Eugene Aram
Edward Bulwer-Lytton



TO SIR WALTER SCOTT, BART., ETC.

SIR,--It has long been my ambition to add some humble tribute to the
offerings laid upon the shrine of your genius. At each succeeding book
that I have given to the world, I have paused to consider if it were
worthy to be inscribed with your great name, and at each I have played
the procrastinator, and hoped for that morrow of better desert which
never came. But 'defluat amnis',--the time runs on; and I am tired of
waiting for the ford which the tides refuse. I seize, then, the present
opportunity, not as the best, but as the only one I can be sure of
commanding, to express that affectionate admiration with which you have
inspired me in common with all your contemporaries, and which a French
writer has not ungracefully termed "the happiest prerogative of genius."
As a Poet and as a Novelist your fame has attained to that height in
which praise has become superfluous; but in the character of the writer
there seems to me a yet higher claim to veneration than in that of the
writings. The example your genius sets us, who can emulate? The example
your moderation bequeaths to us, who shall forget? That nature must
indeed be gentle which has conciliated the envy that pursues intellectual
greatness, and left without an enemy a man who has no living equal in
renown.

You have gone for a while from the scenes you have immortalized, to
regain, we trust, the health which has been impaired by your noble labors
or by the manly struggles with adverse fortunes which have not found the
frame as indomitable as the mind. Take with you the prayers of all whom
your genius, with playful art, has soothed in sickness, or has
strengthened, with generous precepts, against the calamities of life.

   [Written at the time of Sir W. Scott's visit to Italy, after the
   great blow to his health and fortunes.]

          "Navis quae, tibi creditum
           Debes Virgilium . . .
           Reddas incolumem!"

     "O ship, thou owest to us Virgil! Restore in
     safety him whom we intrusted to thee."

You, I feel assured, will not deem it presumptuous in one who, to that
bright and undying flame which now streams from the gray hills of
Scotland,--the last halo with which you have crowned her literary
glories,--has turned from his first childhood with a deep and unrelaxing
devotion; you, I feel assured, will not deem it presumptuous in him to
inscribe an idle work with your illustrious name,--a work which, however
worthless in itself, assumes something of value in his eyes when thus
rendered a tribute of respect to you.

THE AUTHOR OF "EUGENE ARAM."

LONDON, December 22, 1831.




                 PREFACE

             TO THE EDITION OF 1831.

Since, dear Reader, I last addressed thee, in "Paul Clifford," nearly two
years have elapsed, and somewhat more than four years since, in "Pelham,"
our familiarity first began. The Tale which I now submit to thee differs
equally from the last as from the first of those works; for of the two
evils, perhaps it is even better to disappoint thee in a new style than
to weary thee with an old. With the facts on which the tale of "Eugene
Aram" is founded, I have exercised the common and fair license of writers
of fiction it is chiefly the more homely parts of the real story that
have been altered; and for what I have added, and what omitted, I have
the sanction of all established authorities, who have taken greater
liberties with characters yet more recent, and far more protected by
historical recollections. The book was, for the most part, written in the
early part of the year, when the interest which the task created in the
Author was undivided by other subjects of excitement, and he had leisure
enough not only to be 'nescio quid meditans nugarum,' but also to be
'totes in illis.'

   ["Not only to be meditating I know not what of trifles, but also to
   be wholly engaged on them."]

I originally intended to adapt the story of Eugene Aram to the Stage.
That design was abandoned when more than half completed; but I wished to
impart to this Romance something of the nature of Tragedy,--something of
the more transferable of its qualities. Enough of this: it is not the
Author's wishes, but the Author's books that the world will judge him by.
Perhaps, then (with this I conclude), in the dull monotony of public
affairs, and in these long winter evenings, when we gather round the
fire, prepared for the gossip's tale, willing to indulge the fear and to
believe the legend, perhaps, dear Reader, thou mayest turn, not
reluctantly, even to these pages, for at least a newer excitement than
the Cholera, or for momentary relief from the everlasting discussion on
"the Bill." [The year of the Reform Bill.]

LONDON, December 22, 1831.





                 PREFACE

             TO THE EDITION OF 1840.

The strange history of Eugene Aram had excited my interest and wonder
long before the present work was composed or conceived. It so happened
that during Aram's residence at Lynn his reputation for learning had
attracted the notice of my grandfather,--a country gentleman living in
the same county, and of more intelligence and accomplishments than, at
that day, usually characterized his class. Aram frequently visited at
Heydon (my grandfather's house), and gave lessons--probably in no very
elevated branches of erudition--to the younger members of the family.
This I chanced to hear when I was on a visit in Norfolk some two years
before this novel was published; and it tended to increase the interest
with which I had previously speculated on the phenomena of a trial which,
take it altogether, is perhaps the most remarkable in the register of
English crime. I endeavored to collect such anecdotes of Aram's life and
manners as tradition and hearsay still kept afloat. These anecdotes were
so far uniform that they all concurred in representing him as a person
who, till the detection of the crime for which he was sentenced, had
appeared of the mildest character and the most unexceptionable morals. An
invariable gentleness and patience in his mode of tuition--qualities then
very uncommon at school--had made him so beloved by his pupils at Lynn
that, in after life, there was scarcely one of them who did not persist
in the belief of his innocence.

His personal and moral peculiarities, as described in these pages, are
such as were related to me by persons who had heard him described by his
contemporaries, the calm, benign countenance; the delicate health; the
thoughtful stoop; the noiseless step; the custom, not uncommon with
scholars and absent men, of muttering to himself; a singular eloquence in
conversation, when once roused from silence; an active tenderness and
charity to the poor, with whom he was always ready to share his own
scanty means; an apparent disregard for money, except when employed in
the purchase of books; an utter indifference to the ambition usually
accompanying self-taught talent, whether to better the condition or to
increase the repute: these, and other traits of the character portrayed
in the novel, are, as far as I can rely on my information, faithful to
the features of the original.

That a man thus described--so benevolent that he would rob his own
necessities to administer to those of another, so humane that he would
turn aside from the worm in his path--should have been guilty of the
foulest of human crimes, namely, murder for the sake of gain; that a
crime thus committed should have been so episodical and apart from the
rest of his career that, however it might rankle in his conscience, it
should never have hardened his nature; that through a life of some
duration, none of the errors, none of the vices, which would seem
essentially to belong to a character capable of a deed so black, from
motives apparently so sordid, should have been discovered or
suspected,--all this presents all anomaly in human conduct so rare and
surprising that it would be difficult to find any subject more adapted
for that metaphysical speculation and analysis, in order to indulge
which, Fiction, whether in the drama or the higher class of romance,
seeks its materials and grounds its lessons in the chronicles of passion
and crime.

   [For I put wholly out of question the excuse of jealousy, as
   unsupported by any evidence, never hinted at by Aram himself
   (at least on any sufficient authority), and at variance with the
   only fact which the trial establishes; namely, that the robbery was
   the crime planned, and the cause, whether accidental or otherwise,
   of the murder.]

The guilt of Eugene Aram is not that of a vulgar ruffian; it leads to
views and considerations vitally and wholly distinct from those with
which profligate knavery and brutal cruelty revolt and displease us in
the literature of Newgate and the hulks. His crime does, in fact, belong
to those startling paradoxes which the poetry of all countries, and
especially of our own, has always delighted to contemplate and examine.
Whenever crime appears the aberration and monstrous product of a great
intellect or of a nature ordinarily virtuous, it becomes not only the
subject for genius, which deals with passions, to describe, but a problem
for philosophy, which deals with actions, to investigate and solve; hence
the Macbeths and Richards, the Iagos and Othellos. My regret, therefore,
is not that I chose a subject unworthy of elevated fiction, but that such
a subject did not occur to some one capable of treating it as it
deserves; and I never felt this more strongly than when the late Mr.
Godwin (in conversing with me after the publication of this romance)
observed that he had always thought the story of Eugene Aram peculiarly
adapted for fiction, and that he had more than once entertained the
notion of making it the foundation of a novel. I can well conceive what
depth and power that gloomy record would have taken from the dark and
inquiring genius of the author of "Caleb Williams." In fact, the crime
and trial of Eugene Aram arrested the attention and engaged the
conjectures of many of the most eminent men of his own time. His guilt or
innocence was the matter of strong contest; and so keen and so enduring
was the sensation created by an event thus completely distinct from the
ordinary annals of human crime that even History turned aside from the
sonorous narrative of the struggles of parties and the feuds of kings to
commemorate the learning and the guilt of the humble schoolmaster of
Lynn. Did I want any other answer to the animadversions of commonplace
criticism, it might be sufficient to say that what the historian relates
the novelist has little right to disdain.

Before entering on this romance, I examined with some care the
probabilities of Aram's guilt; for I need scarcely perhaps observe that
the legal evidence against him is extremely deficient,--furnished almost
entirely by one (Houseman) confessedly an accomplice of the crime and a
partner in the booty, and that in the present day a man tried upon
evidence so scanty and suspicious would unquestionably escape conviction.
Nevertheless, I must frankly own that the moral evidence appeared to me
more convincing than the legal; and though not without some doubt, which,
in common with many, I still entertain of the real facts of the murder, I
adopted that view which, at all events, was the best suited to the higher
purposes of fiction. On the whole, I still think that if the crime were
committed by Aram, the motive was not very far removed from one which led
recently to a remarkable murder in Spain. A priest in that country,
wholly absorbed in learned pursuits, and apparently of spotless life,
confessed that, being debarred by extreme poverty from prosecuting a
study which had become the sole passion of his existence, he had reasoned
himself into the belief that it would be admissible to rob a very
dissolute, worthless man if he applied the money so obtained to the
acquisition of a knowledge which he could not otherwise acquire, and
which he held to be profitable to mankind. Unfortunately, the dissolute
rich man was not willing to be robbed for so excellent a purpose; he was
armed and he resisted. A struggle ensued, and the crime of homicide was
added to that of robbery. The robbery was premeditated; the murder was
accidental. But he who would accept some similar interpretation of Aram's
crime must, to comprehend fully the lessons which belong to so terrible a
picture of frenzy and guilt, consider also the physical circumstances and
condition of the criminal at the time,--severe illness, intense labor of
the brain, poverty bordering upon famine, the mind preternaturally at
work devising schemes and excuses to arrive at the means for ends
ardently desired. And all this duly considered, the reader may see the
crime bodying itself out from the shades and chimeras of a horrible
hallucination,--the awful dream of a brief but delirious and convulsed
disease. It is thus only that we can account for the contradiction of one
deed at war with a whole life,--blasting, indeed, forever the happiness,
but making little revolution in the pursuits and disposition of the
character. No one who has examined with care and thoughtfulness the
aspects of Life and Nature but must allow that in the contemplation of
such a spectacle, great and most moral truths must force themselves on
the notice and sink deep into the heart. The entanglements of human
reasoning; the influence of circumstance upon deeds; the perversion that
may be made, by one self-palter with the Fiend, of elements the most
glorious; the secret effect of conscience in frustrating all for which
the crime was done, leaving genius without hope, knowledge without fruit,
deadening benevolence into mechanism, tainting love itself with terror
and suspicion,--such reflections (leading, with subtler minds, to many
more vast and complicated theorems in the consideration of our nature,
social and individual) arise out of the tragic moral which the story of
Eugene Aram (were it but adequately treated) could not fail to convey.

BRUSSELS, August, 1840.




                 PREFACE

             TO THE PRESENT EDITION.

