to exercise Christian liberty, we ought" observed Dr. Beaumont, "to remember two considerations, which will assist us so to understand, as not to misapply Scripture. We should first consider the occasion which called forth the precept, and I believe you will find many of those you quoted, were meant to dissuade Gentile converts from observing the abrogated institutions of the Jewish law; at least, I am sure you will not find one which permitted a convert to say he chose to belong to the congregation of Paul or Apollos, or Cephas. Such licence of choice St. Paul strictly prohibits, ever labouring, as his Master had done before him, to build up a church in perfect unity of faith and worship. The other hint which I would suggest to you is, that the example of the Devil shews us that texts of Scripture may be wrested so as to recommend presumption and other enormous offences. Most assuredly, human governments have no power to inhibit man from interpreting the Word of God as his conscience dictates, but it is much to be wished, for the repose of Christendom, for the comfort of individuals, and the general increase of Christian graces, that "the unlearned and unstable" would exercise that lowliness and sacred awe which, operating as a moral restraint, would prevent them from giving their crude conceptions as faithful interpretations of the secret things of the Most High. This evil began to work in the Apostles' days, and every heresy and error that has since arisen in the Catholic church, claims for its foundation some misapplied text, which the perverse subtlety, or presumptuous ignorance of its founder wrested from its true significance. The usurpations of Popery, the daring impieties of Socinus, the mystical reveries of pietism, and the turbulent licentiousness of the fifth-monarchy-men, all assail the champions of orthodoxy with weapons stolen from the divine armoury. Nay, I have heard that the doctrine of metempsychosis has been supported by Scripture-proof, and many texts brought to prove the re-appearance of one human soul in a variety of bodies[6]. Though therefore I sincerely deprecate all legal restraints on the free use of the Word of God, I must commend those divines who enforce the moral restraints I have mentioned, instead of encouraging a boundless latitude of interpretation.

"Shall I weary you if I point out whence arise these discrepancies of opinion? We look into Scripture to confirm our preconceived notions, not with a reverent desire of learning the truth. Each sect prefers some portion of Christian doctrine to the whole, and urges its favourite tenet to an undue extreme. Unskilful interpreters separate texts from their contexts, or they found doctrines on obscure passages, explaining away those plain ones by which the more difficult should be expounded, and overlooking those cautions by which the Holy Spirit guards against exaggeration. By such men a rhetorical illustration, a poetical figure, a local or temporary instruction, are made to form points of faith or positive rules of practice. It is evident many, even of the moral precepts, given by our Saviour, cannot be literally obeyed[7]; and were intended rather to cultivate a general feeling, than to be referred to as a precise injunction; and if we allow for the strong imagery of eastern idiom on these occasions, let us do the same for those texts from whence arose the unhappy disputes among Protestants, on what are called the Five Points; which gave great occasion to Popery to exult in the disorder produced by our separation from her. And would to God that could have been avoided without partaking in her sins!

"To illustrate my idea of the manner in which even moral texts should be construed, I should consider your favourite precept of "Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free," as rather intended to limit the frequent injunctions "to obey those who have rule over us," and to shew Christianity did not enjoin servility, than as designed to prove that we are allowed to choose our own temporal and spiritual masters. And that this is the true interpretation, the universal opinion of mankind must prove, who, in preferring government to anarchy, and supporting the state by coercive laws, shew that they consider the multitude as naturally subject to the institutions of the country which gave them birth, and whose protection and privileges they enjoy. And believe me, Mr. Barton, those who now insist so much on the rights of equal liberty, when they come to govern, will inforce the duty of subordination, and will exact all the claims to which age, station, authority, prescription, or superior attainments are entitled. I shall not blame them; the peace of society depends on the inviolability of these claims. I only censure them for exciting popular resentment against us, by holding forth ideas of perfection which experience tells us cannot be realized in this life."

"I perceive," returned Barton, "you object to the fundamental doctrines on which we found our separation; but, if you refuse to be my convert, let me hope that you will at least affect a passive acquiescence. If the King assents to the terms which Parliament now requires, and abolishes episcopacy, surely you will not resist what you must then, on your own principles, admit to be law."

Dr. Beaumont steadily answered, that even then he would not take the covenant; for though the King and Parliament conjointly possessed very ample legislative powers, they could not alter the constitution, of which they were conservators, not fabricators. "But," said he, "this question is scarcely a speculation. I am well aware that our high-minded King too little values the title and parade, which he is aware is all the present Parliament will ever grant him, to wound his own conscience, or lay snares for that of others. I have therefore rather to consider how I shall suffer with my King, than whether I can temporize with him. I know, worthy Barton, you have a message to deliver. It does not come upon me as an assassin upon a sleeping man; I have long foreseen that this strong-hold of loyal and episcopal principles could not be spared; and I have earnestly implored the grace of Christian fortitude, that I may resign my last temporal possession without a murmur. The power possessed by the predominant party to afflict us, is given them by God. It is designed to purify a sinful people, and to revive the flame of piety in a lukewarm church, whose best restorative will be exemplary holiness. Tried in the furnace of adversity, I doubt not that she will come out pure gold, and that our present sorrows will serve as a warning to the latest times in which England shall be remembered as a nation, to beware of the leaven of hypocrisy, to avoid divisions, and to cultivate universal charity and forbearance, instead of vain unprofitable disputations on metaphysical rights and abstruse doctrines."

Mr. Barton asserted that public morals had been much benefited by the new ministry, who, however unpromising their attainments and manners might be to secular eyes, shewed by their success that they were chosen implements in the hand of Providence to convert the nation. He observed the cause of unity would be considerably benefited by England's conforming to the discipline of the reformed churches abroad. He would not affirm that episcopacy was the cause of her present miseries; but he insisted it would be a hindrance to her healing her wounds.

Dr. Beaumont answered, that there was no doubt Divine Power could accomplish its ends by any instrument; but as it was presumptuous in man to require Omnipotence to work miracles, so it was the duty of rulers to select the most capable and promising agents for every work of importance. The will of God was as often fulfilled by stubborn folly as by obedient wisdom; yet those who wished that "will to be done upon earth," would fill responsible stations with those that seemed most like the inhabitants of heaven.

"You must allow us, who have played a losing game, to talk," said Dr. Beaumont, "and believe me, that so far from meaning any thing personal in my remarks, I honour the patience with which you listen to my prosings, and the benevolence which induces you to wish me to see my own interest. As far as I have observed, men of sound heads, and sober lives, are oftener endued with the especial graces of the Holy Spirit, than persons of weak judgment, or those whose previous conversation placed them in the power of sin, that grand hardener of the heart. A great change has indeed taken place in the manners of the nation; but when I see the dreadful scenes that daily occur; the first persons in the kingdom dragged to prison, or to the scaffold, for no other crime than allegiance; estates confiscated; the temples of God despoiled; the mysteries of religion ridiculed and disputed; the bonds of family-affection broken; servants turned into house-hold spies; domestic privacies violated by informers, in the shape of friends; every one disputing about religion, yet few knowing in what it consists; spiritual pride calling itself piety, and censoriousness affecting the name of zeal for our neighbour's salvation; insubordination pervading every order of society; all clamouring for their own way, and 'meaning licence, when they cry liberty;' the most disingenuous shifts and dishonest contrivances resorted to, not merely without punishment, but without fear of censure; when I see all this, can I say that morals are improved, because theatres are turned into conventicles, and banquets and revels give place to polemical lectures? The faces of men do indeed assume the appearance of sanctity, but that it is only the appearance is evident, because true piety gives chearful serenity to the countenance, and easy simplicity to the whole carriage. It occasionally blazes in ordinary conversation, but it is in the fervent and edifying language of glory to God, and good-will to man. It never talks, for the sake of some secular, or treacherous purpose, of seeking the Lord.--It judges not its neighbour's heart.--It boasts not of its early provocations and present acceptance, nor does it debase the doctrine of Providence, by low and familiar applications of Almighty interposition to its own trivial concerns; applications which argue, not religious thankfulness, but self-importance. It is careful never to anathematize its opponents, by a misapplication of Scripture-texts or events, knowing 'that the sword of the Spirit,' must not be wielded by personal, or party animosity. Nor does it suffer the fervors of devout love and gratitude, to overpower the humility of conscious dust and ashes. Its approaches to the Holy One of Israel are made with reverence. The sanctity of a penitent heart revolts from every allusion to carnal passion, with more than virgin horror; and in its most elevated raptures it still sees the Creator, and the creature, the Saviour, and the sinner, the Sanctifier, and thing sanctified. Such is true piety, the habit of the soul; not the disfigurer of the countenance, nor the fashioner of the apparel, in which points it shews no difference from good sense, and modest propriety."

"The observations you have made on the advantages which would result from the King's giving up episcopacy, require but a brief reply. If, as has been shewn, Calvin introduced a form of discipline, perfectly anomalous, the error of the reformed churches, in departing from antient usage, is not to be copied, but shunned; and conformity would make England do wrong, not prove Geneva to be right. On this false view of unity, might the primitive Christians and Protestant martyrs be censured for non-conformity. It could be said, that they disturbed the repose of the world, by opposing the old doctrine of the unity of the Godhead to idol worship, or, that by preaching the primitive faith, they annulled the lucrative Christianity in which the Papacy traded. Nor do I admit that expedience is a lawful rule of conduct, in cases where moral principle is concerned. We must act as our conscience, enlightened by the best helps we can procure, tells us is right, and leave the event to God."

"And now," continued Dr. Beaumont, "my good friend, for such I know you are, even in this attempt to change my principles, though my coat has been worn too long, and is of too stubborn stuff to cut into the new shape, tell me the name of my successor, that I may remember him in my prayers. For trust me, he, and all those who supplant the episcopal clergy, will have an arduous duty to fulfil. The eyes of Europe will be turned upon them. They have made a vast vacuity, and it will require no common portion of ability, no ordinary supply of graces, to fill the mighty void. Popery has long looked to our church for the most potent soldiers. See that ye be able to maintain the Protestant cause as effectually, and serve God as well with your labours and your lives."

Mr. Barton too well recollected Dr. Beaumont's remarks, on the covert avidity of praise, which was too marked a feature of the separatists, to use any of those phrases of humble sound, but arrogant purport, which he had just heard so properly rebuked. He thanked Dr. Beaumont for his promised intercession, in behalf of himself and his evangelical brethren; frankly acknowledging their situation would be arduous. "As to your immediate successor," said he, "I trust you will not find him, a 'barren fig-tree,' but one in 'whom faith worketh by love;' though, peradventure, his face is not shaped in exact conformity to your notions of a religious aspect, and his mode of study may have led him to doubt, where you are certain, and to deem that perspicuous, in which you see difficulties." The controversialists parted with mutual good-will.

Dr. Beaumont had already taken every precaution to fortify and prepare his family for the trial which awaited them. He had forcibly pointed out the defective patience of those, who, though submissive and composed under corrections, which proceeded immediately from the hand of God; such as sickness, loss of friends by death, or any misfortunes arising from unpropitious seasons, or other accidents; are querulous and rebellious, when the same Sovereign Disposer of events corrects them through the intervention of their enemies. Pride, envy, hatred, ingratitude, selfishness, and treachery, are evils permitted against others; as well as plagues and offences in those who cherish them. Like pain, or decrepitude, hurricanes or drought, poverty or death, they prove, and purify the servants of God. The wrath of man has an allowed limit, which it can no more pass, than the raging ocean can the rocks by which it is bounded. And, if under the trial of moral evil, we behave wisely, charitably, and devoutly, we shall often find that even fraud and envy will produce some temporal advantages. Strangers have frequently stretched out their hands to help those whom friends and kindred have oppressed and abandoned. The world is ever disposed to look kindly on persons suffering wrong, provided they are not vehement in their resentments, and disposed to assist themselves by honest industry and wise measures. The cruelty of a tyrant has sometimes introduced superior desert to conspicuous notice; and at the worst, there is an inward peace, "which passeth understanding," that the oppressor never can enjoy, nor can he deprive the victim of his hatred from partaking of it. This is that peace of God which we forfeit, only by displeasing Him.

Nor did he deem adversity and poverty useless situations to others. The wish of the powerless is recorded, the intercessive prayer of the indigent is offered to God by the Mediator, who observed and blessed the scanty donation of the poor widow. Those angels, who wait around His throne, serve the Most High, as acceptably as they who fly on his messages. It was owing to too inordinate a love of the praise of men, that people generally feared to spend their lives in a condition, where no one thought their actions worth attending to.--We like the text, "Let your light shine before men;" but we recoil from that which bids us be content with the approbation "of Him who seeth in secret." These commands were intended for different stations, one suited the affluent, the other the needy, and they were, beside, limitations and comments on each other, teaching us neither to contemn praise, nor to pursue it too ardently. He spoke much of the passive virtues, patience, returning good for evil (which the most indigent might do by remembering their enemies in their prayers), self-denial, self-examination, and aspirations after a better world. Few, he said, were in a state so destitute, as not to be able to render some service to their fellow-creatures; but all might serve God. While we possessed the inestimable gift of reason, we had ample cause to bless Him, even if we were poor, old, lame, blind, or helpless; and from such a disfigured censor, how grateful would the incense of praise ascend to our Creator's courts?