If none of my prose works have been so attacked as "Eugene Aram," none
have so completely triumphed over attack. It is true that, whether from
real or affected ignorance of the true morality of fiction, a few critics
may still reiterate the old commonplace charges of "selecting heroes from
Newgate," or "investing murderers with interest;" but the firm hold which
the work has established in the opinion of the general public, and the
favor it has received in every country where English literature is known,
suffice to prove that, whatever its faults, it belongs to that legitimate
class of fiction which illustrates life and truth, and only deals with
crime as the recognized agency of pity and terror in the conduct of
tragic narrative. All that I would say further on this score has been
said in the general defence of my writings which I put forth two years
ago; and I ask the indulgence of the reader if I repeat myself:--

   "Here, unlike the milder guilt of Paul Clifford, the author was not
   to imply reform to society, nor open in this world atonement and
   pardon to the criminal. As it would have been wholly in vain to
   disguise, by mean tamperings with art and truth, the ordinary habits
   of life and attributes of character which all record and remembrance
   ascribed to Eugene Aram; as it would have defeated every end of the
   moral inculcated by his guilt, to portray, in the caricature of the
   murderer of melodrama, a man immersed in study, of whom it was noted
   that he turned aside from the worm in his path,--so I have allowed
   to him whatever contrasts with his inexpiable crime have been
   recorded on sufficient authority. But I have invariably taken care
   that the crime itself should stand stripped of every sophistry, and
   hideous to the perpetrator as well as to the world. Allowing all by
   which attention to his biography may explain the tremendous paradox
   of fearful guilt in a man aspiring after knowledge, and not
   generally inhumane; allowing that the crime came upon him in the
   partial insanity produced by the combining circumstances of a brain
   overwrought by intense study, disturbed by an excited imagination
   and the fumes of a momentary disease of the reasoning faculty,
   consumed by the desire of knowledge, unwholesome and morbid, because
   coveted as an end, not a means, added to the other physical causes
   of mental aberration to be found in loneliness, and want verging
   upon famine,--all these, which a biographer may suppose to have
   conspired to his crime, have never been used by the novelist as
   excuses for its enormity, nor indeed, lest they should seem as
   excuses, have they ever been clearly presented to the view. The
   moral consisted in showing more than the mere legal punishment at
   the close. It was to show how the consciousness of the deed was to
   exclude whatever humanity of character preceded and belied it from
   all active exercise, all social confidence; how the knowledge of the
   bar between the minds of others and his own deprived the criminal of
   all motive to ambition, and blighted knowledge of all fruit.
   Miserable in his affections, barren in his intellect; clinging to
   solitude, yet accursed in it; dreading as a danger the fame he had
   once coveted; obscure in spite of learning, hopeless in spite of
   love, fruitless and joyless in his life, calamitous and shameful in
   his end,--surely such is no palliative of crime, no dalliance and
   toying with the grimness of evil! And surely to any ordinary
   comprehension and candid mind such is the moral conveyed by the
   fiction of 'Eugene Aram.'"--[A word to the Public, 1847]

In point of composition "Eugene Aram" is, I think, entitled to rank
amongst the best of my fictions. It somewhat humiliates me to acknowledge
that neither practice nor study has enabled me to surpass a work written
at a very early age, in the skilful construction and patient development
of plot; and though I have since sought to call forth higher and more
subtle passions, I doubt if I have ever excited the two elementary
passions of tragedy,--namely, pity and terror,--to the same degree. In
mere style, too, "Eugene Aram," in spite of certain verbal oversights,
and defects in youthful taste (some of which I have endeavored to remove
from the present edition), appears to me unexcelled by any of my later
writings,--at least in what I have always studied as the main essential
of style in narrative; namely, its harmony with the subject selected and
the passions to be moved,--while it exceeds them all in the minuteness
and fidelity of its descriptions of external nature. This indeed it ought
to do, since the study of external nature is made a peculiar attribute of
the principal character, whose fate colors the narrative. I do not know
whether it has been observed that the time occupied by the events of the
story is conveyed through the medium of such descriptions. Each
description is introduced, not for its own sake, but to serve as a
calendar marking the gradual changes of the seasons as they bear on to
his doom the guilty worshipper of Nature. And in this conception, and in
the care with which it has been followed out, I recognize one of my
earliest but most successful attempts at the subtler principles of
narrative art.

In this edition I have made one alteration somewhat more important than
mere verbal correction. On going, with maturer judgment, over all the
evidences on which Aram was condemned, I have convinced myself that
though an accomplice in the robbery of Clarke, he was free both from the
premeditated design and the actual deed of murder. The crime, indeed,
would still rest on his conscience and insure his punishment, as
necessarily incidental to the robbery in which he was an accomplice, with
Houseman; but finding my convictions, that in the murder itself he had no
share, borne out by the opinion of many eminent lawyers by whom I have
heard the subject discussed, I have accordingly so shaped his confession
to Walter.

Perhaps it will not be without interest to the reader if I append to this
preface an authentic specimen of Eugene Aram's composition, for which I
am indebted to the courtesy of a gentleman by whose grandfather it was
received, with other papers (especially a remarkable "Outline of a New
Lexicon"), during Aram's confinement in York prison. The essay I select
is, indeed, not without value in itself as a very curious and learned
illustration of Popular Antiquities, and it serves also to show not only
the comprehensive nature of Aram's studies and the inquisitive eagerness
of his mind, but also the fact that he was completely self-taught; for in
contrast to much philological erudition, and to passages that evince
considerable mastery in the higher resources of language, we may
occasionally notice those lesser inaccuracies from which the writings of
men solely self-educated are rarely free,--indeed Aram himself, in
sending to a gentleman an elegy on Sir John Armitage, which shows much,
but undisciplined, power of versification, says, "I send this elegy,
which, indeed, if you had not had the curiosity to desire, I could not
have had the assurance to offer, scarce believing I, who was hardly
taught to read, have any abilities to write."

         THE MELSUPPER AND SHOUTING THE CHURN.

These rural entertainments and usages were formerly more general all over
England than they are at present, being become by time, necessity, or
avarice, complex, confined, and altered. They are commonly insisted upon
by the reapers as customary things, and a part of their due for the toils
of the harvest, and complied with by their masters perhaps more through
regards of interest than inclination; for should they refuse them the
pleasures of this much-expected time, this festal night, the youth
especially, of both sexes would decline serving them for the future, and
employ their labors for others, who would promise them the rustic joys of
the harvest-supper, mirth and music, dance and song. These feasts appear
to be the relics of Pagan ceremonies or of Judaism, it is hard to say
which, and carry in them more meaning and are of far higher antiquity
than is generally apprehended. It is true the subject is more curious
than important, and I believe altogether untouched; and as it seems to be
little understood, has been as little adverted to. I do not remember it
to have been so much as the subject of a conversation. Let us make, then,
a little excursion into this field, for the same reason men sometimes
take a walk. Its traces are discoverable at a very great distance of time
from ours,--nay, seem as old as a sense of joy for the benefit of
plentiful harvests and human gratitude to the eternal Creator for His
munificence to men. We hear it under various names in different counties,
and often in the same county; as, "melsupper," "churn-supper,"
"harvest-supper," "harvest-home," "feast of in-gathering," etc. And
perhaps this feast had been long observed, and by different tribes of
people, before it became preceptive with the Jews. However, let that be
as it will, the custom very lucidly appears from the following passages
of S. S., Exod. xxiii. 16, "And the feast of harvest, the first-fruits of
thy labors, which thou hast sown in the field." And its institution as a
sacred rite is commanded in Levit. xxiii. 39: "When ye have gathered in
the fruit of the land ye shall keep a feast to the Lord."

The Jews then, as is evident from hence, celebrated the feast of harvest,
and that by precept; and though no vestiges of any such feast either are
or can be produced before these, yet the oblation of the Primitae, of
which this feast was a consequence, is met with prior to this, for we
find that "Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to the
Lord" (Gen. iv. 3).

Yet this offering of the first-fruits, it may well be supposed was not
peculiar to the Jews either at the time of, or after, its establishment
by their legislator; neither the feast in consequence of it. Many other
nations, either in imitation of the Jews, or rather by tradition from
their several patriarchs, observed the rite of offering their Primitiae,
and of solemnizing a festival after it, in religious acknowledgment for
the blessing of harvest, though that acknowledgment was ignorantly
misapplied in being directed to a secondary, not the primary, fountain of
this benefit,--namely to Apollo, or the Sun.

For Callimachus affirms that these Primitiae were sent by the people of
every nation to the temple of Apollo in Delos, the most distant that
enjoyed the happiness of corn and harvest, even by the Hyperboreans in
particular,--Hymn to Apol., "Bring the sacred sheafs and the mystic
offerings."

Herodotus also mentions this annual custom of the Hyperboreans, remarking
that those of Delos talk of "Holy things tied up in sheaf of wheat
conveyed from the Hyperboreans." And the Jews, by the command of their
law, offered also a sheaf: "And shall reap the harvest thereof, then ye
shall bring a sheaf of the first-fruits of the harvest unto the priest."

This is not introduced in proof of any feast observed by the people who
had harvests, but to show the universality of the custom of offering the
Primitiae, which preceded this feast. But yet it maybe looked upon as
equivalent to a proof; for as the offering and the feast appear to have
been always and intimately connected in countries affording records, so
it is more than probable they were connected too in countries which had
none, or none that ever survived to our times. An entertainment and
gayety were still the concomitants of these rites, which with the vulgar,
one may pretty truly suppose, were esteemed the most acceptable and
material part of them, and a great reason of their having subsisted
through such a length of ages, when both the populace and many of the
learned too have lost sight of the object to which they had been
originally directed. This, among many other ceremonies of the heathen
worship, became disused in some places and retained in others, but still
continued declining after the promulgation of the Gospel. In short, there
seems great reason to conclude that this feast, which was once sacred to
Apollo, was constantly maintained, when a far less valuable
circumstance,--i.e., "shouting the churn,"--is observed to this day by
the reapers, and from so old an era; for we read of this exclamation,
Isa. xvi. 9: "For the shouting for thy summer fruits and for thy harvest
is fallen;" and again, ver. 10: "And in the vineyards there shall be no
singing, their shouting shall be no shouting." Hence then, or from some
of the Phoenician colonies, is our traditionary "shouting the churn." But
it seems these Orientals shouted both for joy of their harvest of grapes
and of corn. We have no quantity of the first to occasion so much joy as
does our plenty of the last; and I do not remember to have heard whether
their vintages abroad are attended with this custom. Bread or cakes
compose part of the Hebrew offering (Levit. xxiii. 13), and a cake thrown
upon the head of the victim was also part of the Greek offering to Apollo
(see Hom., Il., a), whose worship was formerly celebrated in Britain,
where the May-pole yet continues one remain of it. This they adorned with
garlands on May-day, to welcome the approach of Apollo, or the Sun,
towards the North, and to signify that those flowers were the product of
his presence and influence. But upon the progress of Christianity, as was
observed above, Apollo lost his divinity again, and the adoration of his
deity subsided by degrees. Yet so permanent is custom that this rite of
the harvest-supper, together with that of the May-pole (of which last see
Voss. de Orig. and Prag. Idolatr., 1, 2), have been preserved in Britain;
and what had been anciently offered to the god, the reapers as prudently
ate up themselves.

At last the use of the meal of the new corn was neglected, and the
supper, so far as meal was concerned, was made indifferently of old or
new corn, as was most agreeable to the founder. And here the usage itself
accounts for the name of "Melsupper" (where mel signifies meal, or else
the instrument called with us a "Mell," wherewith antiquity reduced their
corn to meal in a mortar, which still amounts to the same thing); for
provisions of meal, or of corn in furmety, etc., composed by far the
greatest part in these elder and country entertainments, perfectly
conformable to the simplicity of those times, places, and persons,
however meanly they may now be looked upon. And as the harvest was last
concluded with several preparations of meal, or brought to be ready for
the "mell," this term became, in a translated signification, to mean the
last of other things; as, when a horse comes last in the race, they often
say in the North, "He has got the mell."

All the other names of this country festivity sufficiently explain
themselves, except "Churn-supper;" and this is entirely different from
"Melsupper:" but they generally happen so near together that they are
frequently confounded. The "Churn-supper" was always provided when all
was shorn, but the "Melsupper" after all was got in. And it was called
the "Churn-supper" because, from immemorial times, it was customary to
produce in a churn a great quantity of cream, and to circulate it by
dishfuls to each of the rustic company, to be eaten with bread. And here
sometimes very extraordinary execution has been done upon cream. And
though this custom has been disused in many places, and agreeably
commuted for by ale, yet it survives still, and that about Whitby and
Scarborough in the East, and round about Gisburn, etc., in Craven, in the
West. But perhaps a century or two more will put an end to it, and both
the thing and name shall die. Vicarious ale is now more approved, and the
tankard almost everywhere politely preferred to the Churn.

This Churn (in our provincial pronunciation Kern) is the Hebrew Kern, or
Keren, from its being circular, like most horns; and it is the Latin
'corona',--named so either from 'radii', resembling horns, as on some
very ancient coins, or from its encircling the head: so a ring of people
is called corona. Also the Celtic Koren, Keren, or corn, which continues
according to its old pronunciation in Cornwall, etc., and our modern word
horn is no more than this; the ancient hard sound of k in corn being
softened into the aspirate h, as has been done in numberless instances.

The Irish Celtae also called a round stone 'clogh crene', where the
variation is merely dialectic. Hence, too, our crane-berries,--i.e.,
round berries,--from this Celtic adjective 'crene', round.

The quotations from Scripture in Aram's original MS. were both in the
Hebrew character, and their value in English sounds.





                CONTENTS.

                 BOOK I.


CHAPTER I.

THE VILLAGE.--ITS INHABITANTS.--AN OLD MANORHOUSE: AND AN ENGLISH FAMILY;
THEIR HISTORY, INVOLVING A MYSTERIOUS EVENT.




CHAPTER II.
A PUBLICAN, A SINNER, AND A STRANGER




CHAPTER III.
A DIALOGUE AND AN ALARM.--A STUDENT'S HOUSE.




CHAPTER IV.
THE SOLILOQUY, AND THE CHARACTER, OF A RECLUSE.--THE INTERRUPTION.




CHAPTER V.

A DINNER AT THE SQUIRE'S HALL.--A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO RETIRED MEN
WITH DIFFERENT OBJECTS IN RETIREMENT.--DISTURBANCE FIRST INTRODUCED INTO
A PEACEFUL FAMILY.




CHAPTER VI.

THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE STUDENT.--A SUMMER SCENE--ARAM'S CONVERSATION WITH
WALTER, AND SUBSEQUENT COLLOQUY WITH HIMSELF.




CHAPTER VII.

THE POWER OF LOVE OVER THE RESOLUTION OF THE STUDENT.--ARAM BECOMES A
FREQUENT GUEST AT THE MANOR-HOUSE.--A WALK.--CONVERSATION WITH DAME
DARKMANS.--HER HISTORY.--POVERTY AND ITS EFFECTS.




CHAPTER VII.

THE PRIVILEGE OF GENIUS.--LESTER'S SATISFACTION AT THE ASPECT OF
EVENTS.--HIS CONVERSATION WITH WALTER.--A DISCOVERY.




CHAPTER IX.

THE STATE OF WALTER'S MIND.--AN ANGLER AND A MAN OF THE WORLD.--A
COMPANION FOUND FOR WALTER.




CHAPTER X.
THE LOVERS.--THE ENCOUNTER AND QUARREL OF THE RIVALS.




CHAPTER XI.

THE FAMILY SUPPER.--THE TWO SISTERS IN THEIR CHAMBER.--A MISUNDERSTANDING
FOLLOWED BY A CONFESSION.--WALTER'S APPROACHING DEPARTURE AND THE
CORPORAL'S BEHAVIOUR THEREON.--THE CORPORAL'S FAVOURITE INTRODUCED TO THE
READER.--THE CORPORAL PROVES HIMSELF A SUBTLE DIPLOMATIST.




CHAPTER XII.

A STRANGE HABIT.--WALTER'S INTERVIEW WITH MADELINE.--HER GENEROUS AND
CONFIDING DISPOSITION.--WALTER'S ANGER.--THE PARTING MEAL.--CONVERSATION
BETWEEN THE UNCLE AND NEPHEW.--WALTER ALONE.--SLEEP THE BLESSING OF THE
YOUNG.

                BOOK II.




CHAPTER I.

THE MARRIAGE SETTLED.--LESTER'S HOPES AND SCHEMES.--GAIETY OF TEMPER A
GOOD SPECULATION.--THE TRUTH AND FERVOUR OF ARAM'S LOVE.




CHAPTER II.

A FAVOURABLE SPECIMEN OF A NOBLEMAN AND A COURTIER.--A MAN OF SOME FAULTS
AND MANY ACCOMPLISHMENTS.




CHAPTER III.

WHEREIN THE EARL AND THE STUDENT CONVERSE ON GRAVE BUT DELIGHTFUL
MATTERS.--THE STUDENT'S NOTION OF THE ONLY EARTHLY HAPPINESS.




CHAPTER IV.

A DEEPER EXAMINATION INTO THE STUDENT'S HEART.--THE VISIT TO THE
CASTLE.--PHILOSOPHY PUT TO THE TRIAL.




CHAPTER V.

IN WHICH THE STORY RETURNS TO WALTER AND THE CORPORAL.--THE RENCONTRE
WITH A STRANGER, AND HOW THE STRANGER PROVES TO BE NOT ALTOGETHER A
STRANGER.




CHAPTER VI.

SIR PETER DISPLAYED.--ONE MAN OF THE WORLD SUFFERS FROM ANOTHER.--THE
INCIDENT OF THE BRIDLE BEGETS THE INCIDENT OF THE SADDLE; THE INCIDENT OF
THE SADDLE BEGETS THE INCIDENT OF THE WHIP; THE INCIDENT OF THE WHIP
BEGETS WHAT THE READER MUST READ TO SEE.




CHAPTER VII.

WALTER VISITS ANOTHER OF HIS UNCLE'S FRIENDS.--MR. COURTLAND'S STRANGE
COMPLAINT.--WALTER LEARNS NEWS OF HIS FATHER, WHICH SURPRISES HIM.--THE
CHANGE IN HIS DESTINATION.




CHAPTER VIII.

WALTER'S MEDITATIONS.--THE CORPORAL'S GRIEF AND ANGER.--THE CORPORAL
PERSONALLY DESCRIBED.--AN EXPLANATION WITH HIS MASTER.--THE CORPORAL
OPENS HIMSELF TO THE YOUNG TRAVELLER.--HIS OPINIONS ON LOVE;--ON THE
WORLD;--ON THE PLEASURE AND RESPECTABILITY OF CHEATING;--ON LADIES--AND A
PARTICULAR CLASS OF LADIES;--ON AUTHORS;--ON THE VALUE OF WORDS;--ON
FIGHTING;--WITH SUNDRY OTHER MATTERS OF EQUAL DELECTATION AND
IMPROVEMENT.--AN UNEXPECTED EVENT.

                BOOK III.




CHAPTER I.

FRAUD AND VIOLENCE ENTER EVEN GRASSDALE.--PETER'S NEWS.--THE LOVERS'
WALK.--THE REAPPEARANCE.




CHAPTER II.
THE INTERVIEW BETWEEN ARAM AND THE STRANGER.




CHAPTER III.

FRESH ALARM IN THE VILLAGE.--LESTER'S VISIT TO ARAM.--A TRAIT OF DELICATE
KINDNESS IN THE STUDENT.--MADELINE.--HER PRONENESS TO CONFIDE.--THE
CONVERSATION BETWEEN LESTER AND ARAM.--THE PERSONS BY WHOM IT IS
INTERRUPTED.




CHAPTER IV.

MILITARY PREPARATIONS.--THE COMMANDER AND HIS MAN.--ARAM IS PERSUADED TO
PASS THE NIGHT AT THE MANOR-HOUSE.




CHAPTER V.
THE SISTERS ALONE.--THE GOSSIP OF LOVE.--AN ALARM--AND AN EVENT.




CHAPTER VI.

ARAM ALONE AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.--HIS SOLILOQUY AND PROJECT.--SCENE
BETWEEN HIMSELF AND MADELINE.




CHAPTER VII.

ARAM'S SECRET EXPEDITION.--A SCENE WORTHY THE ACTORS.--ARAM'S ADDRESS AND
POWERS OF PERSUASION OR HYPOCRISY.--THEIR RESULT.--A FEARFUL
NIGHT.--ARAM'S SOLITARY RIDE HOMEWARD.--WHOM HE MEETS BY THE WAY, AND
WHAT HE SEES.

                BOOK IV.




CHAPTER I.

IN WHICH WE RETURN TO WALTER.--HIS DEBT OF GRATITUDE TO MR. PERTINAX
FILLGRAVE.--THE CORPORAL'S ADVICE, AND THE CORPORAL'S VICTORY.




CHAPTER II.

NEW TRACES OF THE FATE OF GEOFFREY LESTER.--WALTER AND THE CORPORAL
PROCEED ON A FRESH EXPEDITION.--THE CORPORAL IS ESPECIALLY SAGACIOUS ON
THE OLD TOPIC OF THE WORLD.--HIS OPINIONS ON THE MEN WHO CLAIM 'KNOWLEDGE
THEREOF.--ON THE ADVANTAGES ENJOYED BY A VALET.--ON THE SCIENCE OF
SUCCESSFUL LOVE.--ON VIRTUE AND THE CONSTITUTION.--ON QUALITIES TO BE
DESIRED IN A MISTRESS, ETC.--A LANDSCAPE.




CHAPTER III.

A SCHOLAR, BUT OF A DIFFERENT MOULD FROM THE STUDENT OF GRASSDALE.--NEW
PARTICULARS CONCERNING GEOFFREY LESTER.--THE JOURNEY RECOMMENCED.




CHAPTER IV.

ARAM'S DEPARTURE.--MADELINE.--EXAGGERATION OF SENTIMENT NATURAL IN
LOVE.--MADELINE'S LETTER.--WALTER'S.--THE WALK.--TWO VERY DIFFERENT
PERSONS, YET BOTH INMATES OF THE SAME COUNTRY VILLAGE.--THE HUMOURS OF
LIFE, AND ITS DARK PASSIONS, ARE FOUND IN JUXTA-POSITION EVERYWHERE.




CHAPTER V.

A REFLECTION NEW AND STRANGE.--THE STREETS OF LONDON.--A GREAT MAN'S
LIBRARY.--A CONVERSATION BETWEEN THE STUDENT AND AN ACQUAINTANCE OF THE
READER'S.--ITS RESULT.




CHAPTER VI.

THE THAMES AT NIGHT.--A THOUGHT.--THE STUDENT RE-SEEKS THE RUFFIAN.--A
HUMAN FEELING EVEN IN THE WORST SOIL.




CHAPTER VII.

MADELINE, HER HOPES.--A MILD AUTUMN CHARACTERISED.--A LANDSCAPE.--A
RETURN.




CHAPTER VIII.

AFFECTION: ITS GODLIKE NATURE.--THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN ARAM AND
MADELINE.--THE FATALIST FORGETS FATE.




CHAPTER IX.

WALTER AND THE CORPORAL ON THE ROAD.--THE EVENING SETS IN.--THE GIPSEY
TENTS.--ADVENTURE WITH THE HORSEMAN.--THE CORPORAL DISCOMFITED, AND THE
ARRIVAL AT KNARESBOROUGH.




CHAPTER X.

WALTER'S REFLECTIONS.--MINE HOST.--A GENTLE CHARACTER AND A GREEN OLD
AGE.--THE GARDEN, AND THAT WHICH IT TEACHETH.--A DIALOGUE, WHEREIN NEW
HINTS TOWARDS THE WISHED FOR DISCOVERY ARE SUGGESTED.--THE CURATE.--A
VISIT TO A SPOT OF DEEP INTEREST TO THE ADVENTURER.




CHAPTER XI.

GRIEF IN A RUFFIAN.--THE CHAMBER OF EARLY DEATH.--A HOMELY YET MOMENTOUS
CONFESSION.--THE EARTH'S SECRETS.--THE CAVERN.--THE ACCUSATION.