He desired Mrs. Mellicent to moderate the asperity with which she spoke and acted towards the triumphant party. He told her he had fixed his determination to return to Ribblesdale, the scene of his pastoral charge, from which he thought himself not lawfully exonerated, and where his presence might be of some service, at least as an example. But as he could only gain permission to continue there, by preserving the most quiet demeanour, she must now, from regard to his safety, (if from no better motive) avoid execrating the round-heads. He gently hinted too, that, since they must now appear in a very different capacity to what they had formerly done, a more condescending carriage, and less sharp austerity, would better conceal them from the exultation of their enemies.

He intreated Constantia, (whose silent anxiety for Eustace had paled the roses on her cheek) to think of the various miseries which had overwhelmed the nation, and to bear her portion with fortitude. Many great families had seen all their promising branches cut off. Many had to lament worse than the death of their offspring, namely, their treachery, and hopeless wickedness. To have preserved all his family around him, and only to have lost his fortune, would have been, in these times, a too rare felicity. Many profligates were neglected in their education, and of such, small hope of reformation could be formed. But if Eustace were alive, the good seed had been sown in his heart, and he could not but hope, that he would at last, if not even till the eleventh hour, be found labouring in the vineyard.

Isabel needed little admonition. She had joined with the family in the devout services in which Dr. Beaumount had exercised them, to strengthen their fortitude and arm them with Christian graces. She rose from her knees, patient, cheerful, full of resources, and ready to engage in the task of active duty. She anticipated a return to harder toils and privations, than those to which she had submitted in early life; but she felt equal to her expected trial. She rejoiced in the capability of her vigorous constitution, firm health, and unbroken spirits. She could read to the Doctor--clear-starch Mrs. Mellicent's pinners--nurse Constantia--cook for the family--take in plain-work--teach school--in short do every thing to make them comfortable, and find her own comfort in so doing.

Barton parted with the Beaumonts with deep regret. He had stretched his interest to the utmost to procure permission for the Doctor to reside at Ribblesdale, and to recover a fifth of the sequestered living for his support. He did not, however, like many friends, rest satisfied with exerting his interest. His purse was also open to their wants, and his first instance of kindness was furnishing them with a supply for their long journey. His next was giving to Dr. Beaumont a sealed bond, with an injunction not to open it till the next quarter-day. In it he covenanted to pay him regularly half the profits of his canonry as long as he enjoyed it, and to diminish a sense of obligation, he required the Doctor to return him another bond, subjecting himself to a similar division, in case a change of times should cause another revolution of incumbents. The delicacy of this proceeding, at a time so peculiarly unfavourable to the hopes of Loyalists, tended much to assist the Doctor's endeavours of making his family charitably disposed, and even Mrs. Mellicent went so far as to lament that Barton was not a churchman.

[1] Such was the case of Dr. Morley, Bishop of Winchester, who was accidentally met and relieved by Sir Christopher Yelverton, and for many years sheltered in his mansion.

[2] This was true of the family of Wren, Bishop of Hereford, besides many others. He was imprisoned eighteen years, refusing to accept any favour from the Usurper. He lived to the Restoration.

[3] This description is taken from the Spectator, No. 424. Mr. Pennant says it is believed to delineate Dr. Goodwin, President of Magdalen college, during the great rebellion.

[4] This was done by Mr. Baxter at the Savoy Conference.

[5] See the Assembly's Shorter Catechism on God's decrees, the redemption of the elect, &c.

[6] This notion was held, and a curious book written on it by the successor of Dr. Jeremy Taylor in the see of Dromore.

[7] In particular, see Luke, chap. vi. ver. 29, 30.

CHAP. XVI.

The Commonwealth is sick of its own choice.

Shakspeare.

The aspect of Ribblesdale and the adjoining country, was completely changed, during the five years absence of the Beaumont family. The fields and villages, notwithstanding the two last years of comparative repose, bore mournful marks of the ravages of civil war; trade was still stopped and agriculture suspended. The people, disappointed in their hopes of freedom and prosperity by their new masters, longed for the restoration of their King, whose saint-like demeanour, during his long captivity, contradicted the calumnies which his enemies had propagated, and shewed him in his true light, alike conspicuous for his ability, his fortitude, and his misfortunes. The reign of freedom had ended in military despotism; equality had created a tyrant; zeal had introduced fanaticism and hypocrisy, and discontent was every where so ripe, that the presence of a victorious army, and the vigilance of almost as numerous a host of spies and informers, could not prevent attempts being made (in almost every part of the kingdom) to liberate the King, and restore the old order of things. But where to find funds and leaders, was the chief difficulty. The heads of most noble families, distinguished for loyalty, were either slain, or exiled; their estates confiscated or wasted by the pressure of enormous fines, their residences burnt or pillaged, and their farms laid waste. The few who remained in England, watched and betrayed by their own servants, knew not how to act, or whom to trust, for every tie of obligation, as well as all sense of subordination and respect for superiors, were entirely annihilated.

In passing Lathom-house, Dr. Beaumont pondered on that celebrated scene of determined female heroism. Though the noble pile bore many marks of the arduous conflict it had sustained, its walls (like the family to which it belonged) still displayed the unyielding superiority of aristocratic loyalty. But Waverly Hall was a complete ruin. A few of the meaner offices, and a part of the walls, marked where the residence stood, which once sheltered crafty selfishness. The park afforded a temporary asylum to a gang of gipseys, whose cattle grazed unmolested on the unclaimed demesne, once guarded even from the intrusion of admiring curiosity, by the secluding jealousy of a cold-hearted worldling, whose pride counteracted his ostentation, and whose timidity was even greater than his self-love.

Dr. Beaumont was himself the herald of his own return. His humble equipage attracted no attention. His first care being to lodge his family, he sought the house of Dame Humphreys. The streets of the village were silent and deserted. Neither the loom, the flail, nor the anvil were heard; not a child was to be seen at play; every thing looked as if this was a portion of that city where progressive action is suspended, and the sun hangs level over the ocean without power of sinking. Dr. Beaumont, however, found Dame Humphreys actively employed; and a superabundance of good cheer shewed that she was intent on purposes of hospitality. She welcomed the exiled Rector and his family with cordial transport; and assured him, though she had heard as many fine men since he left them as there were stars in the sky, she had never sat under any one by whom she had been so much edified.

The Beaumonts had many questions to ask, and no one was better endowed with the quality of free communication than this kind-hearted dame. She accounted for the silence of the village and her own extraordinary bustle, by stating that it was exercise-day; a meeting of ministers had been at the godly work for eight hours; and she doubted not, after so long buffeting Satan, they would come away main hungry. "My poor Gaffer," said she, "always brings all he can to our house. They tell him a blessing comes upon all those who furnish a chamber for wayfaring prophets, and set on pottage for them; but for my part I see it not, and begin to wonder whether these are prophets or no. As for our Gaffer, he has left off drinking and quarrelling, to be sure, which Your Reverence had used to rate him for at times; but then he did look after the farm and the cattle, and saw things went right. But now he says, let the morrow take care for itself; so we have nothing but preaching, and praying, and pecking at other people, and telling of experiences and stumbling-blocks, and abusing those who don't hold all that we do; and all this while the ricks grow less and less every year. And then when any thing goes wrong in the house, they pop it into a sermon, not as Your Reverence did when you preached about the ten commandments, but a preachment of an hour about such frivolous things as set husbands a-scolding their wives for spoiling their dinner, or not mending their clothes; and our poor Gaffer is grown so cast down ever since Priggins told him he thought he was a reprobate, that he says it is a crying sin to look happy; so he keeps praying on till we have no time to practise."

Isabel inquired how the children were able to command attention to such long services; and Dame Humphreys owned the change in this respect was wonderful. "To be sure," said she, "they do sometimes fall sick; but there is a vast number of thriving little saints growing up among us, who can find out a legal preacher in a moment, and tell you if he is a fine man before he is out of breath the first time. There's my grand-daughter (Nancy we used to call her, but they have since given her some hard name I never can recollect), she is only nine years old, and is such a gifted creature that she has chosen her religion, and says she will be a Brownist, for there is no other way to be saved. But her sister Hephzebah has not had her call yet, and says till she has she is to give no account for what she does, and afterwards sin will not lie at her door. Your Reverence shakes your head; but you will now find a vast deal of learning in the parish, and hard words, and every body able to talk with you; but I say again, that what with spending their time in idleness, and slandering each other, and sighing and groaning they don't know for what, and making feasts for ministers, and night meetings, and praying against the King, and cursing the bishops, and pulling down the church--give me the old times again, and the old way of going to Heaven."

Dr. Beaumont sighed at this strongly coloured, but artless picture of fanatical licence, and changed the subject by inquiring the fate of the Waverly family. Their history was indeed tragical. "Poor Sir William," Dame Humphreys said, "had turned, and trimmed, and cut in, and cut out, till nobody knew whether he was of any side at all, till, just as Prince Rupert raised the siege of Lathom House, when, thinking the King was sure to conquer, mid wanting to be made a Lord, he joined the Prince with a small troop of horse, intending (his neighbours thought) to gallop away before the battle began, for Sir William hated the sight of blood. But so it was; his time was come, and then there is no escaping, for Sir William was shot in his own quarters in a night-skirmish--and who did they think by?" Here she turned pale with horror, and the natural simplicity of her language seemed elevated by the emotions arising from the dreadful tale she had to relate.--"By his own son. O! Your Honour, it is too true. A kinsman of mine saw the deed done, and the ground has looked blasted ever since. But young Sir Harry, as now ought to be, little thought it was his father when he called him a drunken old cavalier; for the poor old gentleman trembled so, he could not cry for quarter till his son had given him his death's wound; and he saw by the flash of the pistol who it was, and called to mind how he had made him serve in the Parliament army against his will. So he just groaned out, "God is just, Harry," and died. It was the most piteous sight; for the poor youth fell on the dead body, and groaned, and tore his hair, and beat himself in such a manner, till his soldiers bore him away; and what has become of him since that day no soul knows, for he has never come to claim the estate, nor to look after any thing; so Parliament seized it all, because Sir William died at last a Loyalist. But nobody will buy it, for they cannot make a title, as Sir Harry has not forfeited, and may be alive. Beside, people said the house was haunted, so it has never been tenanted; and whoever wants to build, fetches it away piece-meal; and the gypsies camp in the Park when they come from the neighbouring fairs, and all goes to ruin like the time-serving family who lived there."

The awful reflections on retributive justice which the fate of this unprincipled man excited, were interrupted by the return of Humphreys, who ushered in some of his divines. The change which his wife described was visible in his horror-stricken countenance. He had been formerly a man of a sordid worldly disposition and hard unyielding temper, on whom the mild Christian persuasions of Dr. Beaumont had occasionally made good impressions, though these were as often blunted by the power of long indulged habits. But when such a man was roused from his stupor by the cauteries of Calvinism, despair was more likely to take possession of his mind than the pious energy and humble hopes which follow true repentance. Priggins indeed boasted of Humphreys as a convert, on the ground of his being restrained from the public commission of some faults in which he had formerly indulged; but if one evil spirit had been dispossessed, seven more wicked had taken up their abode in his heart. He was terrified, not awakened; plunged in an abyss of desperation and misanthropy, not excited to a life acceptable to God or useful to man. The sight of Dr. Beaumont recalled to his mind many acts of fraud and injustice which he had formerly committed against him; but the long exercises, as they were called, to which he had been listening, had not illustrated the universal promise of mercy to penitent sinners; they held out no encouragement to co-operate with the divine call to newness of life which the gospel gives to all mankind; they gave no explanation of reformation and restitution as necessary parts of repentance. Much to their own ease, and with daring disregard of all the plain and practical parts of Scripture, the preachers successively employed themselves in expounding what they called dark texts, on which they built their favourite system; impious in theory and destructive in practice. They spoke of election and reprobation as positive, irreversible decrees of God, no ways resulting from the conduct of man, whom they stated to be a mere inefficient vessel filled with grace and destined to glory, or heaped full of pollution and devoted to eternal destruction, according to the arbitrary will of the Framer, without any liberty of choice in himself, or any power of expediting his own faith or final justification. They spoke of the saving call as discernibly supernatural, preceded by bodily as well as mental torture, and instantaneously followed by a perceptible assurance that they could never more sin, that the righteousness of their Redeemer was imputed to them, and that, as his merits were all-sufficient, nothing was required of them but the supineness of passive faith. This routine of doctrines, varied according to the different tempers and phraseology of the preachers, and rendered yet more obscure by bold metaphors and strained allusions, was what poor Humphreys incessantly listened to, fancying he was thus taking care of his soul, and vainly hoping he would gather some instructions which would assuage his secret horrors. He was miserable when not employed in this manner; yet, as no start of enthusiasm ever told him that the saving call had taken place even in the congregations which he mistook for the courts of the Lord, he rather hoped for, than found relief from his tortures. Pale and haggard in his looks, morose and sullen in his manners, restless and dissatisfied, he revived the disputations of the conventicle at the table, calling on Dr. Beaumont to tell what he thought of some points of doctrine on which his ministers could not agree. The Doctor attempted to speak, but his voice was soon drowned by the Stentorian lungs and tautological verbiage of his opponent. Only one sentence that he uttered was distinctly heard, which was a quotation from the pious Hammond, that "exemplary virtue must restore the church." A general cry was raised against this sentiment. One repeated a text from St. Paul, supposed to assert the inefficacy of works; another observed, it was presumptuous to dictate to Providence. Some called him a formalist; others a Pharisee; while a third party, yet more metaphysical, denied that men, strictly speaking, had any power to act at all. Priggins at last rose, and, with many plausible pretences of charity, proposed that they should all pray for their offending brother, which was done in the anathematizing style which, in those days, was called intercession: "Lord, open the eyes of this reprobate sinner. Pluck him as a burning brand out of the furnace of thy wrath. Make him see that he is a vessel filled with spiritual pride, hypocrisy, and barren legality. Punish him for the saving of his soul till he repents of his ungodly enmity to us thy chosen favourites, whom thou hast raised to the work of conversion, and penned in thy fold to eternal life," &c.