                 BOOK V.




CHAPTER I.

GRASSDALE.--THE MORNING OF THE MARRIAGE.--THE CRONES' GOSSIP. THE BRIDE
AT HER TOILET.--THE ARRIVAL.




CHAPTER II.
THE STUDENT ALONE IN HIS CHAMBER.--THE INTERRUPTION.--FAITHFUL
LOVE.




CHAPTER III.

THE JUSTICE.--THE DEPARTURE.--THE EQUANIMITY OF THE CORPORAL IN BEARING
THE MISFORTUNES OF OTHER PEOPLE.--THE EXAMINATION; ITS RESULT.--ARAM'S
CONDUCT IN PRISON.--THE ELASTICITY OF OUR HUMAN NATURE.--A VISIT FROM THE
EARL.--WALTER'S DETERMINATION.--MADELINE.




CHAPTER IV.

THE EVENING BEFORE THE TRIAL.--THE COUSINS.--THE CHANGE IN MADELINE.--THE
FAMILY OF GRASSDALE MEET ONCE MORE BENEATH ONE ROOF.




CHAPTER V.
THE TRIAL




CHAPTER VI.
THE DEATH.--THE PRISON.--AN INTERVIEW.--ITS RESULT




CHAPTER VII.
THE CONFESSION; AND THE FATE




CHAPTER VIII AND LAST.

THE TRAVELLER'S RETURN.--THE COUNTRY VILLAGE ONCE MORE VISITED.--ITS
INHABITANTS.--THE REMEMBERED BROOK.--THE DESERTED MANOR-HOUSE.--THE
CHURCH-YARD.--THE TRAVELLER RESUMES HIS JOURNEY.--THE COUNTRY TOWN.--A
MEETING OF TWO LOVERS AFTER LONG ABSENCE AND MUCH SORROW.--CONCLUSION.





               EUGENE ARAM


                 BOOK I.




                CHAPTER I.

THE VILLAGE.--ITS INHABITANTS.--AN OLD MANORHOUSE: AND AN ENGLISH FAMILY;
       THEIR HISTORY, INVOLVING A MYSTERIOUS EVENT.

"Protected by the divinity they adored, supported by the earth which they
cultivated, and at peace with themselves, they enjoyed the sweets of
life, without dreading or desiring dissolution." Numa Pompilius.

In the country of--there is a sequestered hamlet, which I have often
sought occasion to pass, and which I have never left without a certain
reluctance and regret. It is not only (though this has a remarkable spell
over my imagination) that it is the sanctuary, as it were, of a story
which appears to me of a singular and fearful interest; but the scene
itself is one which requires no legend to arrest the traveller's
attention. I know not in any part of the world, which it has been my lot
to visit, a landscape so entirely lovely and picturesque, as that which
on every side of the village I speak of, you may survey. The hamlet to
which I shall here give the name of Grassdale, is situated in a valley,
which for about the length of a mile winds among gardens and orchards,
laden with fruit, between two chains of gentle and fertile hills.

Here, singly or in pairs, are scattered cottages, which bespeak a comfort
and a rural luxury, less often than our poets have described the
characteristics of the English peasantry. It has been observed, and there
is a world of homely, ay, and of legislative knowledge in the
observation, that wherever you see a flower in a cottage garden, or a
bird-cage at the window, you may feel sure that the cottagers are better
and wiser than their neighbours; and such humble tokens of attention to
something beyond the sterile labour of life, were (we must now revert to
the past,) to be remarked in almost every one of the lowly abodes at
Grassdale. The jasmine here, there the vine clustered over the threshold,
not so wildly as to testify negligence; but rather to sweeten the air
than to exclude it from the inmates. Each of the cottages possessed at
its rear its plot of ground, apportioned to the more useful and
nutritious product of nature; while the greater part of them fenced also
from the unfrequented road a little spot for the lupin, the sweet pea, or
the many tribes of the English rose. And it is not unworthy of remark,
that the bees came in greater clusters to Grassdale than to any other
part of that rich and cultivated district. A small piece of waste land,
which was intersected by a brook, fringed with ozier and dwarf and
fantastic pollards, afforded pasture for a few cows, and the only
carrier's solitary horse. The stream itself was of no ignoble repute
among the gentle craft of the Angle, the brotherhood whom our
associations defend in the spite of our mercy; and this repute drew
welcome and periodical itinerants to the village, who furnished it with
its scanty news of the great world without, and maintained in a decorous
custom the little and single hostelry of the place. Not that Peter
Dealtry, the proprietor of the "Spotted Dog," was altogether contented to
subsist upon the gains of his hospitable profession; he joined thereto
the light cares of a small farm, held under a wealthy and an easy
landlord; and being moreover honoured with the dignity of clerk to the
parish, he was deemed by his neighbours a person of no small
accomplishment, and no insignificant distinction. He was a little, dry,
thin man, of a turn rather sentimental than jocose; a memory well stored
with fag-ends of psalms, and hymns which, being less familiar than the
psalms to the ears of the villagers, were more than suspected to be his
own composition; often gave a poetic and semi-religious colouring to his
conversation, which accorded rather with his dignity in the church, than
his post at the Spotted Dog. Yet he disliked not his joke, though it was
subtle and delicate of nature; nor did he disdain to bear companionship
over his own liquor, with guests less gifted and refined.

In the centre of the village you chanced upon a cottage which had been
lately white-washed, where a certain preciseness in the owner might be
detected in the clipped hedge, and the exact and newly mended style by
which you approached the habitation; herein dwelt the beau and bachelor
of the village, somewhat antiquated it is true, but still an object of
great attention and some hope to the elder damsels in the vicinity, and
of a respectful popularity, that did not however prohibit a joke, to the
younger part of the sisterhood. Jacob Bunting, so was this gentleman
called, had been for many years in the king's service, in which he had
risen to the rank of corporal, and had saved and pinched together a
certain small independence upon which he now rented his cottage and
enjoyed his leisure. He had seen a good deal of the world, and profited
in shrewdness by his experience; he had rubbed off, however, all
superfluous devotion as he rubbed off his prejudices, and though he drank
more often than any one else with the landlord of the Spotted Dog, he
also quarrelled with him the oftenest, and testified the least
forbearance at the publican's segments of psalmody. Jacob was a tall,
comely, and perpendicular personage; his threadbare coat was scrupulously
brushed, and his hair punctiliously plastered at the sides into two stiff
obstinate-looking curls, and at the top into what he was pleased to call
a feather, though it was much more like a tile. His conversation had in
it something peculiar; generally it assumed a quick, short, abrupt turn,
that, retrenching all superfluities of pronoun and conjunction, and
marching at once upon the meaning of the sentence, had in it a military
and Spartan significance, which betrayed how difficult it often is for a
man to forget that he has been a corporal. Occasionally indeed, for where
but in farces is the phraseology of the humorist always the same? he
escaped into a more enlarged and christianlike method of dealing with the
king's English, but that was chiefly noticeable, when from conversation
he launched himself into lecture, a luxury the worthy soldier loved
greatly to indulge, for much had he seen and somewhat had he reflected;
and valuing himself, which was odd in a corporal, more on his knowledge
of the world than his knowledge even of war, he rarely missed any
occasion of edifying a patient listener with the result of his
observations.

After you had sauntered by the veteran's door, beside which you
generally, if the evening were fine, or he was not drinking with
neighbour Dealtry--or taking his tea with gossip this or master that--or
teaching some emulous urchins the broadsword exercise--or snaring trout
in the stream--or, in short, otherwise engaged; beside which, I say, you
not unfrequently beheld him sitting on a rude bench, and enjoying with
half-shut eyes, crossed legs, but still unindulgently erect posture, the
luxury of his pipe; you ventured over a little wooden bridge; beneath
which, clear and shallow, ran the rivulet we have before honorably
mentioned; and a walk of a few minutes brought you to a moderately sized
and old-fashioned mansion--the manor-house of the parish. It stood at the
very foot of the hill; behind, a rich, ancient, and hanging wood, brought
into relief--the exceeding freshness and verdure of the patch of green
meadow immediately in front. On one side, the garden was bounded by the
village churchyard, with its simple mounds, and its few scattered and
humble tombs. The church was of great antiquity; and it was only in one
point of view that you caught more than a glimpse of its grey tower and
graceful spire, so thickly and so darkly grouped the yew tree and the
larch around the edifice. Opposite the gate by which you gained the
house, the view was not extended, but rich with wood and pasture, backed
by a hill, which; less verdant than its fellows, was covered with sheep:
while you saw hard by the rivulet darkening and stealing away; till your
sight, though not your ear, lost it among the woodland.

Trained up the embrowned paling on either side of the gate, were bushes
of rustic fruit, and fruit and flowers (through plots of which green and
winding alleys had been cut with no untasteful hand) testified by their
thriving and healthful looks, the care bestowed upon them. The main
boasts of the garden were, on one side, a huge horse-chesnut tree--the
largest in the village; and on the other, an arbour covered without with
honeysuckles, and tapestried within by moss. The house, a grey and quaint
building of the time of James I. with stone copings and gable roof, could
scarcely in these days have been deemed a fitting residence for the lord
of the manor. Nearly the whole of the centre was occupied by the hall, in
which the meals of the family were commonly held--only two other
sitting-rooms of very moderate dimensions had been reserved by the
architect for the convenience or ostentation of the proprietor. An ample
porch jutted from the main building, and this was covered with ivy, as
the windows were with jasmine and honeysuckle; while seats were ranged
inside the porch covered with many a rude initial and long-past date.

The owner of this mansion bore the name of Rowland Lester. His
forefathers, without pretending to high antiquity of family, had held the
dignity of squires of Grassdale for some two centuries; and Rowland
Lester was perhaps the first of the race who had stirred above fifty
miles from the house in which each successive lord had received his
birth, or the green churchyard in which was yet chronicled his death. The
present proprietor was a man of cultivated tastes; and abilities,
naturally not much above mediocrity, had been improved by travel as well
as study. Himself and one younger brother had been early left masters of
their fate and their several portions. The younger, Geoffrey, testified a
roving and dissipated turn. Bold, licentious, extravagant,
unprincipled,--his career soon outstripped the slender fortunes of a
cadet in the family of a country squire. He was early thrown into
difficulties, but, by some means or other they never seemed to overwhelm
him; an unexpected turn--a lucky adventure--presented itself at the very
moment when Fortune appeared the most utterly to have deserted him.

Among these more propitious fluctuations in the tide of affairs, was, at
about the age of forty, a sudden marriage with a young lady of what might
be termed (for Geoffrey Lester's rank of life, and the rational expenses
of that day) a very competent and respectable fortune. Unhappily,
however, the lady was neither handsome in feature nor gentle in temper;
and, after a few years of quarrel and contest, the faithless husband, one
bright morning, having collected in his proper person whatever remained
of their fortune, absconded from the conjugal hearth without either
warning or farewell. He left nothing to his wife but his house, his
debts, and his only child, a son. From that time to the present little
had been known, though much had been conjectured, concerning the
deserter. For the first few years they traced, however, so far of his
fate as to learn that he had been seen once in India; and that previously
he had been met in England by a relation, under the disguise of assumed
names: a proof that whatever his occupations, they could scarcely be very
respectable. But, of late, nothing whatsoever relating to the wanderer
had transpired. By some he was imagined dead; by most he was forgotten.
Those more immediately connected with him--his brother in especial,
cherished a secret belief, that wherever Geoffrey Lester should chance to
alight, the manner of alighting would (to use the significant and homely
metaphor) be always on his legs; and coupling the wonted luck of the
scapegrace with the fact of his having been seen in India, Rowland, in
his heart, not only hoped, but fully expected, that the lost one would,
some day or other, return home laden with the spoils of the East, and
eager to shower upon his relatives, in recompense of long desertion,

"With richest hand ... barbaric pearl and gold."