Dr. Beaumont and his family withdrew, in compassionate silence, from this profane perversion of devotion, which discovered the same spirit of intolerance and persecution that characterized the darkest periods of Popery. A project had been formed by Isabel, to which the rest of the family readily assented. This was to take up their abode for the present in the untenanted ruins of Waverly-hall, and endeavour to prevent its further dilapidation. With the assistance of Williams, she re-inclosed the garden, and put a few of the outer tenements into that state of comfort which cleanliness supplies. Dame Humphreys conscientiously restored all the moveables she held in trust to furnish their apartments; and, as Dr. Beaumont brought with him a protection from the government, neither Morgan nor Priggins could prevent him from residing in the parish as long as he conducted himself in an inoffensive manner. As to Davis, since his induction into the Rectory, he had gradually carnalized (to use one of his own favourite expressions); and, being grown sleek and contented, he preferred reposing in his arm-chair to storming in the pulpit, congratulating himself with having reformed the church, which he effected by removing every ornament as superstitious, stripping public worship of every decency, publicly burning the Common Prayer books, and denying the sacraments to all who were not Covenanters. Having done all this, he thought it time to rest from his labours, and devoted his days to those gross indulgences of appetite which are not unfrequently the solaces of men who consider the enjoyments of mental taste as criminal, permitting his neglected flock to be collected by Priggins, or any other hungry itinerant who was training himself as a theological tyro, previous to his being settled in an incumbency.

Among these tents of Kedar, Dr. Beaumont fixed his habitation with a soul thirsting for peace, and a mind disposed to subdue his opponents by those invincible weapons, a meek and quiet spirit, and a holy, inoffensive, and useful life. His narrow finances, derived chiefly from a precarious fund, allowed not the practice of that liberality which is the surest means of attracting a crowd of panegyrists; and his scanty means were still further taxed by what he esteemed the duty of sending assistance to many gallant royalists at this time in arms for the imprisoned King; in particular to those, who, with the brave, repentant Morrice, surprised Pontefract Castle, and made from thence those courageous sallies and predatory incursions which gave employment to the Parliamentary troops in that quarter, and prevented them from uniting to overwhelm the succours which Sir Marmaduke Langdale was conducting to join Duke Hamilton and the Scotch Loyalists. But, however limited its means, a good heart will ever discover some way of shewing its benevolence. Charity was now a scanty rill, not an ample stream; but its source was fed by a regular supply, and where it ran it fertilized. Constantia roused her mind from the apathy of grief to obey and support her father. She found she could instruct the ignorant; and though no longer able to furnish materials for clothing the naked, she could cut out garments and sew them for those who were too ill-informed to be expert in female housewifery. Isabel and she gathered herbs; Mrs. Mellicent superintended their distillation, and again consulted "The Family Physician," in forming ointments and compounding cordials; Dr. Beaumont went from house to house, trying to conciliate his parishioners, and to recall their wanderings, in nothing changed but the paleness of his countenance and the homeliness of his attire, still reproving with mild authority, and instructing with affectionate solicitude; while his appearance spoke a heart yearning over the sorrows and sins of the kingdom, and habits necessarily restricted to that bare sufficiency which just supports life. The manners of the young ladies were equally mild, uncomplaining, and respectable; the only difference was, that Constantia was pensive and dejected, Isabel active and cheerful in adversity. The former seemed to move in a joyless routine of duty; but Isabel was so animated that only the most minute observer could tell that she was not perfectly happy, and hence she gained the character of having an unfeeling heart.

The affectionate respect which the villagers had long felt for their old pastor soon began to revive. Man naturally looks on the unfortunate with pity. The Beaumonts no longer excited envy, which (such is our proneness to offend) is often the substitute for gratitude. Dr. Beaumont was now their superior only in goodness and wisdom; a superiority more easily endured than that created by affluence or a larger share of temporal indulgencies. Many too began to be weary of the tautology and confusion of their arbitrary services, which, depending upon the humour, or (as they proudly called it) the inspiration of their minister, often wearied instead of gratifying the curiosity of the hearers. They recollected the Liturgy of the Church of England with somewhat of the feeling we entertain for a dead friend, remembering all his excellences, forgetting his imperfections, and lamenting that in his lifetime we were often inclined captiously to condemn his whole conduct. By returning to that church from which they had been led, by what they now saw was the spirit of delusion, they exercised the freedom of choice which was so dear to their proud feelings; and it soon became the request of many of the parishioners, that Dr. Beaumont would read to them the church service, and expound the Scripture in the manner prescribed by her articles. To read the Liturgy was now become a statutable offence; but Dr. Beaumont adopted, as an expedient, what was then resorted to by many divines[1] well versed in difficult cases of conscience--changing the expressions, but preserving a meaning as closely allied to the old worship as the times would admit. Yet even this transposed and disguised form was too opposite to the doctrines, and, (may it not be said?) too superior to the productions of the new teachers to be permitted with impunity. Hence Dr. Beaumont found it necessary, for his own safety, to collect his little flock on a Sunday evening, in an unfrequented valley surrounded by hills, on one of which a centinel was placed to prevent their being surprised in this interdicted worship; and thus this church, literally exiled and driven into the wilderness, performed the Christian sacrifice of prayer and praise.

The storm of war, however, soon interrupted their devotion; and, rolling fearfully from the North, came close to the dwelling where the pious pastor endeavoured to drink the waters of affliction in privacy. The Duke of Hamilton had now collected an army, from whose efforts to wipe off the shame of their countrymen the Covenanters, in delivering up the King to his merciless enemies, a glorious result was expected. With this hope they entered England by way of Carlisle; and, preceded by the English forces, led by Sir Marmaduke Langdale, they marched into Lancashire full of zeal and confidence, but negligent of that discipline, and inattentive to those military expedients by which alone (considering the enemy with whom they had to contend) the least shadow of success could be acquired. In vigilance, activity, and prompt decision, Cromwell was the very prototype of that man who has changed the aspect of the present times. Various armies were collected with almost magical celerity, and provided with every necessary for their own comfort and the annoyance of the foe; and scarcely had the Loyalists in the west, north, and east brought their raw recruits into the field, before a well-appointed body of veterans was arrayed against them, ready to cut off their resources, and give them battle. Cromwell himself took the command of the northern division; and without delaying his grand design, by stopping to subdue Pontefract Castle, as his more timid counsellors advised, he marched immediately to attack the Scotch army, though with inferior numbers, and put them to the rout, after having first defeated their English allies. Both the generals were taken prisoners. Sir Marmaduke afterwards escaped; but the Duke suffered on the scaffold shortly after the Royal Martyr whom, with late repentance, he vainly attempted to save.

The scene of this contest was so near Ribblesdale that the engagement was plainly seen from the hills I have just spoken of, where Dr. Beaumont and his family, with the fervent piety, though not with the success of Moses, held up their hands in prayer to the God of battle. The result disappointed their ardent hopes; and the more grateful duty of thanksgiving was thus changed to humble resignation. The fugitive Loyalists and their vindictive pursuers scoured along the valleys. The present situation of the Beaumonts was highly unsafe; and they eagerly hurried along to regain the melancholy shelter of their ruinous abode.

The shades of evening fell as they entered Waverly Park, agonized with sorrow and commiseration of the calamities they had beheld. A squadron of cavalry rode rapidly by them, which they guessed were part of the King's northern horse, so celebrated in the early periods of the civil war. Isabel's anxiety to see if they were closely pursued conquered her female terrors. She ran from her friends and climbed a little eminence, by which means she discovered a sight which roused the liveliest feelings of compassion. She saw an officer falling from his horse, dead, as she believed. Perceiving that he bled profusely, she called to her uncle to go back with her and try if they could render him any assistance. On such an occasion even Constance was courageous, and they all hastened to the spot where he lay. Mrs. Mellicent remarked, that though he had lost the distinguishing insignia, she feared, by his being so well accoutered, he was a rebel. His helmet was fallen off, his countenance entirely disfigured with blood, and the hand which grasped his broad-sword seemed stiffened instead of being relaxed by death. "It matters not what he is," replied Dr. Beaumont, "his present state requires immediate assistance." Constantia seized one of his hands to see if life still fluttered in the pulse, but dropped it in an agony, exclaiming, "Merciful Heaven, it is Eustace! I know him by the ring he always wore." Dr. Beaumont immediately recognized the well-known crest of the Earls of Bellingham. "Dear unfortunate youth," said he; "yet, my child, be comforted; he has died in a most righteous cause." By this time Isabel, who had ran to fetch some water, returned, and began to wash his face, and staunch the blood, while the distracted Constance clung, screaming, to the bosom of her aunt, wildly lamenting the fate of her beloved. With more self-command, but equal anxiety, Isabel removed the clotted gore, and pulled the matted hair from off his brow. "These," said she, "are not my brother's features, but indeed I know them well. Our noble protector, the good Barton's pupil--" She paused a moment, and gasped for her own breath, while eagerly watching if he respired. A deep sob gave indication of life. "He is alive," continued she, in a low whisper, as if fearing to precipitate a spirit that was fluttering between time and eternity; "let us gently raise, and try to restore him."

There was not one of the party who did not anxiously join in expressing, by their active services, the sense they entertained of former kindness. Williams hastened to bring a wain and mattress; Mrs. Mellicent ran for bandages and styptics; and the wounded gentleman was safely conveyed to the house, still in a state of insensibility. Mrs. Mellicent's skill had stopped the hemorrhage; and a more scientific surgeon, who was called in, pronounced that, with proper care, his wounds would not prove mortal. Isabel claimed the office of chief nurse; the patient's senses gradually returned; and his eyes, when again capable of distinguishing objects, recognized one which had long been impressed on his heart. He rewarded her benevolent ministration with a grateful smile and feeble pressure of her hand; and Isabel felt happier at that moment than she had ever done since her dear mother was interred among Fourness Fells, when, with a voice convulsed with grief, she joined in the requiem, filled her coffin with funeral herbs, and scattered the emblems of sorrow on her grave.

"You must not speak," said Isabel; "the Doctor has prescribed the utmost quietness; you must only listen while I tell you, that for a thousand worlds I would not have lost the pleasure of saving your life. Had I not turned back you would have bled to death in a few minutes. Alas!" continued she, recollecting herself, "the hope of your recovery transports me too far. I forget that your exertions probably contributed to make the battle of Preston end so fatally to our cause? Why are you the enemy of my King and of my father?"

"I will never be the enemy of those you love," replied he, with a look of languishing pain and grateful anxiety. Isabel burst into tears. "Say that again," said she; "just those words and no more, lest your wounds should bled afresh; and if you die--"

"Sweet Isabel, finish that sentence."

"I shall surely die of grief," said she, rushing out of the room to call her aunt to take her office, ashamed that her joy at her patient's recovery of his senses had overpowered her habitual self-command.

The news of Dr. Beaumont's having preserved the life of a wounded officer, soon reached the ears of Morgan, who concluding it must be one of his own party, imagined he should now have ample opportunity to wreak his vengeance on a man whom he had marked for destruction, in revenge for the insult he had received from Eustace, and the disappointment of his hopes of obtaining Constantia. It was, however, necessary to ascertain the fact of his harbouring a Royalist taken in arms, before he proceeded to frame the information. Not satisfied with the Doctor's solemn assurance that the person whose life he had preserved was in reality a Parliamentary officer, he insisted on examining him himself; and also that he might interrogate him without the intrusion of any witness. The danger which the sufferer's health might undergo, was beneath his notice; he entered the room with an air of domineering cruelty, ready to pounce on a victim unable to escape; but, after a short interview, he returned with the softened accents of obsequious respect to the stranger, and affable condescension to the Beaumonts. He desired that they would spare no trouble and expence in attending the gentleman, and assured them they would be well rewarded for their pains. He lamented that their poor abode did not afford suitable convenience, and hinted that as soon as the stranger was able to be removed he would have him conveyed to Saints' Rest, his own mansion. He then announced that their guest was the Lord Sedley, only son of the Earl of Bellingham, who at that time commanded the forces sent to subdue the Welsh insurgents, and was himself a personal favourite of Cromwell, and attached to his staff. "He gives," continued Morgan, "a very favourable account of your principles and conduct, and I shall not fail to announce your proper behaviour to their honours the Committee-men, and I hope Government will be disposed to overlook your past offences. The Earl is a staunch supporter of the good cause, and the young gentleman a youth of very fair promise."