But we must return to the forsaken spouse.--Left in this abrupt
destitution and distress, Mrs. Lester had only the resource of applying
to her brother-in-law, whom indeed the fugitive had before seized many
opportunities of not leaving wholly unprepared for such an application.
Rowland promptly and generously obeyed the summons: he took the child and
the wife to his own home,--he freed the latter from the persecution of
all legal claimants,--and, after selling such effects as remained, he
devoted the whole proceeds to the forsaken family, without regarding his
own expenses on their behalf, ill as he was able to afford the luxury of
that self-neglect. The wife did not long need the asylum of his
hearth,--she, poor lady, died of a slow fever produced by irritation and
disappointment, a few months after Geoffrey's desertion. She had no need
to recommend her children to their kindhearted uncle's care. And now we
must glance over the elder brother's domestic fortunes.

In Rowland, the wild dispositions of his brother were so far tamed, that
they assumed only the character of a buoyant temper and a gay spirit. He
had strong principles as well as warm feelings, and a fine and resolute
sense of honour utterly impervious to attack. It was impossible to be in
his company an hour and not see that he was a man to be respected. It was
equally impossible to live with him a week and not see that he was a man
to be beloved. He also had married, and about a year after that era in
the life of his brother, but not for the same advantage of fortune. He
had formed an attachment to the portionlesss daughter of a man in his own
neighbourhood and of his own rank. He wooed and won her, and for a few
years he enjoyed that greatest happiness which the world is capable of
bestowing--the society and the love of one in whom we could wish for no
change, and beyond whom we have no desire. But what Evil cannot corrupt
Fate seldom spares. A few months after the birth of a second daughter the
young wife of Rowland Lester died. It was to a widowed hearth that the
wife and child of his brother came for shelter. Rowland was a man of an
affectionate and warm heart: if the blow did not crush, at least it
changed him. Naturally of a cheerful and ardent disposition, his mood now
became soberized and sedate. He shrunk from the rural gaieties and
companionship he had before courted and enlivened, and, for the first
time in his life, the mourner felt the holiness of solitude. As his
nephew and his motherless daughters grew up, they gave an object to his
seclusion and a relief to his reflections. He found a pure and unfailing
delight in watching the growth of their young minds, and guiding their
differing dispositions; and, as time at length enabled the to return his
affection, and appreciate his cares, he became once more sensible that he
had a HOME.

The elder of his daughters, Madeline, at the time our story opens, had
attained the age of eighteen. She was the beauty and the boast of the
whole country. Above the ordinary height, her figure was richly and
exquisitely formed. So translucently pure and soft was her complexion,
that it might have seemed the token of delicate health, but for the dewy
and exceeding redness of her lips, and the freshness of teeth whiter than
pearls. Her eyes of a deep blue, wore a thoughtful and serene expression,
and her forehead, higher and broader than it usually is in women, gave
promise of a certain nobleness of intellect, and added dignity, but a
feminine dignity, to the more tender characteristics of her beauty. And
indeed, the peculiar tone of Madeline's mind fulfilled the indication of
her features, and was eminently thoughtful and high-wrought. She had
early testified a remarkable love for study, and not only a desire for
knowledge, but a veneration for those who possessed it. The remote corner
of the county in which they lived, and the rarely broken seclusion which
Lester habitually preserved from the intercourse of their few and
scattered neighbours, had naturally cast each member of the little circle
upon his or her own resources. An accident, some five years ago, had
confined Madeline for several weeks or rather months to the house; and as
the old hall possessed a very respectable share of books, she had then
matured and confirmed that love to reading and reflection, which she had
at a yet earlier period prematurely evinced. The woman's tendency to
romance naturally tinctured her meditations, and thus, while they
dignified, they also softened her mind. Her sister Ellinor, younger by
two years, was of a character equally gentle, but less elevated. She
looked up to her sister as a superior being. She felt pride without a
shadow of envy, at her superior and surpassing beauty; and was
unconsciously guided in her pursuits and predilections, by a mind she
cheerfully acknowledged to be loftier than her own. And yet Ellinor had
also her pretensions to personal loveliness, and pretensions perhaps that
would be less reluctantly acknowledged by her own sex than those of her
sister. The sunlight of a happy and innocent heart sparkled on her face,
and gave a beam it gladdened you to behold, to her quick hazel eye, and a
smile that broke out from a thousand dimples. She did not possess the
height of Madeline, and though not so slender as to be curtailed of the
roundness and feminine luxuriance of beauty, her shape was slighter,
feebler, and less rich in its symmetry than her sister's. And this the
tendency of the physical frame to require elsewhere support, nor to feel
secure of strength, influenced perhaps her mind, and made love, and the
dependence of love, more necessary to her than to the thoughtful and
lofty Madeline. The latter might pass through life, and never see the one
to whom her heart could give itself away. But every village might possess
a hero whom the imagination of Ellinor could clothe with unreal graces,
and to whom the lovingness of her disposition might bias her affections.
Both, however, eminently possessed that earnestness and purity of heart,
which would have made them, perhaps in an equal degree, constant and
devoted to the object of an attachment, once formed, in defiance of
change and to the brink of death.

Their cousin Walter, Geoffrey Lester's son, was now in his twenty-first
year; tall and strong of person, and with a face, if not regularly
handsome, striking enough to be generally deemed so. High-spirited, bold,
fiery, impatient; jealous of the affections of those he loved; cheerful
to outward seeming, but restless, fond of change, and subject to the
melancholy and pining mood common to young and ardent minds: such was the
character of Walter Lester. The estates of Lester were settled in the
male line, and devolved therefore upon him. Yet there were moments when
he keenly felt his orphan and deserted situation; and sighed to think,
that while his father perhaps yet lived, he was a dependent for
affection, if not for maintenance, on the kindness of others. This
reflection sometimes gave an air of sullenness or petulance to his
character, that did not really belong to it. For what in the world makes
a man of just pride appear so unamiable as the sense of dependence?





CHAPTER II.

         A PUBLICAN, A SINNER, AND A STRANGER

"Ah, Don Alphonso, is it you? Agreeable accident! Chance presents you to
my eyes where you were least expected." Gil Blas.

It was an evening in the beginning of summer, and Peter Dealtry and the
ci-devant Corporal sate beneath the sign of The Spotted Dog (as it hung
motionless from the bough of a friendly elm), quaffing a cup of boon
companionship. The reader will imagine the two men very different from
each other in form and aspect; the one short, dry, fragile, and betraying
a love of ease in his unbuttoned vest, and a certain lolling, see-sawing
method of balancing his body upon his chair; the other, erect and solemn,
and as steady on his seat as if he were nailed to it. It was a fine,
tranquil balmy evening; the sun had just set, and the clouds still
retained the rosy tints which they had caught from his parting ray. Here
and there, at scattered intervals, you might see the cottages peeping
from the trees around them; or mark the smoke that rose from their
roofs--roofs green with mosses and house-leek,--in graceful and spiral
curls against the clear soft air. It was an English scene, and the two
men, the dog at their feet, (for Peter Dealtry favoured a wirey
stone-coloured cur, which he called a terrier,) and just at the door of
the little inn, two old gossips, loitering on the threshold in familiar
chat with the landlady, in cap and kerchief,--all together made a groupe
equally English, and somewhat picturesque, though homely enough, in
effect.

"Well, now," said Peter Dealtry, as he pushed the brown jug towards the
Corporal, "this is what I call pleasant; it puts me in mind--"

"Of what?" quoth the Corporal.

"Of those nice lines in the hymn, Master Bunting.

     'How fair ye are, ye little hills,
       Ye little fields also;
      Ye murmuring streams that sweetly run;
       Ye willows in a row!'

"There is something very comfortable in sacred verses, Master Bunting;
but you're a scoffer."

"Psha, man!" said the Corporal, throwing out his right leg and leaning
back, with his eyes half-shut, and his chin protruded, as he took an
unusually long inhalation from his pipe; "Psha, man!--send verses to the
right-about--fit for girls going to school of a Sunday; full-grown men
more up to snuff. I've seen the world, Master Dealtry;--the world, and be
damned to you!--augh!"

"Fie, neighbour, fie! What's the good of profaneness, evil speaking and
slandering?--

     'Oaths are the debts your spendthrift soul must pay;
      All scores are chalked against the reckoning day.'
      Just wait a bit, neighbour; wait till I light my pipe."

"Tell you what," said the Corporal, after he had communicated from his
own pipe the friendly flame to his comrade's; "tell you what--talk
nonsense; the commander-in-chief's no Martinet--if we're all right in
action, he'll wink at a slip word or two. Come, no humbug--hold jaw. D'ye
think God would sooner have snivelling fellow like you in his regiment,
than a man like me, clean limbed, straight as a dart, six feet one
without his shoes!--baugh!"

This notion of the Corporal's, by which he would have likened the
dominion of Heaven to the King of Prussia's body-guard, and only admitted
the elect on account of their inches, so tickled mine host's fancy, that
he leaned back in his chair, and indulged in a long, dry, obstreperous
cachinnation. This irreverence mightily displeased the Corporal. He
looked at the little man very sourly, and said in his least smooth
accentuation:--

"What--devil--cackling at?--always grin, grin, grin--giggle, giggle,
giggle--psha!"

"Why really, neighbour," said Peter, composing himself, "you must let a
man laugh now and then."

"Man!" said the Corporal; "man's a noble animal! Man's a musquet, primed,
loaded, ready to supply a friend or kill a foe--charge not to be wasted
on every tom-tit. But you! not a musquet, but a cracker! noisy,
harmless,--can't touch you, but off you go, whizz, pop, bang in one's
face!--baugh!"

"Well!" said the good-humoured landlord, "I should think Master Aram, the
great scholar who lives down the vale yonder, a man quite after your own
heart. He is grave enough to suit you. He does not laugh very easily, I
fancy."

"After my heart? Stoops like a bow!"

"Indeed he does look on the ground as he walks; when I think, I do the
same. But what a marvellous man it is! I hear, that he reads the Psalms
in Hebrew. He's very affable and meek-like for such a scholard."

"Tell you what. Seen the world, Master Dealtry, and know a thing or two.
Your shy dog is always a deep one. Give me a man who looks me in the face
as he would a cannon!"

"Or a lass," said Peter knowingly.

The grim Corporal smiled.

"Talking of lasses," said the soldier, re-filling his pipe, "what
creature Miss Lester is! Such eyes!--such nose! Fit for a colonel, by
God! ay, or a major-general!"

"For my part, I think Miss Ellinor almost as handsome; not so grand-like,
but more lovesome!"

"Nice little thing!" said the Corporal, condescendingly. "But, zooks!
whom have we here?"

This last question was applied to a man who was slowly turning from the
road towards the inn. The stranger, for such he was, was stout,
thick-set, and of middle height. His dress was not without pretension to
a rank higher than the lowest; but it was threadbare and worn, and soiled
with dust and travel. His appearance was by no means prepossessing; small
sunken eyes of a light hazel and a restless and rather fierce expression,
a thick flat nose, high cheekbones, a large bony jaw, from which the
flesh receded, and a bull throat indicative of great strength,
constituted his claims to personal attraction. The stately Corporal,
without moving, kept a vigilant and suspicious eye upon the new comer,
muttering to Peter,--"Customer for you; rum customer too--by Gad!"

The stranger now reached the little table, and halting short, took up the
brown jug, without ceremony or preface, and emptied it at a draught.

The Corporal stared--the Corporal frowned; but before--for he was
somewhat slow of speech--he had time to vent his displeasure, the
stranger, wiping his mouth across his sleeve, said, in rather a civil and
apologetic tone,

"I beg pardon, gentlemen. I have had a long march of it, and very tired I
am."

"Humph! march," said the Corporal a little appeased, "Not in his
Majesty's service--eh?"

"Not now," answered the Traveller; then, turning round to Dealtry, he
said: "Are you landlord here?"

"At your service," said Peter, with the indifference of a man well to do,
and not ambitious of halfpence.