If Morgan expected his intelligence would be received with the transport of minds subdued by adversity, and suddenly elated by a prospect of better times, he mistook the characters of those he addressed. The circumstance of Sedley wearing a seal-ring impressed with the crest of Bellingham, had led Dr. Beaumont to suspect who he was; but since in his former intercourse with the family he had studiously avoided all discovery, the worthy Rector thought it would be indecorous to take any advantage of his misfortunes, and therefore evaded the inquiries of Constantia, how he came to wear the same crest as Eustace, by remarking that many families adopted armorial bearings nearly similar. Totally free from all the malignant passions, he felt no animosity to the son of that traitor who had wrested a coronet and princely demesne from the injured Neville, but rejoiced at the consideration that it had been in his power to render the most important services gratuitously to one who had so essentially assisted his family, and was beside the darling pupil of his respected friend Barton. Mrs. Mellicent's feelings were of a more vindictive cast, but her asperity had been so softened by the fine person and pleasing manners of young Sedley, that she could not determine on the expediency of immediately turning him out of doors, as she possibly might have done had he been uncouth and vulgar; she even kept her resolution till sight of his necessity and helplessness had assisted her benevolence to vanquish the warmth of temper, and taught her to respect the claims of a fellow creature in distress. Isabel had by this time discovered the state of her own heart; and the superior rank of the object of her affections was not the only reason for changing love into despair. Her dear father had often in his former ravings mentioned Lord Bellingham as the ally of Lucifer, and likely to succeed him on the infernal throne. At those times it must indeed be remembered, that he mistook his own children for dancing fiends, but his aversion to Bellingham was rooted, and at every eclipse of reason he renewed his execrations on a person, whose name, in his tranquil moments, never passed his lips. She loved the son of this man; this villain; for so she must think him, as her father, even in his most eccentric moments, never so confounded the distinctions of honour and guilt as to misrepresent characters. Nor could his rooted aversion proceed from the difference in their political principles, for it was in her early years, before the troubles commenced, that he mentioned Bellingham as the infernal spirit who had driven him to the mountains; and in every allusion he confirmed the idea of a private rather than a public quarrel. Time and absence had increased rather than weakened the affection and reverence which Isabel bore to her father. His eminent services to the King, his bravery and activity, unimpaired by wounds, imprisonment, or declining years, made her prouder of such a parent than she would have been of one seated on the right hand of power. And had she cherished and avowed an affection for the son of a cruel enemy to her honoured father!--What a want of filial piety, what a shameful inattention to his wrongs would it be, knowingly to confirm such an unnatural inclination! Whatever pain it cost her, she determined to release her heart from the fetters which gratitude and pity had combined to form.

The resolution was extremely noble, but to execute it was superlatively difficult. Lord Sedley was daily before her eyes in the interesting characters of suffering magnanimity or ardent attachment. When his unclosed wounds throbbed with extreme anguish, could she refuse to minister to his relief? When returning ease allowed him to direct the grateful acknowledgments of a devoted heart, to the protecting angel who had rescued him from death, could she deny the confessed affection surprise had drawn from her, and resolve to hate or even forget him on account of a supposed hereditary feud? The struggle of her soul was apparent to Sedley, who, ignorant of his father's crimes, attributed her affected reserve to the alarm she felt lest the claims of his exalted station should prove incompatible with love. To alleviate this fear he was more explicit in his declarations, and energetic in his vows of devoting to her the life she had preserved. She attempted to look cold and determined, while she answered that she feared insuperable objections would prevent their union. In the weak state to which Lord Sedley was reduced, the least agitation of mind was dangerous; after one of these conversations he fainted, and was thought expiring, but the first object he saw on his recovery was Isabel, in such an agony of grief as convinced him that indifference had no share in the alteration of her behaviour.

The first opportunity which she again afforded him of speaking to her, he resolved to use to bring on a complete eclaircissement, and as he should require perfect frankness, he resolved to set her a similar example. But to execute his design was now very difficult; for Isabel, with virgin modesty, blended with the restrictions imposed by filial duty, now avoided being alone with the object of her tenderest regard. Her uncle had deemed it right to inform her, that it was a lively sense of irreparable injuries, which pointed her father's incoherent ravings at Lord Bellingham. His wrongs, the Doctor observed, were of a nature which only Christian charity could forgive, or Christian fortitude endure; and he warned her against cherishing any sentiment more ardent than pity for Sedley's sufferings, and gratitude for his former services. She promised to endeavour to comply, in a manner which evinced that this advice came too late. She tried to recollect the pains he had formerly taken to avoid her, and the marked precaution of Barton in concealing his name. She wished to think him a scion of a cankered tree, which would transfuse infection wherever it was engrafted. The surgeon had just pronounced him at liberty to remove, and Isabel endeavoured to hope he would avail himself of that permission. "His declarations of love and gratitude may," thought she, "be bribes to induce us to be more careful of his preservation, or he may think himself bound in honour to offer me a partnership in his fortunes, as the preserver of his life. I will owe nothing to his pity or his gratitude. I will recollect, that I am the daughter of a noble Loyalist, irreparably injured by his rebel father, restrain the ebullitions of youthful sensibility and unweighed preference, and if he leaves us, part without a tear."

Nothing could be more foreign to the purposes of Lord Sedley than to quit his adored preserver. He made no use of his release from restraint, but to follow Isabel in her domestic occupations, nor of his returning strength, but to try to lighten her labours. "Am I troublesome to you," he would say, "that you look on me less kindly; if so, I shall regret the restoration of health and ease, and the power of again enjoying the refreshing air and blessed light of heaven. The tenderness which made the chamber of infirmity paradise, is withheld from me, now I have a prospect of living to reward it."

Isabel attempted to reply, but only stammered out, "Lord Sedley!"--"I will be known to you," said he, "by no other name than that by which I will plight my troth, Arthur de Vallance.--What has my Isabel to say to me in that character? I will not allow her to retract the sweet encouragement she gave me when I was the helpless object of her tender care. Her compassion and assiduity looked so much like love, as to cheat me into a belief, that she who said she would die with me would consent to make the life she preserved a blessing."

Surely, thought Isabel, this is not the language of hereditary baseness. She cast a look on her lover which confirmed that opinion. Yet, how could she tell him that his father's crimes formed an insuperable barrier to their union. After much hesitation, she resolved to be as explicit as her own respect for the feelings of filial piety would permit. "I will own," said she, "that what fell from me in a transport of joyful surprise, was not an unmeaning exclamation, but the confession of a strong preference. But now that I have had time for reflection, I must remember that you long struggled against your partiality for me, and even now you seem rather vanquished by a combination of circumstances and a sense of obligation, than led to make me your free unquestioned choice. This indicates that you know of some secret reason, some family animosity, perhaps, which ought to prevent my ever being your wife. I am the daughter of a Loyalist, unfortunate indeed, but brave and noble; I will not reproach you with your father's faults. His prosperity, the trust he exercises under the Usurper, are in my eyes reasons, if not of hating you, at least of resolving not to unite myself to principles so opposite to those I have ever cherished."

Sedley thanked her for allowing him an opportunity of explaining the past. It was most true, that at their first interview he felt the power of her fortitude and generous regard to others, nor did he overlook the complacency with which she received his services. Though at that time hearty in the Parliamentary cause, it was owing to the advice (or he should rather say, the commands) of Barton, under whose guidance he was placed by his father, that he deputed him to execute the plan he had formed for the safe conduct of the Beaumonts through the seat of war, instead of being himself their escort, as he at first intended. The same interference had again prevented him from renewing an acquaintance with them, on the rescue of Constantia. The principles he had imbibed from Barton forbade every deviation from the path of honour; and an alliance with a conspicuous royalist, would either have estranged him from his family or exposed them to ruin. Isabel inquired if the same impediments did not still exist. "A great change has taken place," replied Lord Sedley; "I am now like you, a child of misfortune; but were it not so, 'Love is become the lord of all,' and when he reigns, he reigns unrivalled."

He proceeded to inform her, that the violent feuds of the predominant factions had infected the privacies of domestic life. His mother was warmly attached to Cromwell's party, while his father adhered to that of the Presbyterian republicans; the differences between whom were now grown irreconcileable. He knew that the command intrusted to Lord Bellingham was given him as a snare, and that he was so surrounded by spies, as to be virtually in the power of any common serjeant, who, in the two-fold capacity of Agitator and Preacher, could denounce his general at the drum-head, and under the pretence of his having sacrificed the Lord's cause, and the rights of the army, to an ungodly Parliament, could send him prisoner to London. Lord Sedley confessed, with shame, that his mother, by giving information that his father was in secret not well disposed to Cromwell, had caused him to be placed in a situation where the greatest circumspection could not ensure his safety. The sentiments he had imbibed from Barton led him to prefer the more moderate counsels, and in the conduct of the contending factions he had seen so much to condemn, that he wished to abstain from all interference in public affairs. But his mother misinterpreting his seclusion into a preference of his father's party, invited Cromwell to Castle Bellingham, on his march against the Duke of Hamilton, and requested that he would take her son with him as one of his suite. More like a captive than a volunteer, Lord Sedley was compelled to acquiesce in her proposal; but the intimate view which his situation gave him of Cromwell's character, inspired him with the most revolting disgust. The domestic situation of his parents dispirited him on the one side, while something more than indifference to the cause for which he fought operated on the other, till, hopeless of better times, careless of safety, and desirous rather of losing life than of gaining glory, he rushed into the battle; yet, when the conflict began, he felt roused by a mechanical impulse, and, engaging in a hot pursuit of some of the northern horse, he received those wounds from one of the troopers, which nearly terminated his existence.

"Such, Isabel," continued he, "is the present condition of him, who must again owe his life to your pity. I have no home, but one occupied by a mother, engaged in plots for the destruction of her husband, and determined to render her son the creature of an ambitious hypocrite, rather than serve whom, he would die. I cannot join my father, for that would be to add a second victim to the one, whom Cromwell has resolved to expose to the sharpest ordeal. My hereditary claim to rank and title is now merely the vision of a shadow, for I know it is the secret intention of the fanatics to abolish the Peers as a political body, and estates are now held by permission rather than right, nor are the possessors secure of their inheritance for a single day. Greatness is thus reduced to the bare simplicity of individual desert. In you, Isabel, I see the genuine loveliness of unsophisticated virtue, the qualities of fortitude, discretion, and sincerity, which these arduous times peculiarly require. At present I have had little opportunity to shew you my character, but let me intreat permission to be sheltered under your uncle's roof, till I can arrange some plan for my future conduct, and shew you more of the heart which is irrevocably yours."

The plea of anxious distress revived all the tenderness of Isabel; and he whom, she believed, she could reject as the heir of a coronet, and the favourite of an Usurper, became the object of inviolable attachment when viewed as an outcast, seeking an asylum from the misfortunes brought on him by the crimes of his parents. Considering it to be her duty, she explained his situation to her uncle and aunt, and they agreed that it would be inhuman to deny him the refuge he craved. But still, as he was at present rather a probationary than an assured penitent, and in some points of view an object of suspicion, Dr. Beaumont felt it would be endangering his own security to converse with him freely on political topics. Still more hazardous would it be to admit him to a participation of their family-secrets, and at this time there was one which engrossed their minds, and threw an unusual air of mystery and anxious solicitude into Isabel's behaviour.

[1] Especially Bishop Sanderson.

CHAP. XVII.

To her direct thy looks; there fix thy praise, And gaze with wonder there. The life I gave her Oh! she has used it for the noblest ends! To fill each duty; make her father feel The purest joy, the heart dissolving bliss, To have a grateful child.

Murphy.

The manners of Isabel were peculiarly frank and playful; the consciousness that her life was spent in the discharge of active duty, gave the same energy to her mind, which bodily exertion did to her nervous system. She never acted under the influence of motives which required disguise; the simplicity of her habits, her ignorance of the world, and innocence of intention, gave such an undesigning engaging character to her conversation, that whoever spoke to her, might think themselves addressing one of those pure intelligences, who are incapable of falsehood or disguise. To a mind so modelled, a secret was a dreadful burden, especially when compelled to hide it from one, whom love induced her to treat with peculiar confidence, and who often complained of her reserve, and asked the meaning of those embarrassed looks, that impatience to break from him, and those thousand mysterious contrivances upon petty occasions, which were so new to her character, and might have awakened jealousy in the most unsuspicious heart.

On his being first domesticated in the Beaumont family, Lord Sedley was charmed with that elegance of arrangement, which contrived to make a bare sufficiency of the simplest fare, look like plenty. He had wondered how the little means he knew they possessed, could be so multiplied, even by the most provident frugality, as, like the widow's oil and meal, to supply their own wants, and yet afford a portion to the hungry traveller. Formerly, when he reconsidered at night the behaviour of the family, he used to be able to account for all their actions, and could testify that their time was virtuously and wisely employed, without the least alloy from caprice, indolence, or inconsiderateness. Dr. Beaumont and Constantia went at their appointed hour to visit the villagers; Mrs. Mellicent sorted her simples, compounded her medicines, and examined her patients; Isabel superintended the domestic management.--Williams was caterer, gardener and serving-man; the relics of yesterday's meal were neatly reserved, garnished with "roots, cut in characters," and the sauce spiced, as if it were for Jove. After dinner, literature, wit, or piety, gave a zest to their conversation, and made the lone ruins of Waverly Hall the scene of a regale, often unknown in palaces. But now every proceeding was deranged and perplexed, no one seemed to enquire into the engagements of the others. Isabel was often absent, and often neglected the duties to which she once used to affix importance.--Williams was employed in some business, which all but himself seemed tacitly to admit was of infinite concern. The provisions clandestinely disappeared, and the family seemed to think it necessary to repair the waste, by eating more sparingly. Instead of wishing to sit up to sing, when every body else was sleepy, Isabel was the first to hint the benefit of early hours, yet in the morning her faded cheeks and sunk eyes indicated that the night had been spent in watching. Nay, what more excited his apprehensions, he discovered that besides the evening devotions, to which he had been long admitted, there was a secret service, which left on all their faces the mark of tears.