"Come, then, quick--budge," said the Traveller, tapping him on the back:
"bring more glasses--another jug of the October; and any thing or every
thing your larder is able to produce--d'ye hear?"

Peter, by no means pleased with the briskness of this address, eyed the
dusty and way-worn pedestrian from head to foot; then, looking over his
shoulder towards the door, he said, as he ensconced himself yet more
firmly on his seat--

"There's my wife by the door, friend; go, tell her what you want."

"Do you know," said the Traveller, in a slow and measured accent--"Do you
know, master Shrivel-face, that I have more than half a mind to break
your head for impertinence. You a landlord!--you keep an inn, indeed!
Come, Sir, make off, or--"

"Corporal!--Corporal!" cried Peter, retreating hastily from his seat as
the brawny Traveller approached menacingly towards him--"You won't see
the peace broken. Have a care, friend--have a care I'm clerk to the
parish--clerk to the parish, Sir--and I'll indict you for sacrilege."

The wooden features of Bunting relaxed into a sort of grin at the alarm
of his friend. He puffed away, without making any reply; meanwhile the
Traveller, taking advantage of Peter's hasty abandonment of his
cathedrarian accommodation, seized the vacant chair, and drawing it yet
closer to the table, flung himself upon it, and placing his hat on the
table, wiped his brows with the air of a man about to make himself
thoroughly at home.

Peter Dealtry was assuredly a personage of peaceable disposition; but
then he had the proper pride of a host and a clerk. His feeling were
exceedingly wounded at this cavalier treatment--before the very eyes of
his wife too--what an example! He thrust his hands deep into his breeches
pockets, and strutting with a ferocious swagger towards the Traveller, he
said:--

"Harkye, sirrah! This is not the way folks are treated in this country:
and I'd have you to know, that I'm a man what has a brother a constable."

"Well, Sir!"

"Well, Sir, indeed! Well!--Sir, it's not well, by no manner of means; and
if you don't pay for the ale you drank, and go quietly about your
business, I'll have you put in the stocks for a vagrant."

This, the most menacing speech Peter Dealtry was ever known to deliver,
was uttered with so much spirit, that the Corporal, who had hitherto
preserved silence--for he was too strict a disciplinarian to thrust
himself unnecessarily into brawls,--turned approvingly round, and nodding
as well as his stock would suffer him at the indignant Peter, he said:
"Well done! 'fegs--you've a soul, man!--a soul fit for the forty-second!
augh!--A soul above the inches of five feet two!"

There was something bitter and sneering in the Traveller's aspect as he
now, regarding Dealtry, repeated--

"Vagrant--humph! And pray what is a vagrant?"

"What is a vagrant?" echoed Peter, a little puzzled.

"Yes! answer me that."

"Why, a vagrant is a man what wanders, and what has no money."

"Truly," said the stranger smiling, but the smile by no means improved
his physiognomy, "an excellent definition, but one which, I will convince
you, does not apply to me." So saying, he drew from his pocket a handful
of silver coins, and, throwing them on the table, added: "Come, let's
have no more of this. You see I can pay for what I order; and now, do
recollect that I am a weary and hungry man."

No sooner did Peter behold the money, than a sudden placidity stole over
his ruffled spirit:--nay, a certain benevolent commiseration for the
fatigue and wants of the Traveller replaced at once, and as by a spell,
the angry feelings that had previously roused him.

"Weary and hungry," said he; "why did not you say that before? That would
have been quite enough for Peter Dealtry. Thank God! I am a man what can
feel for my neighbours. I have bowels--yes, I have bowels. Weary and
hungry!--you shall be served in an instant. I may be a little hasty or
so, but I'm a good Christian at bottom--ask the Corporal. And what says
the Psalmist, Psalm 147?--

     'By Him, the beasts that loosely range
       With timely food are fed:
      He speaks the word--and what He wills
       Is done as soon as said.'"

Animating his kindly emotions by this apt quotation, Peter turned to the
house. The Corporal now broke silence: the sight of the money had not
been without an effect upon him as well as the landlord.

"Warm day, Sir:--your health. Oh! forgot you emptied jug--baugh! You said
you were not now in his Majesty's service: beg pardon--were you ever?"

"Why, once I was; many years ago."

"Ah!--and what regiment? I was in the forty-second. Heard of the
forty-second? Colonel's name, Dysart; captain's, Trotter; corporal's,
Bunting, at your service."

"I am much obliged by your confidence," said the Traveller drily. "I dare
say you have seen much service."

"Service! Ah! may well say that;--twenty-three years' hard work: and not
the better for it! A man that loves his country is 'titled to a
pension--that's my mind!--but the world don't smile upon
corporals--augh!"

Here Peter re-appeared with a fresh supply of the October, and an
assurance that the cold meat would speedily follow.

"I hope yourself and this gentleman will bear me company," said the
Traveller, passing the jug to the Corporal; and in a few moments, so well
pleased grew the trio with each other, that the sound of their laughter
came loud and frequent to the ears of the good housewife within.

The traveller now seemed to the Corporal and mine host a right jolly,
good-humoured fellow. Not, however, that he bore a fair share in the
conversation--he rather promoted the hilarity of his new acquaintances
than led it. He laughed heartily at Peter's jests, and the Corporal's
repartees; and the latter, by degrees, assuming the usual sway he bore in
the circle of the village, contrived, before the viands were on the
table, to monopolize the whole conversation.

The Traveller found in the repast a new excuse for silence. He ate with a
most prodigious and most contagious appetite; and in a few seconds the
knife and fork of the Corporal were as busily engaged as if he had only
three minutes to spare between a march and a dinner.

"This is a pretty, retired spot," quoth the Traveller, as at length he
finished his repast, and threw himself back on his chair--a very pretty
spot. Whose neat old-fashioned house was that I passed on the green, with
the gable-ends and the flower-plots in front?

"Oh, the Squire's," answered Peter; "Squire Lester's an excellent
gentleman."

"A rich man, I should think, for these parts; the best house I have seen
for some miles," said the Stranger carelessly.

"Rich--yes, he's well to do; he does not live so as not to have money to
lay by."

"Any family?"

"Two daughters and a nephew."

"And the nephew does not ruin him. Happy uncle! Mine was not so lucky,"
said the Traveller.

"Sad fellows we soldiers in our young days!" observed the Corporal with a
wink. "No, Squire Walter's a good young man, a pride to his uncle!"

"So," said the pedestrian, "they are not forced to keep up a large
establishment and ruin themselves by a retinue of servants?--Corporal,
the jug."

"Nay!" said Peter, "Squire Lester's gate is always open to the poor; but
as for shew, he leaves that to my lord at the castle."

"The castle, where's that?"

"About six miles off, you've heard of my Lord--, I'll swear."

"Ah, to be sure, a courtier. But who else lives about here? I mean, who
are the principal persons, barring the Corporal and yourself, Mr.
Eelpry--I think our friend here calls you."

"Dealtry, Peter Dealtry, Sir, is my name.--Why the most noticeable man,
you must know, is a great scholard, a wonderfully learned man; there
yonder, you may just catch a glimpse of the tall what-d'ye-call-it he has
built out on the top of his house, that he may get nearer to the stars.
He has got glasses by which I've heard that you may see the people in the
moon walking on their heads; but I can't say as I believe all I hear."

"You are too sensible for that, I'm sure. But this scholar, I suppose, is
not very rich; learning does not clothe men now-a-days--eh, Corporal?"

"And why should it? Zounds! can it teach a man how to defend his country?
Old England wants soldiers, and be d--d to them! But the man's well
enough, I must own, civil, modest--"

"And not by no means a beggar," added Peter; "he gave as much to the poor
last winter as the Squire himself."

"Indeed!" said the Stranger, "this scholar is rich then?"

"So, so; neither one nor t'other. But if he were as rich as my lord, he
could not be more respected; the greatest folks in the country come in
their carriages and four to see him. Lord bless you, there is not a name
more talked on in the whole county than Eugene Aram."

"What!" cried the Traveller, his countenance changing as he sprung from
his seat; "what!--Aram!--did you say Aram? Great God! how strange!"

Peter, not a little startled by the abruptness and vehemence of his
guest, stared at him with open mouth, and even the Corporal took his pipe
involuntarily from his lips.

"What!" said the former, "you know him, do you? you've heard of him, eh?"

The Stranger did not reply, he seemed lost in a reverie; he muttered
inaudible words between his teeth; now he strode two steps forward,
clenching his hands; now smiled grimly; and then returning to his seat,
threw himself on it, still in silence. The soldier and the clerk
exchanged looks, and now outspake the Corporal.

"Rum tantrums! What the devil, did the man eat your grandmother?"

Roused perhaps by so pertinent and sensible a question, the Stranger
lifted his head from his breast, and said with a forced smile, "You have
done me, without knowing it, a great kindness, my friend. Eugene Aram was
an early and intimate acquaintance of mine: we have not met for many
years. I never guessed that he lived in these parts: indeed I did not
know where he resided. I am truly glad to think I have lighted upon him
thus unexpectedly."

"What! you did not know where he lived? Well! I thought all the world
knew that! Why, men from the univarsities have come all the way, merely
to look at the spot."

"Very likely," returned the Stranger; "but I am not a learned man myself,
and what is celebrity in one set is obscurity in another. Besides, I have
never been in this part of the world before!"

Peter was about to reply, when he heard the shrill voice of his wife
behind.

"Why don't you rise, Mr. Lazyboots? Where are your eyes? Don't you see
the young ladies."

Dealtry's hat was off in an instant,--the stiff Corporal rose like a
musquet; the Stranger would have kept his seat, but Dealtry gave him an
admonitory tug by the collar; accordingly he rose, muttering a hasty
oath, which certainly died on his lips when he saw the cause which had
thus constrained him into courtesy.

Through a little gate close by Peter's house Madeline and her sister had
just passed on their evening walk, and with the kind familiarity for
which they were both noted, they had stopped to salute the landlady of
the Spotted Dog, as she now, her labours done, sat by the threshold,
within hearing of the convivial group, and plaiting straw. The whole
family of Lester were so beloved, that we question whether my Lord
himself, as the great nobleman of the place was always called, (as if
there were only one lord in the peerage,) would have obtained the same
degree of respect that was always lavished upon them.

"Don't let us disturb you, good people," said Ellinor, as they now moved
towards the boon companions, when her eye suddenly falling on the
Stranger, she stopped short. There was something in his appearance, and
especially in the expression of his countenance at that moment, which no
one could have marked for the first time without apprehension and
distrust: and it was so seldom that, in that retired spot, the young
ladies encountered even one unfamiliar face, that the effect the
stranger's appearance might have produced on any one, might well be
increased for them to a startling and painful degree. The Traveller saw
at once the sensation he had created: his brow lowered; and the same
unpleasing smile, or rather sneer, that we have noted before, distorted
his lip, as he made with affected humility his obeisance.

"How!--a stranger!" said Madeline, sharing, though in a less degree, the
feelings of her sister; and then, after a pause, she said, as she glanced
over his garb, "not in distress, I hope."

"No, Madam!" said the stranger, "if by distress is meant beggary. I am in
all respects perhaps better than I seem."

There was a general titter from the Corporal, my host, and his wife, at
the Traveller's semi-jest at his own unprepossessing appearance: but
Madeline, a little disconcerted, bowed hastily, and drew her sister away.

"A proud quean!" said the Stranger, as he re-seated himself, and watched
the sisters gliding across the green.

All mouths were opened against him immediately. He found it no easy
matter to make his peace; and before he had quite done it, he called for
his bill, and rose to depart.

"Well!" said he, as he tendered his hand to the Corporal, "we may meet
again, and enjoy together some more of your good stories. Meanwhile,
which is my way to this--this--this famous scholar's--Ehem?"

"Why," quoth Peter, "you saw the direction in which the young ladies
went; you must take the same. Cross the stile you will find at the
right--wind along the foot of the hill for about three parts of a mile,
and you will then see in the middle of a broad plain, a lonely grey house
with a thingumebob at the top; a servatory they call it. That's Master
Aram's."