Love, terror, pity, anxiety, and doubt, alike prompted Lord Sedley to discover the cause of this marked alteration. He determined to watch Isabel, and the next night saw her leave the house, soon after midnight, and enter an avenue of sycamores at some distance. He immediately followed her; a loud barking of dogs changed every other emotion to lively apprehensions for her safety, but he soon saw her run back, and, on observing him coming to meet her, assume an untroubled countenance. "Has this serene night," said she, "made you too a truant with your pillow? I have, of late, been little disposed to sleep, and enjoy a moon-light walk amazingly."--"Do not those dogs annoy you," inquired Sedley, with more of moody displeasure than tenderness; "I should think they would form but a harsh response to your soliloquies." She answered, they did not always discover her, and she ran back when they were troublesome. Sedley asked her if it would not be better to secure herself from danger by the protection of a companion. "If you mean to offer yourself," replied she, "I must say, no. My uncle is constantly dissuading the villagers from attending night-meetings, which, he says, though they may be innocent, yet give occasion for reproach; and we must be careful not to countenance impropriety, by setting an ill example."

"Yet, surely," replied Sedley, "the prudence of these midnight wanderings is not so unquestionable. Were I of a jealous temper, I might imagine some presumptuous rival haunted your avenue, and that I even now detain you from an assignation."

"You will think otherwise," answered she, "when I tell you that I say a prayer when I quit my uncle's house, and a thanksgiving when I return; and you know, if my excursion were indecorous, I durst not so tempt Providence. I ascribe my meeting you to-night to accident, but I will tell you, dearly as I love you, Arthur, if I thought you watched me from suspicion of my conduct, I would never speak to you more."

Sedley was awed by the ingenuous resentment which appeared in her manner. Was it the effrontery of practised perfidy? Impossible! With an air of pious enthusiasm, she raised her eyes to the clear expanse, splendidly illuminated by the full-orbed moon and attendant stars, and clasping her hands in fervour of devotion, besought that Divine Omniscience, who neither slumbered nor slept, that aweful witness of all her actions, so to prosper the most ardent desires of her soul, as she endeavoured to frame them in conformity to his will. "I shall now," said she, "pursue my walk down the avenue. If you suspect me, follow me, witness the innocence of my conduct, and forfeit my love. If you confide in my integrity, return to the house, and never again subject my reputation to the reproach of being seen with you at night in so lonely a scene; but, if you wake at this hour put up a prayer for my preservation."

"The forfeiture of your love, dearest Isabel," said Sedley, "is a penalty I dare not incur; yet remember I have trusted you with all my own secrets."

"I have made an equally frank return," answered she, "I have told you all mine, even that I love you most tenderly, and wish every obstacle could be removed, which threatens to prevent our journeying hand in hand through life; but these walks I must take alone. Here every night I must remain two hours. Ask not if I am a sorceress, consulting an evil spirit, or a papist doing penance for a crime. You distress me, Arthur, by thus lingering and turning back to watch me; I thought your mind superior to jealousy."

"Does not concern for your safety," said he, in an impassioned tone, "justify my unwillingness to leave you; your family are known to be zealous Loyalists. A troop of horse are now stationed at Preston, and always sending out foraging parties."

Isabel paused for a moment, extremely agitated; then turning round, answered, "The holy angels hover round me; I will trust to their protection, and defy Morgan and the republican myrmidons."

If Sedley for a moment suspected any thing improper in Isabel's mysterious behaviour, his doubts now gave place to that perfect confidence which candour and virtuous simplicity ever impart to congenial minds. But in proportion as he revered the holy fortitude, which evidently supported her in these nocturnal adventures, so were his fears roused by a sense of the danger, with which, as she admitted, they were attended. She had pointed out Morgan as an enemy whom she dreaded. Sedley recollected the civilities he had received from him, and blamed himself for having been remiss in endeavouring to conciliate a man, who had power over the fortunes of his best beloved. He considered therefore, that it was a duty he owed to Isabel to call on Morgan, and try to discover if he had laid any hostile schemes against the Beaumonts.

Though Morgan affected to be made of the most stern republican materials, a visit from a nobleman, and an ostensible favourite of Cromwell's, was a high gratification. He received his guest with boisterous hospitality, and without any regard to his diminished strength, dragged him over his demesne, and shewed him all its beauties. It was, he said, a mere dog-hole, when he bought it for a song; his ponds, now well stocked with carp, were originally tan-pits; his garden was a slate-quarry; the phillireas now clipped into well-proportioned dragons, grew just as nature shaped them; and the hall he had neatly plaistered and white-washed was then disfigured with painted saints, and carved tracery. He hinted with a smile, that he had turned the times to a pretty good account, and was grown warm. Royalists were soon alarmed, and bled freely. Besides the per centage, when compounding for their estates, there was generally a little private oiling the hands of committee men. He talked of his stock of wines, liberal table, rich hangings, and the universal plenty of good things which he enjoyed; and strongly urged Lord Sedley, now he was able, to remove from the penurious dwelling which could just serve his turn, while his wounds were healing, and reestablish his health, by residing with his humble servant, Zedekiah Morgan, at Saint's-Rest, till he thought fit to return to his own princely mansion, Castle-Bellingham.

Sedley made a civil reply, intimating that his duty required him to remain where he was, and that as a soldier, he must despise luxuries. "True," answered Morgan; "trained in the school of our noble general, you choose to see with your own eyes, what plots the malignants are hatching. There is not a more suspected family than Beaumont's in this neighbourhood." Sedley encouraged this communicativeness, and Morgan proceeded to say, "that since the last defeat, the chief crime the disaffected could commit, was concealing those who had distinguished themselves in the insurrections."

Six bloody-minded cavaliers had been lately turned loose upon the peaceable inhabitants. Major General Lambert refused them quarters, when he granted terms to Pontefract garrison[1]; but the horrid creatures had fought their way out and escaped, though he gloried in saying, the county was so well disposed, that three of the knaves, (and among them their scoundrel leader, Morrice) had been retaken--"And terrible dogs, I promise you," said Morgan, "they were, as ever you looked upon; hacked and gashed, and so reduced by famine, from hiding in holes and caves, that they could hardly stand. So we hanged them, without judge or jury, and made them safe. But three are still at large, and I can hardly sleep in my bed for fear of them. I will read you a description of their persons, and the names they pretend to go by. Humphrey Higgins, aged seventy, lean, and would be a tall man, only bent double, has but one eye, and lost the use of his right arm: Memorandum, thought to be the man who shot Colonel Rainsborough at Doncaster.--William Dickson, aged twenty-four, has been seen begging on crutches, with one leg contracted; and Timothy Jones, who pretends to be mad and paralytic, a most ferocious terrible malignant; curses the godly covenant, and wishes the Round-heads had but one neck, and he stood over them with a hatchet. Now, my Lord, if these Beaumonts should, out of hatred and malice to our upright rulers, hide any of these murderous miscreants in the vaults, recesses, or secret-chambers of the old ruins, which they may pretend to live in for the very purpose, I trust your Lordship's penetration will unearth the foxes, so that they may be brought to condign punishment, and I heartily wish our noble General had as faithful a spy in every delinquent's family in the three nations."

Sedley suppressed his indignation, and assured Morgan he would not fail to report to government whatever he thought culpable in the conduct of the Beaumonts, who were apparently benevolent and humane; but on Morgan's suggesting that was a mask often assumed by the blackest malignity, he allowed the truth as a general remark, and took his leave, aware that the best means of preventing the persecution of his friends was to conceal his own sentiments.

In the way back he called on Dame Humphreys, whose attention to him, during his illness, corresponded with her usual artless kindness and true benevolence. He found her in the most dreadful distress; her husband's malady was increased to violent frenzy; she assigned as the cause, his incessantly listening to what she called "long preachments about the Devil;" but he gave a different account. He was sure he had seen Sir William Waverly sitting at the outside of a mausoleum he had built in the park, without his head, and an angel standing by him. He knew it was an angel, for it looked white and shining; and the other must be Sir William, because he had in part pulled down the old church, which his fore-fathers had built, to make a grand burying-place for himself and his family, and though his body was thrown into a hole where he was killed, that was no reason why his spirit might not walk in his own park. The Dame was prevented from making further comments on this narrative by concern for her husband's situation. He lay, she said, roaring and foaming at the mouth, thinking what he had seen was a warning of his own death. The chamber was full of godly ministers, who would not let her send for a doctor, saying the case was in their way, and that they would dispossess him. But in spite of all they did, he grew worse, and was in such terrible convulsions, that she feared if he did not make away with himself, still he must die.

Sedley sincerely pitied her distress, and, in compliance with her wishes, promised to send the good old Doctor to her to try if he could do any good. A lover sees his mistress in every object. Combining the suspicions of Morgan, the appearance at the mausoleum, and the night-wanderings of Isabel, a sudden apprehension came across Sedley's mind, and determined him to see to what part of the park the sycamore avenue pointed, and he soon found it ended in a coppice, which shaded a ruined church, and a stately sepulchre, inclosed with iron pallisades, that had escaped the general pillage, which, in those times of rapacious sacrilege, spared not the altar of religion nor the silent repositories of the dead.

Sedley examined the modern structure. The gate was closed, and the bolts rusted in the wards. The long withered grass bore no marks of having been recently trodden; every thing appeared in the state in which it might be supposed to have been left, when the vain-glorious unfortunate projector of this monumental trophy of his own greatness augmented the heaps of dead who were interred without religious rite or distinction of rank, after the fatal battle of Marston-Moor ended the efforts of the Royalists in the north of England. The unoccupied tomb stood as a solemn warning against the fond precautions of low cunning and versatile policy. Sedley now proceeded to the church, which was a complete ruin. The roof was broken, and the entrances were blocked up with large stones that had fallen from the walls; yet not so totally, but that a slender person might find admittance into the building from the south-porch. As he looked in, he thought fancy might select this as the scene where the Anglican church, prostrate on her own ruins, mourned her departed glory and her present desolation in undisturbed silence, far from the sympathy of her friends, and the insults of her enemies. He called aloud, but the echo of his own voice reverberating through the aisles was his only answer. Though the wintry sun shone with meridian splendor, and cast his slanting rays through the apertures in the roof, so as to allow him to see the falling monuments and mutilated statues which were intended to commemorate the mighty of past ages, there was such an aweful solitude and petrifying horror in the whole scene, that he thought it impossible for Isabel to make nocturnal visits to such a place, believing his own courage would be scarcely equal to the undertaking, when darkness or the pale splendor of the moon added to its profound melancholy. There was, indeed, a slight appearance of a path to the most practicable entrance, but he could not help thinking it was made by some wild animal, which had chosen one of the vaults for its hiding-place.

Still ruminating on Isabel's concealed adventures as he returned, Sedley perceived a handful of sweet bay lying in the grass, which he recollected seeing her gather the preceding evening, with peculiar attention to the reviving fragrance of the evergreen. Every doubt was now removed. This was the spot which a young and beautiful female visited alone at midnight. No base inclination, no unworthy passion which shunned the light, could stimulate such an enterprize. Piety must bestow the inspiration; and that fortitude which results from conscious rectitude must confirm the trembling knees, and guide the cautious steps of the heroical adventurer.

A more honourable and praise-worthy principle than doubt or curiosity now led Sedley to discover what the treasure was which Isabel thus clandestinely visited. On his return, he mentioned to the family the dreadful situation of Humphreys, and described the spectral appearance to which it was imputed, "Absurd and impossible!" exclaimed Isabel, while a deep crimson flushed her face. Mrs. Mellicent turned very pale, and remarked that she did not entirely disbelieve all accounts of visionary notices of the future world. They might act as warnings to sinners, or as a call to an unbeliever. "True," replied Isabel, "but the contradiction of this is evident. Why should a good angel be connected with the apparition of Sir William Waverly? And, far from tending to reform Humphreys, the impression on his mind has produced distraction." Dr. Beaumont, who had remained silent and meditative during this conversation, now required Isabel to attend him before he went to offer his services to the afflicted farmer.

Sedley embraced the opportunity of their absence to examine more minutely the ruins of Waverly Hall. The thickness of one of the remaining walls struck him as singular; it was an abutment behind the chimney of what had been the banqueting-room, the wainscot of which was left in this place entire. Sedley inspected every pannel, and at last found one which slided, and afforded him an entrance into a small but perfect apartment, lighted from the ceiling, and which had probably served as a secret chamber to conceal the plate and valuables of the family, being so completely concealed by the contrivance of the architecture as not to be discernible on the outside. Was it not strange, that, with so secure and convenient a lodging close at hand, Isabel should chuse to deposit her treasure at such a distance? Had she overlooked this asylum, or avoided the use of it as a lure to deceive the vigilance of Morgan? Sedley proceeded in his search, explored every subterraneous vault and recess; but no signs of recent inhabitation could be found. He returned again to Morgan, commended his zeal for the good cause, but assured him, that though he had discovered many places proper for concealment, not a ghost of a royalist could any where be found.