"Thank you."

"And a very pretty walk it is too," said the Dame, "the prettiest
hereabouts to my liking, till you get to the house at least; and so the
young ladies think, for it's their usual walk every evening!"

"Humph,--then I may meet them."

"Well, and if you do, make yourself look as Christian-like as you can,"
retorted the hostess.

There was a second grin at the ill-favoured Traveller's expense, amidst
which he went his way.

"An odd chap!" said Peter, looking after the sturdy form of the
Traveller. "I wonder what he is; he seems well edicated--makes use of
good words."

"What sinnifies?" said the Corporal, who felt a sort of fellow-feeling
for his new acquaintance's brusquerie of manner;--"what sinnifies what he
is. Served his country,--that's enough;--never told me, by the by, his
regiment;--set me a talking, and let out nothing himself;--old soldier
every inch of him!"

"He can take care of number one," said Peter. "How he emptied the jug;
and my stars! what an appetite!"

"Tush," said the Corporal, "hold jaw. Man of the world--man of the
world,--that's clear."




CHAPTER III.

       A DIALOGUE AND AN ALARM.--A STUDENT'S HOUSE.

          "A fellow by the hand of Nature marked,
          Quoted, and signed, to do a deed of shame."
                 --Shakspeare.--King John.

          "He is a scholar, if a man may trust
          The liberal voice of Fame, in her report.
           Myself was once a student, and indeed
           Fed with the self-same humour he is now."
             --Ben Jonson.--Every Man in his Humour.

The two sisters pursued their walk along a scene which might well be
favoured by their selection. No sooner had they crossed the stile, than
the village seemed vanished into earth; so quiet, so lonely, so far from
the evidence of life was the landscape through which they passed. On
their right, sloped a green and silent hill, shutting out all view beyond
itself, save the deepening and twilight sky; to the left, and immediately
along their road lay fragments of stone, covered with moss, or shadowed
by wild shrubs, that here and there, gathered into copses, or breaking
abruptly away from the rich sod, left frequent spaces through which you
caught long vistas of forestland, or the brooklet gliding in a noisy and
rocky course, and breaking into a thousand tiny waterfalls, or mimic
eddies. So secluded was the scene, and so unwitnessing of cultivation,
that you would not have believed that a human habitation could be at
hand, and this air of perfect solitude and quiet gave an additional charm
to the spot.

"But I assure you," said Ellinor, earnestly continuing a conversation
they had begun, "I assure you I was not mistaken, I saw it as plainly as
I see you."

"What, in the breast pocket?"

"Yes, as he drew out his handkerchief, I saw the barrel of the pistol
quite distinctly."

"Indeed, I think we had better tell my father as soon as we get home; it
may be as well to be on our guard, though robbery, I believe, has not
been heard of in Grassdale for these twenty years."

"Yet for what purpose, save that of evil, could he in these peaceable
times and this peaceable country, carry fire arms about him. And what a
countenance! Did you note the shy, and yet ferocious eye, like that of
some animal, that longs, yet fears to spring upon you."

"Upon my word, Ellinor," said Madeline, smiling, "you are not very
merciful to strangers. After all, the man might have provided himself
with the pistol which you saw as a natural precaution; reflect that, as a
stranger, he may well not know how safe this district usually is, and he
may have come from London, in the neighbourhood of which they say
robberies have been frequent of late. As to his looks, they are I own
unpardonable; for so much ugliness there can be no excuse. Had the man
been as handsome as our cousin Walter, you would not perhaps have been so
uncharitable in your fears at the pistol."

"Nonsense, Madeline," said Ellinor, blushing, and turning away her
face;--there was a moment's pause, which the younger sister broke.

"We do not seem," said she, "to make much progress in the friendship of
our singular neighbour. I never knew my father court any one so much as
he has courted Mr. Aram, and yet, you see how seldom he calls upon us;
nay, I often think that he seeks to shun us; no great compliment to our
attractions, Madeline."

"I regret his want of sociability, for his own sake," said Madeline, "for
he seems melancholy as well as thoughtful, and he leads so secluded a
life, that I cannot but think my father's conversation and society, if he
would but encourage it, might afford some relief to his solitude."

"And he always seems," observed Ellinor, "to take pleasure in my father's
conversation, as who would not? how his countenance lights up when he
converses! it is a pleasure to watch it. I think him positively handsome
when he speaks."

"Oh, more than handsome!" said Madeline, with enthusiasm, "with that
high, pale brow, and those deep, unfathomable eyes!"

Ellinor smiled, and it was now Madeline's turn to blush.

"Well," said the former, "there is something about him that fills one
with an indescribable interest; and his manner, if cold at times, is yet
always so gentle."

"And to hear him converse," said Madeline, "it is like music. His
thoughts, his very words, seem so different from the language and ideas
of others. What a pity that he should ever be silent!"

"There is one peculiarity about his gloom, it never inspires one with
distrust," said Ellinor; "if I had observed him in the same circumstances
as that ill-omened traveller, I should have had no apprehension."

"Ah! that traveller still runs in your head. If we were to meet him in
this spot."

"Heaven forbid!" cried Ellinor, turning hastily round in alarm--and, lo!
as if her sister had been a prophet, she saw the very person in question
at some little distance behind them, and walking on with rapid strides.

She uttered a faint shriek of surprise and terror, and Madeline, looking
back at the sound, immediately participated in her alarm. The spot looked
so desolate and lonely, and the imagination of both had been already so
worked upon by Ellinor's fears, and their conjectures respecting the
ill-boding weapon she had witnessed, that a thousand apprehensions of
outrage and murder crowded at once upon the minds of the two sisters.
Without, however, giving vent in words to their alarm, they, as by an
involuntary and simultaneous suggestion, quickened their pace, every
moment stealing a glance behind, to watch the progress of the suspected
robber. They thought that he also seemed to accelerate his movements; and
this observation increased their terror, and would appear indeed to give
it some more rational ground. At length, as by a sudden turn of the road
they lost sight of the dreaded stranger, their alarm suggested to them
but one resolution, and they fairly fled on as fast as the fear which
actuated, would allow, them. The nearest, and indeed the only house in
that direction, was Aram's, but they both imagined if they could come
within sight of that, they should be safe. They looked back at every
interval; now they did not see their fancied pursuer--now he emerged
again into view--now--yes--he also was running.

"Faster, faster, Madeline, for God's sake! he is gaining upon us!" cried
Ellinor: the path grew more wild, and the trees more thick and frequent;
at every cluster that marked their progress they saw the Stranger closer
and closer; at length, a sudden break,--a sudden turn in the
landscape;--a broad plain burst upon them, and in the midst of it the
Student's solitary abode!

"Thank God, we are safe!" cried Madeline. She turned once more to look
for the Stranger; in so doing, her foot struck against a fragment of
stone, and she fell with great violence to the ground. She endeavoured to
rise, but found herself, at first, unable to stir from the spot. In this
state she looked, however, back, and saw the Traveller at some little
distance. But he also halted, and after a moment's seeming deliberation,
turned aside, and was lost among the bushes.

With great difficulty Ellinor now assisted Madeline to rise; her ancle
was violently sprained, and she could not put her foot to the ground; but
though she had evinced so much dread at the apparition of the stranger,
she now testified an almost equal degree of fortitude in bearing pain.

"I am not much hurt, Ellinor," she said, faintly smiling, to encourage
her sister, who supported her in speechless alarm: "but what is to be
done? I cannot use this foot; how shall we get home?"

"Thank God, if you are not much hurt!" said poor Ellinor, almost crying,
"lean on me--heavier--pray. Only try and reach the house, and we can then
stay there till Mr. Aram sends home for the carriage."

"But what will he think? how strange it will seem!" said Madeline, the
colour once more visiting her cheek, which a moment since had been
blanched as pale as death.

"Is this a time for scruples and ceremony?" said Ellinor. "Come! I
entreat you, come; if you linger thus, the man may take courage and
attack us yet. There! that's right! Is the pain very great?"

"I do not mind the pain," murmured Madeline; "but if he should think we
intrude? His habits are so reserved--so secluded; indeed I fear--"

"Intrude!" interrupted Ellinor. "Do you think so ill of him?--Do you
suppose that, hermit as he is, he has lost common humanity? But lean more
on me, dearest; you do not know how strong I am!"

Thus alternately chiding, caressing, and encouraging her sister, Ellinor
led on the sufferer, till they had crossed the plain, though with
slowness and labour, and stood before the porch of the Recluse's house.
They had looked back from time to time, but the cause of so much alarm
appeared no more. This they deemed a sufficient evidence of the justice
of their apprehensions.

Madeline would even now fain have detained her sister's hand from the
bell that hung without the porch half imbedded in ivy; but Ellinor, out
of patience--as she well might be--with her sister's unseasonable
prudence, refused any longer delay. So singularly still and solitary was
the plain around the house, that the sound of the bell breaking the
silence, had in it something startling, and appeared in its sudden and
shrill voice, a profanation to the deep tranquillity of the spot. They
did not wait long--a step was heard within--the door was slowly unbarred,
and the Student himself stood before them.

He was a man who might, perhaps, have numbered some five and thirty
years; but at a hasty glance, he would have seemed considerably younger.
He was above the ordinary stature; though a gentle, and not ungraceful
bend in the neck rather than the shoulders, somewhat curtailed his proper
advantages of height. His frame was thin and slender, but well knit and
fair proportioned. Nature had originally cast his form in an athletic
mould; but sedentary habits, and the wear of mind, seemed somewhat to
have impaired her gifts. His cheek was pale and delicate; yet it was
rather the delicacy of thought than of weak health. His hair, which was
long, and of a rich and deep brown, was worn back from his face and
temples, and left a broad high majestic forehead utterly unrelieved and
bare; and on the brow there was not a single wrinkle, it was as smooth as
it might have been some fifteen years ago. There was a singular calmness,
and, so to speak, profundity, of thought, eloquent upon its clear
expanse, which suggested the idea of one who had passed his life rather
in contemplation than emotion. It was a face that a physiognomist would
have loved to look upon, so much did it speak both of the refinement and
the dignity of intellect.

Such was the person--if pictures convey a faithful resemblance--of a man,
certainly the most eminent in his day for various and profound learning,
and a genius wholly self-taught, yet never contented to repose upon the
wonderful stores it had laboriously accumulated.

He now stood before the two girls, silent, and evidently surprised; and
it would scarce have been an unworthy subject for a picture--that ivied
porch--that still spot--Madeline's reclining and subdued form and
downcast eyes--the eager face of Ellinor, about to narrate the nature and
cause of their intrusion--and the pale Student himself, thus suddenly
aroused from his solitary meditations, and converted into the protector
of beauty.

No sooner did Aram gather from Ellinor the outline of their story, and of
Madeline's accident, than his countenance and manner testified the
liveliest and most eager sympathy. Madeline was inexpressibly touched and
surprised at the kindly and respectful earnestness with which this
recluse scholar--usually so cold and abstracted in mood--assisted and led
her into the house: the sympathy he expressed for her pain--the sincerity
of his tone--the compassion of his eyes--and as those dark--and to use
her own thought--unfathomable orbs bent admiringly and yet so gently upon
her, Madeline, even in spite of her pain, felt an indescribable, a
delicious thrill at her heart, which in the presence of no one else had
she ever experienced before.

Aram now summoned the only domestic his house possessed, who appeared in
the form of an old woman, whom he seemed to have selected from the whole
neighbourhood as the person most in keeping with the rigid seclusion he
preserved. She was exceedingly deaf, and was a proverb in the village for
her extreme taciturnity. Poor old Margaret; she was a widow, and had lost
ten children by early deaths. There was a time when her gaiety had been
as noticeable as her reserve was now. In spite of her infirmity, she was
not slow in comprehending the accident Madeline had met with; and she
busied herself with a promptness that shewed her misfortunes had not
deadened her natural kindness of disposition, in preparing fomentations
and bandages for the wounded foot.