"You say well, excellently well, my young Lord," replied Morgan, chuckling at the idea of his own superior sagacity; "yet for all that there is a ghost, aye, and he chuses a proper scene for his pranks, but we will lay him to-morrow morning." He then informed Sedley that Priggins had just been with him to say their neighbour Humphreys was troubled in the spirit, and, in a late wrestling with Satan, had been favoured with a vision, in which he had seen the ghost of Sir William Waverly in torment, complaining that there was a royalist in his grave who would not let him rest. "I believe not a word of the business," said he, "and defy the whole tribe of apparitions; but, as Your Lordship must see, it is my duty to search the burying-place, and the old church immediately."

Sedley suppressed his apprehensions, and coolly answered, he had reconnoitred the outside, and believed he had never seen a more desolate and unfrequented spot. "All the better for such a purpose," answered Morgan; "these bloody fugitives would not chuse highways and market-places for their cabals. But I don't like to venture among these terrible fellows without being protected; so I have sent for the Preston horse, and ordered them to bring the blood-hounds; and as Your Lordship has been there, I will thank you to be our guide. But, hark! not a word to the Beaumonts, or the birds will be flown."

Sedley preserved the serenity of his features, promised punctual attendance, and remarked that, to prevent any alarm from suspicion of an intercourse with Morgan, it would be expedient for him to hurry back. His anxiety to rescue the threatened victim was nearly as lively as the assiduity of Isabel; yet not daring again to request the confidence she had so peremptorily refused, he thought his best plan would be to watch the cemetery; and, pretending to retire indisposed to his chamber, as soon as it was evening he hurried, unobserved, down the avenue, entered the church, and concealed himself behind a pillar, from whence he had a full view of a door partially obstructed with rubbish which, he supposed, opened into the mausoleum.

A little before midnight, he heard the sound of feet; the shade was withdrawn from a dark lanthorn; and he discovered Isabel by its feeble light, as she held it up, and with cautious anxiety seemed to explore the ruins, to be assured that all was safe before she ventured on her nocturnal employment. She then approached the door, and whispered to the invisible inhabitant of the sepulchre. Sedley heard a bar fall, and saw her remove a portion of the rubbish, enter the dreary abode, and re-close the door. Listening, he heard voices conversing in low murmurs. Could a lover resist making a further discovery? He determined to open the door sufficiently to steal a view of the object concealed, and afterwards to join Isabel on her return, and apprize her of the necessity of selecting another asylum.

The stolen view was aweful and impressive. The inside of the cemetery was lighted by a lamp that shewed it was furnished with those articles of comfort which rendered it an habitable abode. On a neat pallet lay an aged gentleman, corresponding, in his appearance and infirmities, with one of the fugitives from Pontefract described by Morgan. Isabel had already spread a table, on which were placed the refreshments she had just brought, and a prayer-book. She was at that moment employed in chafing his benumbed limbs, and at the same time looking up at her patient with the tenderest affection, smiling through the tears of anxiety and compassion; while, as he bent over her, shrinking with acute pain from her light and tender touch, a glow of sublime affection illuminated his pale and furrowed features.

It was at this moment that the wind, rushing down the aisles of the church, forced the door out of Sedley's hand, and revealed him to the father and daughter as a witness of their affecting interview. The reader must have anticipated that no motive less potent than filial piety could have stimulated the heroism of Isabel. Surprise extorted from her a loud shriek; and the disabled Evellin snatched a carbine, which stood charged within his reach, and pointed it at the invader of their retreat. Isabel hung upon his arm. "'Tis my preserver! 'Tis my father!" exclaimed she, addressing them alternately. "Oh! Sedley, how durst you disobey me!"

"Young man," said the stern veteran, in a voice which denoted that an unconquered soul still tenanted his decaying body, "instantly tell your motive for this intrusion. My daughter addresses you as a friend, but your name announces a double traitor."

"Then it belies my heart," answered Sedley, "for I come devoted to your service, impatient to assist in the preservation of persecuted worth. The generous bravery of the renowned Colonel Evellin must endear him to every soldier, even if he were not the father of that matchless excellence who kneels beside you, and stays your arm from taking the life of one whose purpose is to preserve yours."

"I have seen too much of the world," answered Evellin, "to trust smooth talkers. Sentiments are easily uttered; they are all the fashion; and the butcher now uses them to the lamb he slaughters. I am a disabled soldier of that King whom regicides are now subjecting to the mockery of a public trial; and I am as ready to follow my Prince to the scaffold as I have been to fly to his banner when thousands were false. Hear me yet further. I am one of the proscribed victims who escaped from Pontefract. The hardships I have endured have deprived me of the use of my limbs; yet I am still dangerous to usurpers. A price is set upon my head; I am hunted from the abodes of man, denied the light of heaven, and, at this rigorous season, compelled to seek the shelter of a tomb, even while alive to anguish and sorrow. Approach, young man; you see my child has disarmed me. I have no other weapon; infirmity chains me to this pallet. I was born to the possession of a princely inheritance, but it was wrested from me by traitors foul as those who have overthrown the glory of England. I have nothing left but an honest heart, and enmity to traitors. Yes!" continued he, folding Isabel in his arms; "I have this weeping girl, who ought to have been a bright gem sparkling in a royal court, instead of a sickly lamp beaming in a monument."

Sedley wept. "You know," said he, "what side I have espoused; yet a mind so magnanimous must be candid; nor will you confound the errors and prejudices of early education with the turpitude of guilt. I was tutored by one who passionately worshipped civil and religious liberty; a man whose heart was generous and sincere as your own, and only mistook the means by which the desired objects were attainable. He now deeply mourns the enormous oppression which has originated from what he deemed perfect theories. Filial duty, joined to the instructions of my preceptor, made me join the Parliamentary army. You are a father. Think what agonies you would feel had your son refused to obey you, and falsified the hopes you had formed of his acting as your associate in what you deemed the career of glory."

"Cease, dearest Sedley," cried Isabel, "his weak frame cannot bear these strong emotions." "I have a son," said the agonized Evellin, "and he refused to obey me. He has falsified the hopes I entertained, that he would be the restorer of my house. Sedley, I would exchange sons with thy father. Come nearer, and I will tell thee what will make thee renounce the traitor who gave thee birth. Hast thou ever heard of thy uncle Allan Neville, the man from whom thy father stole his coronet and lands?"

"I have heard," said Sedley, "that he was unfortunate, very criminal, and long since dead."

"Unfortunate indeed," returned the Colonel, "but neither dead nor criminal. I am Allan Neville, a living witness of thy father's crimes, the least of which is usurpation. I accuse him as the foul slanderer of my fame, as the inhuman villain who betrayed my confidence. He knew my woes, my wants, my dependence on his friendship; nay, that I trusted to him only. He smiled, promised, cajoled, and destroyed me. My daughter has told me that thou art warm, ingenuous, sincere, and affectionate. Such, at thy age, was he that now lies before thee, the victim of thy mother's ambition and thy father's hypocrisy."

Sedley tried to conceal the burning blushes of shame with his hands, while his recollection of past circumstances confirmed his uncle's accusation. Ambition was the crime of both his parents; hypocrisy the means used by the cautious Lord Bellingham in seeking to compass those ends which his bolder consort pursued with the effrontery of determined versatility. Sedley remembered his mother a court-beauty, the favourite of the Queen, and the glass which reflected the smiles and frowns of royalty. He afterwards saw her the idol of the party which opposed government, sung by Waller, flattered by Holland, presiding with all the frivolity and pride of a pretty trifler at the dark divan, while Pym and St. John disclosed their hopes of extending their aggressions to seizing the remaining prerogatives of the alarmed and conceding King. Weak, vain, passionate, and unprincipled, with no determined object but her own aggrandizement--no claim to attention but an attractive person and soft courtliness of manner (which polished insincerity often assumes to disguise a stubborn, wayward, ungoverned temper),--Lady Bellingham supplied by a shew of benevolence her total want of the reality. He had seen her, without even the affectation of compassion, listen to a detail of the measures which were intended to drag Lord Strafford to the block; and though she boasted of that nobleman as her earliest lover, she made no attempt to procure him the respite for which his afflicted master ineffectually solicited. No storm of public calamity, no sympathizing pity for murdered friends, no sentiment of gratitude for her royal benefactors, ever disturbed the suavity of Lady Bellingham's deportment. Nothing could interrupt the dead calm of her unfeeling heart but opposition to her will, or the apprehension of danger to her effects or person. In the former case the gentle beauty was loud and pertinacious; in the latter, terrified to the extreme, and clamorous in her complaints; in both, perfectly regardless of the means she employed to promote her purposes, or insure her safety.

Sedley had long discovered a guarded circumspection in his father's conduct, which, as it exceeded prudence, must be called timidity. His perplexed look and restless manner spoke a soul ill at ease with itself, and more suspicious of persons, and the motives of their actions, than was consistent with fortitude and integrity. From the period of his assuming the title of Bellingham, Sedley could date a gradual increase of domestic misery. Even in his childhood he had been obliged to interfere in the disputes of his parents, each complaining to him of the faults of the other, and of their own injuries. The Earl ever spake of the sacrifices he had made to oblige his wife; the Countess, of the title, fortune, and importance she had bestowed on her husband. Many circumstances led him to fear that mutual guilt was the only bond which kept them from separation, as they often hinted in their quarrels that they were equally in each other's power for some punishable offences; and once, in an ungovernable transport of rage, Lady Bellingham bade her trembling Lord "remember her brother." These recollections made it impossible for Sedley to doubt the criminality of his parents, especially as their accuser was Colonel Evellin, whose gallantry and unquestioned honour had extorted alike the terror and admiration of his enemies. And was the admirable Isabel the victim of their crimes, who now, in all the unaffected loveliness of tender duty, wiped the cold dew from the face of her agonized father, beseeching him to consider his weakness, and forbear convulsing his tortured limbs by these mental throes, still assuring him, that if she could preserve his life, her own would be worth valuing?

Impelled by that homage which virtuous emulation ever pays to acknowledged worth, Sedley knelt by the side of Isabel. "Here," said he, "I devote myself to your service, and abjure your enemies, though my heart recoils when I consider who they are. In this sacred, this aweful abode, I drop all titles but that of your kinsman: now for your dear daughter's sake, listen to the intelligence I come to disclose; you are in the most imminent danger, and prompt measures for your security must be devised. I will never more participate in the guilt of those who wronged you, or partake of those luxuries which proved irresistible temptations to those who caused your ruin. Suffer me to supply the place of your lost Eustace, and to relieve the pious duties of your daughter. You shall then know that my immediate progenitors have not corrupted that pure blood which I, with you, derive from one common stock of eminent ancestors, distinguished alike by fidelity to their friends, their country, and their King."

Isabel scarcely waited for the reconciling embrace, which proved that her generous father knew not his own heart when he thought it capable of eternal enmity to the blood of De Vallance. Her transport at seeing the two dearest objects in the world known and esteemed by each other, was allayed by her eager anxiety to know what Sedley meant by imminent danger. He now disclosed what had passed between him and Morgan, and the discovery himself had made of another and nearer asylum for the brave fugitive. No time was lost in expediting his removal. Incapable of rising from his pallet, the whole family were employed in conveying him to the secret chamber, and in removing from the mausoleum every vestige of its having been inhabited. Rubbish was piled against the door; and, to prevent the path from being traced, the small stock of cattle the Beaumonts possessed were driven into the burying-ground. The rising sun saw their labours completed an hour before Morgan and his soldiers arrived to execute their inhuman inquisition. The care of Williams had frustrated the sagacity of the blood-hounds by a chemical preparation; and a night of inexpressible alarm and emotion was succeeded by a happy day, in which Isabel had the transport of having her dear father lodged close to her own dwelling, in a more comfortable place of concealment, where she could pay a more minute attention to his wants, and have an assistant in the task of ministering to his infirmities; that assistant too the lord of her affections, to whom she was ha longer compelled to wear the air of cold reserve so uncongenial to her ingenuous temper.

The Beaumont family would now have felt happy, and Arthur might have talked of love, assured of a favourable audience, had not every future plan and private feeling been engrossed by the situation of the King, whose mournful tragedy now drew near its final close. Like many others, Arthur de Vallance had been drawn, by the grossest misrepresentations, to oppose a Prince whose real character, bursting through the mists of adversity, now dazzled the eyes of those who had affected to speak of him as a meteorous exhalation, owing its lustre to chance, and destitute of the inherent qualities which constitute true greatness. To a general revolt and disaffection, arising from some actual and many imaginary grievances, succeeded an universal conviction of delusion, disappointment, disgust, and contrition. All parties but that which had the King in their keeping were ready to unite in efforts to save him from those who meant to make his corse a step to his hereditary dignity; and this, no less from a sense of his deserts and injuries, than from feeling experimentally, that destroying the balance of the Constitution annihilated their own liberty, and that the whips used by lawful rulers are, by usurpers, exchanged for scorpions. The rule of a limited monarch was now supplied by the tyranny of many despots--I say many; for though Cromwell had seized the whole administration into his own hands, managing what was called the House of Commons and the army by his creatures, annihilating the aristocratic branch of the legislature, and cajoling his brother-general, while he prepared the scaffold and sharpened the axe for the Monarch whom it was the settled purpose of Fairfax to preserve; yet his government had the feature which constantly characterizes newly-assumed power. He durst not disoblige the supporters of his greatness; and the services of his myrmidons were purchased by a sort of tacit agreement, that they might enrich themselves with the plunder of an oppressed people. Rapacity, therefore, walked triumphant through the land. Loyalty and Episcopacy had already been stripped. The bare carcase of truth and honour afforded no food for the carrion birds who floated round the unfledged antitype of the royal eagle. The adherents to the Rump parliament (as the House of Commons was then called, before Cromwell excluded from it the members who were offensive to his views), the Presbyterians and Republicans, had lately fattened on the miseries of their countrymen. Some of these, repenting their former errors, made efforts to save the King's life; and, for the crime of petitioning to that effect, were exposed to the rigorous punishments of imprisonment and sequestration. The royalists, conscious of their weakness, had suspended all military efforts, and fearing lest, by irritating their enemies, they should precipitate their Master's fate, they confined themselves to supplicatory addresses to him who alone had power to chain the fury of these human tigers. But, in the present instance, it was the will of the Almighty to give a fearful lesson to those who engage in fomenting rebellion and confusion, with an expectation of being able to muzzle the many-headed monster they let loose, and to govern that ignorance and depravity whose irregular appetites and malignant passions they have inflamed. The blow was struck which disgraced the nation, released the royal martyr from his crown of thorns, but had no power to prevent his receiving one of glory. "A dismal, universal groan burst from the thousands who witnessed the horrid scene[2], such as was never before heard! May England never utter such another! The troopers rode among the populace, driving them in all directions, and shewing the multitude, that though nine-tenths of the kingdom abhorred the action, committed in the name of all," the right of the majority was so little respected by these false assertors of liberty of opinion, "that it was now a state offence to express the natural feelings of compunction and pity." Driven to their own houses by the satellites of usurpation, tyranny, and murder, the people then gave vent to their tears and execrations. The contrite prayers of a sinful nation arose from every dwelling; and, like the blood of the Paschal Lamb on the doors of the Israelites, implored Divine Mercy to avert the sword of the destroying angel from them and their families, when he should be sent in wrathful visitation to take vengeance for that detestable regicide.

[1] For a very interesting account of what passed at Pontefract Castle, and of the adventures of Colonel Morrice; see Clarendon, vol. iii.

[2] Henry, a pious and eminent Nonconformist divine, gives this account of the awful sensation generally produced by the King's murder.

CHAP. XVIII.

Vast confusion waits; As doth the raven on a sick-fall'n beast, The imminent decay of wrested pomp. Now happy he whose cloak and cincture can Hold out this tempest.

Shakspeare.

I avoid dwelling on the bitter anguish of the Beaumont family at the dreadful catastrophe of the long-imprisoned King. Its pious head added largely to his intercessory prayers, imploring heaven to avert its vengeance from all who had inadvertently been accessary to the fact, to forgive those who repented of the heinous sin, and to soften the hearts of those who still gloried in having murdered their Sovereign. For the English nation, his petitions were most fervent and impressive. The character of the young King had in it some traits which excited his apprehension; he prayed earnestly that they might be found (as many people said they were) merely the exuberance of youth; and that the acknowledged grace and affability of his manners, and the placableness of his temper, might ornament, but not supplant, those christian virtues and noble principles which had so eminently distinguished his father. Considering the provocations the people had committed, the great dissoluteness of one sort, and the wild fanaticism or palpable hypocrisy of the others, added to the furious passions and implacable resentments which were excited, especially by this last desperate deed, he saw little hope that true religion and regular liberty could be speedily restored; he feared, therefore, the sun of England's glory would suffer a long eclipse: yet England was his country, nor could affluence or distinction have tempted him to quit it while he thought his example, his labours, or his prayers could afford assistance to its inhabitants.

The existing Government allowed Dr. Beaumont and his family personal security: in return, he resolved to abstain from plotting its overthrow. The young King wished his friends not to hazard their own safety by rash undertakings; and Dr. Beaumont considered that to labour at the gradual introduction of right principles, the removal of mistakes, and the regulation of false doctrines; and, above all, to lead a life of holiness, universal charity, and meek simplicity, were the most likely means to heal the wounds made by violence, to soften the Divine anger, and to prepare the people for the restoration of legitimate rule. The reformation of individuals must, he knew, precede that of the nation; and he considered that the man, who employed himself diligently at his post, and strove to revive the sentiments of loyalty and piety in a country village, more truly served his God and his King than he who engaged in weak and unweighed efforts against a power which now wielded the energies of the kingdom. He lamented to see such enterprizes successively come to no better issue than that of giving fresh instances of the often-recorded fact, that loyalty and truth can die on the scaffold, or in the field of battle, without bending to their persecutors, or relinquishing the principles interwoven with life.

The situation of Colonel Evellin was very different. He was proscribed, exempted out of every amnesty, and though incapacitated by his infirmities from serving his King, yet forbidden to rest his weary head in secure privacy, till called by nature to hide it in the grave. Arthur De Vallance too, the noble-minded revolter, renouncing the distinctions purchased by the guilt of his parents, was resolved henceforth to devote his life to atone for their crimes, by being the constant attendant, comforter, and protector of his uncle. Yet was he not wholly disinterested in that resolution; the love of Isabel stimulated him to persevere in it, and he looked to her as the companion and reward of his services.

It was now determined to wait the probable effect of the summer heats in relieving the Colonel from the imbecility of extreme decrepitude. Dr. Beaumont was then to join the hands of Arthur and Isabel, and they and their father were to remove to Holland, where every friend of the Royal Martyr was affectionately welcomed by the Princess of Orange, whose only consolation in her deep affliction for him, was to cherish those who suffered in his cause. Arthur possessed a small private fortune independent of his parents, which, when converted into cash, would be adequate to their frugal support; and it was agreed, that while they waited the chance of the Colonel's recovery, no disclosure should be made of the change in his principles. He, therefore, retained the title of Sedley; continued to visit Morgan; talked of the friendship of Cromwell; and pretended that he resided with the Beaumonts, because he still required the assistance of his surgeon, and that he wished to be fully convinced of their inoffensive conduct before he recommended them to the General's favour.

During this time the Sunday assembling of the church in the wilderness was repeated as often as the safety of the congregation would permit. These were Dr. Beaumont's halcyon moments; the refreshing balms which enabled him to support his public and private affliction. The terrible death of Humphreys had made a great impression in the village, the outrageous blasphemies of the self-condemned reprobate in his last moments, and the utter inability of the various teachers of different opinions who gathered around him, to tranquillize his disordered imagination or quiet his alarmed conscience, led the beholders of that heart-rending scene to recollect, that no such occurrence had taken place during the quiet ministry of him who had preached the comfortable doctrine of God's universal acceptance of penitent sinners, and who had ever aimed rather to reform their lives than bewilder their understandings or influence their imaginations. Many of the neighbours who wanted courage to attend his more public services, visited the Doctor by night, and besought his instruction as a preceptor, or his judgment as a casuist. One wished him to talk with his wife, who was so much engrossed with spiritual things, that she thought it sinful to attend to temporal concerns. He said she left him alone in a severe fit of sickness, while in extreme danger, to listen to a favourite preacher; and, when reproved for her inhumanity, she burst into a transporting extacy, and declared herself now sure of salvation, as "she suffered for righteousness-sake," and would bear her cross with patience. He protested he knew not how to act, since, if he treated her with kindness, she was in despair, calling herself a lost soul, applying to her own case the woe denounced on those with whom the world is at peace, and complaining that she had no longer "a thorn in the flesh to buffet her." A disconsolate mother implored Dr. Beaumont to interfere and support her authority with her daughter, who, misunderstanding their preacher's encomiums on the sufficiency of faith, abandoned herself to antinomian licentiousness, asserting, that "it was the law which had created sin," but that the elect were free from the curse of the law. One father was ruined by children, who refused to "labour for the meat that perisheth." Another came in the deepest distress, lamenting that his son was committed to prison for having joined a band of fanatical desperadoes, who publicly plundered their neighbours, declaring that they were now superior to the commandments, and were prophets appointed to set up the empire of King Jesus, and restore those times "when believers had all things in common." In some of these instances Dr. Beaumont was enabled to enlighten the bewildered judgment; but when the errors of the imagination were fortified by licentious passions, or a perverse disposition, he could only give comfort to the afflicted relations by confirming them in a clearer view of divine truth.

But the Doctor's greatest trouble proceeded from those frequent visitors who came to complain to him of the state of their neighbours' souls, and to vaunt their own spiritual gifts and happy security. To these he could be of no use, nor is it any reflection on his learning and abilities, to say he was often posed by a class of disputants, who, wanting a previous acquaintance with those general topics of information which are necessary to a clear and true view of the question, presume to handle the most abstruse and profound topics of theology, while unable to see the force of their opponent's reasonings, or to attend to the development of the false hypothesis on which their notions are founded. These people, being wise in their own conceits, gloried in their errors, mistaking spiritual pride for piety, and censorious curiosity for concern for their neighbours' souls. The spirit of "Stand apart, I am holier and wiser than thou," had such firm possession of their minds, that the mild instructions and persuasive example of Dr. Beaumont had no effect; his refusal to anathematize the darkness of their adversaries, or to admire the splendour of their illumination, sealed their ears against all his counsels. In vain did he admonish them that the test of Christian principles, as given by our Divine Lawgiver, was unity. The promulgation of the Gospel to distant countries was to result from universal good-will. "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another," was the Saviour's definition of his true servants. "I thank God that I am not like this Publican," was the self-gratulation of a much greater sinner. The Apostles enjoined the most guarded temperance of judgment respecting others, and the closest inquisition about ourselves; and the wisest and best men, from well-grounded fears of their own perseverance in well-doing, have declined[1] all superior affectation of sanctity or invidious comparison of the behaviour of others with their own, lest they should afterwards fall into some grievous sin, and thus bring disgrace on religion and virtue. The Catholic church, he said, was a term implying affectionate communion as well as universality; and how could they be said to wish for Christ's reign upon earth, who made knowledge to consist in frivolous cavils, and piety in rancorous misinterpretation of a brother's motives? Were discord, enmity, and censoriousness, fit harbingers of the Prince of peace? His great forerunner preached repentance and reformation. The sins of individuals, not the institutions of civil society, were the mountains which were to be levelled before the rising of the Sun of Righteousness. We might be saved, without knowing if our neighbour was in the road to heaven; we must at the last day be judged for the good we have done, not for the evil others have thought; nor would the mere frequent calling upon the Lord save those who in their deeds rejected the Divine government. In fine, Dr. Beaumont, weary of the obstinacy and determined ignorance of these self-righteous, told them that their pretensions to a larger share of heavenly gifts was presumptuous, since they indulged in offences that spoke a more infernal origin than merely carnal sins; for, so far as human eye can penetrate into concealed mysteries, pride was the crime of the fallen angels. Nor would he admit that Christian humility had any thing to do with general acknowledgments, which rested in the corruption of our common nature. "It is in confession of actual sin that the contrite offender humbles himself before his God. The sentiment arising from an imputation of guilt which we could not avoid, or from the expectation of a punishment of which we are born the inheritors, is not self-abasement, but despair. The penitent, observed Dr. Beaumont, feels like one abashed by the recollection of his misdeeds, and fearful of forfeiting the pardon afforded him by mercy: hence arise kindness and compassion to his fellow-sinners, and newness of life in his own conduct; but he was yet to learn how the feelings of the predestinated elect, who boasted of being brands snatched out of the fire, and privileged favourites of Heaven, improved the morals of mankind."

Had Dr. Beaumont merely consulted his own ease, he could not have taken more effectual methods for clearing his door of those who came to display their own graces; yet his converts were numerous, respectable, and, what is better, shewed in their behaviour the improvement they derived from his labours. A quiet tractable deportment, a due sense of subordination, of duty to superiors, and of contented labour in their own callings, those noble and peculiar distinctions of true disciples of the church of England, which render her so proper an ally to the state, were again visible in the language and manners of those who attended the stolen congregational services I have mentioned, for to this assembling themselves together, the Divine blessing is especially promised. After the solemn and primary duties of confession, prayer, and praise, Dr. Beaumont resumed his old method of instruction, alternately expounding Christian mysteries, and inforcing Christian morals. On some occasions he pursued a course of catechetical lectures; on others, quitting elementary instructions, he proceeded to inforce good works as the test of faith; now recommending the means of grace, by which the heart of man was prepared to co-operate with the Divine Spirit, and then expatiating on the hopes of glory, the goal and reward of diligence and perseverance in well-doing. The service was lengthened by occasional prayers, adapted to the state of the kingdom, and closed with an hymn, except at those times when the centinel or watch indicated there was danger of interruption.

One fine evening of the summer of 1649 they were thus employed, and roused to uncommon fervour by a most pathetic discourse, to which the following hymn, sung by the congregation, was in its purport analogous:

Oh Thou, to whose paternal ear Affliction never vainly cried! Whom in prosperity we fear, On whom in sorrow we confide; We mourning exiles humbly crave Thy light to guide--thy power to save.

Proscribed from consecrated ground, Forbid thy sacred courts to tread, We know, where contrite hearts are found, Thy cleansing grace is largely shed. The church may wander in the wild, But God still feeds his pilgrim child.

Our canopy the vaulted skies, Our unction the refreshing dew; The circling rocks that round us rise, Conceal us from th' oppressor's view; Still shall their solemn echoes bear To thy high courts our praise and prayer.

Not for ourselves (though sore dismay'd Like hunted doves) we pray alone; A bleeding people asks thy aid, A ruin'd church, a prostrate throne, A land become by woes and crimes, A beacon to surrounding climes.

Oh, by the sacred ransom paid For rebel man, rebellion hide; Where evil spirits now have made Their den, let thine own Spirit 'bide. And change our contests and our wrongs To holy lauds and peaceful songs.

The echoing rocks prolonged the solemn melody, and every heart was filled with sympathetic submission, devout patience, and humble hope, when their attention was recalled to the present scene by a loud Amen, which discovered a till-then-unobserved participator in their devotions. A lame bare-headed beggar stood leaning on his crutch, while the wind blew his hair and tattered garments in every direction. "Heaven bless you, worthy Christians!" said he; "you have prayed for the King, help a wounded soldier who has fought for his Royal Father. 'Tis many a day since I have heard the old church service, and it has done my heart good; I have drunk to her prosperity thousands of times."

Arthur offered him an alms.--"Oh, young gentleman," said he, "this is like throwing diamonds to a dunghill-cock. I cannot buy a loaf in the mountains, and I dare not venture into any town till I can get some other clothes to disguise myself. I was in the last insurrection, as the rebels call it, and so may be hanged without judge or jury, wherever they catch me; and they may hang me if they will, for they can never make any thing of me but a King's trooper, or else a Tom o' Bedlam."

Dr. Beaumont now advanced to see what measures could be adopted to relieve the stranger's necessities, when, to his great surprize, the man limped forward, and, grasping his hand with ecstasy, gave it a hearty shake. "Ah, my good Doctor, is it you?--'Twas so dusky I could not see your face; and your voice is quite broke and hollow to what it used to be. I hoped Your Reverence was safe and well at Oxford, and not preaching here among the goats and sheep in the mountains, while tinkers and tailors are palavering in churches. Don't Your Reverence remember Jobson, whom you tried to get out of that Squire Morgan's clutches, when the cursed covenant came first in fashion. I could not swallow it, you know, nor will I now, though they were to change my torn coat for a major's uniform. Is the Squire still alive? I should like to knock him down with my crutch, and tell him I bought shoes of his father."

It was with unfeigned pleasure that honest Jobson was recognised by his neighbours. Plans were proposed for his immediate relief, and Arthur hoped he could procure him a protection through the interest of Morgan. "Say nothing about it, Sir," answered Jobson; "I tell you I'll owe him nothing but a sound drubbing, and I hope to pay that before I die, in spite of the wound in my knee; he should have it now if I could catch him; and let me tell you, I am sorry to hear such a pretty-spoken gentleman as you, say you have any acquaintance with such a scoundrel. He has made me hate the neighbourhood he lives in; and I only came into it to see if all was true that was said of my wife; and I find she is gone a tramping with one of the new preachers, and her girls are gone after her with some of the rebel troopers. Let them go, I say, if they have no better fancies than that; I'll hop back to Wales, where an old soldier of the King's is sure to find a nook in a cottage-chimney, and a piggin of warm leek porridge; aye, and a warm heart too, that never will betray him."

"It is not in Wales only," answered Dr. Beaumont, "that there are found warm hearts who revere the memory of their martyred Sovereign, and love the brave soldier who has bled in his cause. My situation compels me to be careful of offending the ruling powers, but we can contrive to make some cavern in the mountains a comfortable place of shelter, till you are better able to undertake a long journey; and believe me, it rejoices my soul to see you display the same firmness in adversity as you did in the hour of danger. In the wreck of your little fortune, you have preserved that noblest treasure, an upright heart. Many who now bask in affluence, would give their ill-acquired eminence to call that jewel without price their own."

"True, worthy Doctor," answered Jobson; "yet the knaves often get uppermost in this world, and so won't own themselves to be scoundrels, which is what provokes me. But the times will come when we shall tell them a bit of our minds again; and then I suppose my wife will leave the preacher, and want me to take her in again; but no, no, Madam, says I, there's two words to that bargain. Does Your Reverence know, that though I never rose higher yet than to be an officer's servant, I am to be a yeoman of the guard. His Highness the King, as now ought to be, promised, when he was only Prince of Wales, that when he came to live in Whitehall, he'd make me one of the Beaf-eaters: bless his generous heart! he'd have made me any thing I asked, but I never was ambitious. So, please Your Majesty's Highness sweet Prince, says I, let me be a Beef-eater as long as I live. This was when I was in the boat with him, as he went to Sicily from Pendennis-Castle. 'Twas the last time he set his foot on English ground, said he must think of his word when he comes back with the crown on his head."

By this time Isabel and Constantia had concerted a retreat for Jobson in the mausoleum, which, having been recently searched, was not likely soon to excite the suspicions of the parliamentary committee-men. They therefore lingered by the side of Jobson, and gave him a private intimation of their design, directing him to come to the park-wall at midnight, where they would provide, not only for his support, but attempt to cure his wound, as habit had now made them expert surgeons. Jobson could scarcely be confined to whispering his acknowledgements. "Give me the use of my leg again," said he, "and let the King's colours fly in what part of England they will, Ralph Jobson shall stand by the side of them."

Each party was true to the appointment, and the tender chirurgeons perceived with pleasure, that Jobson's lameness proceeded rather from neglect and unskilful treatment, than from such an injury of the muscles as excluded all hope that their action could be restored. His adventures were told to Colonel Evellin, who insisted that his fellow-sufferer should become an inmate of his apartment. "Soldiers," said he, "can talk over wars and sieges together, and pray for better times. The tedious hours will pass pleasantly, enlivened by that gallant fellow's simplicity; and, if Morgan thinks that it is worth while to let loose his blood-hounds in search of a lame beggar, he may, at the same time, unearth another who has nothing but his life to lose. Calamities like ours level all distinctions; and why is the breath which animates the ruined representative of fallen greatness more valuable than that which inspires the heroism and cheerful patience of an honest trooper. Yet courage, my girl; the blood of Neville is not wholly contaminated; and when I cease to give thee anguish, thou and Arthur shall restore its purity."

The family considered on Colonel Evellin's request, and as none but themselves knew of Jobson's first retreat, they thought the safety of their noble charge would not be hazarded by indulging him with a companion. It was, however, still deemed expedient to conceal his name and connexion with the Beaumonts, and to describe him to Jobson only as a loyal officer, disabled by hard service, who sought concealment till he was sufficiently recovered to leave England. Jobson rejoiced in the change of apartments. The tincture of superstition, which was universal in those times, gave him a great reluctance to being hid in a monument, though he disguised his general apprehension of supernatural beings under the pretence of dislike to Sir William Waverly. "If it had been a loyal gentleman's tomb," said he, "I dare say I could have slept in it all night very well, but I know the Baronet was no better than a rebel in his heart, and the malice of those scoundrels is not cured by knocking their brains out. To say the truth, my teeth chattered in my head, and my legs twitched so about, that I am sure I never should have got well while I staid there."

Jobson's light heart now foreboded that his wound would quickly heal, and that the brave gentleman, who was his companion in affliction, would take him to be his servant, when he should be able to leave England; he, therefore, settled in his own mind, that he would stay in Colonel Evellin's service till the King sent for him to make him a Beef-eater. The concealed Loyalists soon fell into that intimacy which suffering in the same cause naturally inspires. Adversity is a great leveller, not only of artificial distinctions, but also of personal qualities. The dispossessed nobleman, and the village-ploughman, conversed familiarly together of many a hard-fought day. The scene of their warfare lay in different parts of the kingdom; but each listened with painful interest to the details of the other: Evellin ruminating on the errors which had ruined the King's cause, Jobson cursing the knaves who betrayed, and the traitors who beheaded, him.

"I cannot help making free with Your Honour," said Jobson, "though I see by all your ways you are a right true gentleman, and not like the Rump-tinkers and Old Noll's make-believes. You would hardly think, merry as I seem with you, that I am very sad at heart: not about Madge Jobson, my wife as was; no, let her go where she will, for she always was a bad one; but 'tis about that noble family that are so good to us both. And that pretty Mistress Constance, as sighs so when she bandages up my knee; sweet creature! she thinks she hurts me, but I would not cry out if she did; for I have a story I could tell her would make her sigh more, and look paler than she does, though she is now as white as a coward marching up to a charged battery."

Colonel Evellin inquired what story. The remembrance of his son was ever present to his mind; but the indelible shame of his public disgrace had prevented him from alluding to him, or asking Jobson if he had ever met him during the campaign of 1645: and the deep feeling of affectionate grief prevented Jobson from naming the gallant youth to the good gentleman, who seemed, he thought, to want to have his spirits raised, and was too cast down to be diverted with melancholy stories.

Jobson now begged the Colonel to satisfy his doubts whether it was right to make his benefactors unhappy. "As a friend of the family," said he, "and a wise man, I wish to consult you. They don't seem to know what is become of Mr. Eustace Evellin, had I better tell them or not?"

Though long and intimately versed in the discipline of severest misery, Colonel Evellin was forced to turn away his face to conceal his paternal perturbation. "If," said he, "since the public rebuke of Lord Hopton, he has again disgraced his lineage, bury his shame in that oblivion which I hope now covers his body; but, if he lived long enough to redeem his honour, tell me his history."

Jobson gazed with indignant surprise on his agitated companion. "If," answered he, "you had not fought as nobly as you have for the King, I would not bear to hear you talk about Mr. Eustace Evellin's redeeming his honour before he lost it. Why, it was all a mistake of the old Lord's when the cowards and traitors drove him distracted; and so he thought Mr. Eustace one of them, because now and then they tippled together. Aye, he has been sorry enough for it since: but Generals should be careful what they say, for Lord Hopton ruined one of the fairest young gentlemen that ever was born."

The Colonel motioned with his hand that Jobson should proceed with his narrative. "Does Your Honour groan through pain?" inquired the latter; "let me lay you in an easier posture. Did you never hear how Mr. Eustace fought at Pendennis-Castle; when old John Arundel of Terrice thanked him before all the garrison?"

"Thank heaven!" exclaimed Evellin, "that was a public honour!"

"Tush! that was nothing," continued Jobson; "every soldier knew already what stuff Mr. Eustace was made of. Old John called him the hero of Lancashire. After the castle had surrendered, I went with him into Wales; and wherever there was a little fighting we were at it: and when there was none, we lived just as we could; for I did not care about Madge Jobson, and Mr. Eustace said he could not go home because his father had cursed him."

"No, no, no," said Evellin; "he never cursed him."

"I wish," cried Jobson, "the poor gentleman had known that; it might have saved his life."

"Is he dead?" exclaimed the father, in an agony that lifted his debilitated frame from its recumbent posture.

"Shot in cold blood after the taking of Pembroke-Castle."

"By whose order?"

"A devil's-born traitor, as bad as those who cut off the King's head; Lord Bellingham they call him."

Evellin clenched his fist; his teeth were set; his eyes rolled in terrific wildness; Jobson thought him in a fit, and advanced to support him. But with the reckless strength of frenzy, the distracted father grasped the tottering veteran. No object but Bellingham presented itself to his perverted imagination; and in the fury of rage, blended with anguish, he redoubled his blows on Jobson, exclaiming, "Accursed Bellingham, give me back my son!"

The vehemence of the Colonel's execrations brought Arthur de Vallance to the assistance of Jobson, who, in terrified accents, declared the good gentleman was suddenly gone mad, and he could not hold him. It might be expected, that the entrance, at that instant, of the son of Eustace's murderer would have increased the paroxysm, but nature was exhausted; he fixed his eyes upon him, till anguish changed to glaring inanity, and he sunk lifeless on the pallet.

Arthur's first care was to call Isabel, in hopes her tender ministrations would restore her father. Her efforts were attended with success. Evellin opened his eyes, saw his daughter and her lover supporting him; he looked alternately at each; no language can describe the expression of those looks, while he vainly struggled for utterance. Withdrawing his hand from the pressure of Arthur's, he threw it round the neck of Isabel, and with the feebleness of an apparently dying accent, inquired if she loved that man. Astonishment kept her mute; Evellin sobbed aloud. "By _his_ father, girl, your brother has been murdered in cold blood."

If a painter wished to portray a scene of superlative misery, which the pen cannot describe, the present might employ his strongest powers of pathos.--The pleading eye of Arthur fixed on the face of Isabel, while she gazed on her father with the blank features of astonishment and despair. Jobson now understood the development he had caused, and shared the anguish which it excited. He brushed the tears from his eyes; they filled again. He sobbed aloud, and thought such sorrow worse than the severest warfare he had ever sustained.

The first return of recollection suggested to young De Vallance the necessity of withdrawing from the presence of his uncle. He sought Dr. Beaumont, but that universal comforter could not relieve such despair. He had, himself, the dreadful task of disclosing the death of Eustace to Constantia, and of sustaining the keen anguish of her first sorrow, before he could intrust her to the care of Mrs. Mellicent, and assist Isabel in the secret chamber, where the loud cries and groans of Evellin exposed them all to the most imminent danger of discovery.

Before Dr. Beaumont could visit his frantic friend, rage had again exhausted his strength; he lay apparently lifeless, and Isabel was weeping over him.--In cases of extreme distress, to talk of comfort and prescribe composure, is impertinence. Nature will claim her rights, and a true friend respects them in silence. He directed his attention to the narrative of Jobson, from whose report he gathered those particulars of the fate of Eustace, which, with other circumstances that afterwards transpired, shall be narrated in the subsequent chapter.

[1] This disposition was a prominent feature in the character of Sir Matthew Hale.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.