Meanwhile Aram, having no person to send in his stead, undertook to seek
the manor-house, and bring back the old family coach, which had dozed
inactively in its shelter for the last six months, to convey the sufferer
home.

"No, Mr. Aram," said Madeline, colouring; "pray do not go yourself:
consider, the man may still be loitering on the road. He is armed--good
Heavens, if he should meet you!"

"Fear not, Madam," said Aram, with a faint smile. "I also keep arms, even
in this obscure and safe retreat; and to satisfy you, I will not neglect
to carry them with me."

"As he spoke, he took from the wainscoat, from which they hung, a brace
of large horse pistols, slung them round him by a leather belt, and
flinging over his person, to conceal weapons so alarming to any less
dangerous passenger he might encounter, the long cloak then usually worn
in inclement seasons, as an outer garment, he turned to depart.

"But are they loaded?" asked Ellinor.

Aram answered briefly, in the affirmative. It was somewhat singular, but
the sisters did not then remark it, that a man so peaceable in his
pursuits, and seemingly possessed of no valuables that could tempt
cupidity, should in that spot, where crime was never heard of, use such
habitual precaution.

When the door closed upon him, and while the old woman, relieved with a
light hand and soothing lotions, which she had shewn some skill in
preparing, the anguish of the sprain, Madeline cast glances of interest
and curiosity around the apartment into which she had had the rare good
fortune to obtain admittance.

The house had belonged to a family of some note, whose heirs had
outstripped their fortunes. It had been long deserted and uninhabited;
and when Aram settled in those parts, the proprietor was too glad to get
rid of the incumbrance of an empty house, at a nominal rent. The solitude
of the place had been the main attraction to Aram; and as he possessed
what would be considered a very extensive assortment of books, even for a
library of these days, he required a larger apartment than he would have
been able to obtain in an abode more compact and more suitable to his
fortunes and mode of living.

The room in which the sisters now found themselves was the most spacious
in the house, and was indeed of considerable dimensions. It contained in
front one large window, jutting from the wall. Opposite was an antique
and high mantelpiece of black oak. The rest of the room was walled from
the floor to the roof with books; volumes of all languages, and it might
even be said, without much exaggeration, upon all sciences, were strewed
around, on the chairs, the tables, or the floor. By the window stood the
Student's desk, and a large old-fashioned chair of oak. A few papers,
filled with astronomical calculations, lay on the desk, and these were
all the witnesses of the result of study. Indeed Aram does not appear to
have been a man much inclined to reproduce the learning he
acquired;--what he wrote was in very small proportion to what he had
read.

So high and grave was the reputation he had acquired, that the retreat
and sanctum of so many learned hours would have been interesting, even to
one who could not appreciate learning; but to Madeline, with her peculiar
disposition and traits of mind, we may readily conceive that the room
presented a powerful and pleasing charm. As the elder sister looked round
in silence, Ellinor attempted to draw the old woman into conversation.
She would fain have elicited some particulars of the habits and daily
life of the recluse; but the deafness of their attendant was so obstinate
and hopeless, that she was forced to give up the attempt in despair. "I
fear," said she at last, her good-nature so far overcome by impatience as
not to forbid a slight yawn; "I fear we shall have a dull time of it till
my father arrives. Just consider, the fat black mares, never too fast,
can only creep along that broken path,--for road there is none: it will
be quite night before the coach arrives."

"I am sorry, dear Ellinor, my awkwardness should occasion you so stupid
an evening," answered Madeline.

"Oh," cried Ellinor, throwing her arms around her sister's neck, "it is
not for myself I spoke; and indeed I am delighted to think we have got
into this wizard's den, and seen the instruments of his art. But I do so
trust Mr. Aram will not meet that terrible man."

"Nay," said the prouder Madeline, "he is armed, and it is but one man. I
feel too high a respect for him to allow myself much fear."

"But these bookmen are not often heroes," remarked Ellinor, laughing.

"For shame," said Madeline, the colour mounting to her forehead. "Do you
not remember how, last summer, Eugene Aram rescued Dame Grenfeld's child
from the bull, though at the literal peril of his own life? And who but
Eugene Aram, when the floods in the year before swept along the low lands
by Fairleigh, went day after day to rescue the persons, or even to save
the goods of those poor people; at a time too, when the boldest villagers
would not hazard themselves across the waters?--But bless me, Ellinor,
what is the matter? you turn pale, you tremble.'

"Hush!" said Ellinor under her breath, and, putting her finger to her
mouth, she rose and stole lightly to the window; she had observed the
figure of a man pass by, and now, as she gained the window, she saw him
halt by the porch, and recognised the formidable Stranger. Presently the
bell sounded, and the old woman, familiar with its shrill sound, rose
from her kneeling position beside the sufferer to attend to the summons.
Ellinor sprang forward and detained her: the poor old woman stared at her
in amazement, wholly unable to comprehend her abrupt gestures and her
rapid language. It was with considerable difficulty and after repeated
efforts, that she at length impressed the dulled sense of the crone with
the nature of their alarm, and the expediency of refusing admittance to
the Stranger. Meanwhile, the bell had rung again,--again, and the third
time with a prolonged violence which testified the impatience of the
applicant. As soon as the good dame had satisfied herself as to Ellinor's
meaning, she could no longer be accused of unreasonable taciturnity; she
wrung her hands and poured forth a volley of lamentations and fears,
which effectually relieved Ellinor from the dread of her unheeding the
admonition. Satisfied at having done thus much, Ellinor now herself
hastened to the door and secured the ingress with an additional bolt, and
then, as the thought flashed upon her, returned to the old woman and made
her, with an easier effort than before, now that her senses were
sharpened by fear, comprehend the necessity of securing the back entrance
also; both hastened away to effect this precaution, and Madeline, who
herself desired Ellinor to accompany the old woman, was left alone. She
kept her eyes fixed on the window with a strange sentiment of dread at
being thus left in so helpless a situation; and though a door of no
ordinary dimensions and doubly locked interposed between herself and the
intruder, she expected in breathless terror, every instant, to see the
form of the ruffian burst into the apartment. As she thus sat and looked,
she shudderingly saw the man, tired perhaps of repeating a summons so
ineffectual, come to the window and look pryingly within: their eyes met;
Madeline had not the power to shriek. Would he break through the window?
that was her only idea, and it deprived her of words, almost of sense. He
gazed upon her evident terror for a moment with a grim smile of contempt;
he then knocked at the window, and his voice broke harshly on a silence
yet more dreadful than the interruption.

"Ho, ho! so there is some life stirring! I beg pardon, Madam, is Mr.
Aram--Eugene Aram, within?"

"No," said Madeline faintly, and then, sensible that her voice did not
reach him, she reiterated the answer in a louder tone. The man, as if
satisfied, made a rude inclination of his head and withdrew from the
window. Ellinor now returned, and with difficulty Madeline found words to
explain to her what had passed. It will be conceived that the two young
ladies watched the arrival of their father with no lukewarm expectation;
the stranger however appeared no more; and in about an hour, to their
inexpressible joy, they heard the rumbling sound of the old coach as it
rolled towards the house. This time there was no delay in unbarring the
door.




CHAPTER IV.

     THE SOLILOQUY, AND THE CHARACTER, OF A RECLUSE.--THE
               INTERRUPTION.

          "Or let my lamp at midnight hour
          Be seen in some high lonely tower,
          Where I may oft outwatch the Bear,
          Or thrice-great Hermes, and unsphere
          The spirit of Plato."
              --Milton.--Il Penseroso.

As Aram assisted the beautiful Madeline into the carriage--as he listened
to her sweet voice--as he marked the grateful expression of her soft
eyes--as he felt the slight yet warm pressure of her fairy hand, that
vague sensation of delight which preludes love, for the first time, in
his sterile and solitary life, agitated his breast. Lester held out his
hand to him with a frank cordiality which the scholar could not resist.

"Do not let us be strangers, Mr. Aram," said he warmly. "It is not often
that I press for companionship out of my own circle; but in your company
I should find pleasure as well as instruction. Let us break the ice
boldly, and at once. Come and dine with me to-morrow, and Ellinor shall
sing to us in the evening."

The excuse died upon Aram's lips. Another glance at Madeline conquered
the remains of his reserve: he accepted the invitation, and he could not
but mark, with an unfamiliar emotion of the heart, that the eyes of
Madeline sparkled as he did so.

With an abstracted air, and arms folded across his breast, he gazed after
the carriage till the winding of the valley snatched it from his view. He
then, waking from his reverie with a start, turned into the house, and
carefully closing and barring the door, mounted with slow steps to the
lofty chamber with which, the better to indulge his astronomical
researches, he had crested his lonely abode.

It was now night. The Heavens broadened round him in all the loving yet
august tranquillity of the season and the hour; the stars bathed the
living atmosphere with a solemn light; and above--about--around--

"The holy time was quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration." He looked
forth upon the deep and ineffable stillness of the night, and indulged
the reflections that it suggested.

"Ye mystic lights," said he soliloquizing: "worlds upon
worlds--infinite--incalculable.--Bright defiers of rest and change,
rolling for ever above our petty sea of mortality, as, wave after wave,
we fret forth our little life, and sink into the black abyss;--can we
look upon you, note your appointed order, and your unvarying course, and
not feel that we are indeed the poorest puppets of an all-pervading and
resistless destiny? Shall we see throughout creation each marvel
fulfilling its pre-ordered fate--no wandering from its orbit--no
variation in its seasons--and yet imagine that the Arch-ordainer will
hold back the tides He has sent from their unseen source, at our
miserable bidding? Shall we think that our prayers can avert a doom woven
with the skein of events? To change a particle of our fate, might change
the destiny of millions! Shall the link forsake the chain, and yet the
chain be unbroken? Away, then, with our vague repinings, and our blind
demands. All must walk onward to their goal, be he the wisest who looks
not one step behind. The colours of our existence were doomed before our
birth--our sorrows and our crimes;--millions of ages back, when this
hoary earth was peopled by other kinds, yea! ere its atoms had formed one
layer of its present soil, the Eternal and the all-seeing Ruler of the
universe, Destiny, or God, had here fixed the moment of our birth and the
limits of our career. What then is crime?--Fate! What life?--Submission!"

Such were the strange and dark thoughts which, constituting a part indeed
of his established creed, broke over Aram's mind. He sought for a fairer
subject for meditation, and Madeline Lester rose before him.

Eugene Aram was a man whose whole life seemed to have been one sacrifice
to knowledge. What is termed pleasure had no attraction for him. From the
mature manhood at which he had arrived, he looked back along his youth,
and recognized no youthful folly. Love he had hitherto regarded with a
cold though not an incurious eye: intemperance had never lured him to a
momentary self-abandonment. Even the innocent relaxations with which the
austerest minds relieve their accustomed toils, had had no power to draw
him from his beloved researches. The delight monstrari digito; the
gratification of triumphant wisdom; the whispers of an elevated vanity;
existed not for his self-dependent and solitary heart. He was one of
those earnest and high-wrought enthusiasts who now are almost extinct upon
earth, and whom Romance has not hitherto attempted to pourtray; men not
uncommon in the last century, who were devoted to knowledge, yet
disdainful of its fame; who lived for nothing else than to learn. From
store to store, from treasure to treasure, they proceeded in exulting
labour, and having accumulated all, they bestowed nought; they were the
arch-misers of the wealth of letters. Wrapped in obscurity, in some
sheltered nook, remote from the great stir of men, they passed a life at
once unprofitable and glorious; the least part of what they ransacked
would appal the industry of a modern student, yet the most superficial of
modern students might effect more for mankind. They lived among oracles,
but they gave none forth. And yet, even in this very barrenness, there
seems something high; it was a rare and great spectacle--Men, living
aloof from the roar and strife of the passions that raged below, devoting
themselves to the knowledge which is our purification and our immortality
on earth, and yet deaf and blind to the allurements of the vanity which
generally accompanies research; refusing the ignorant homage of their
kind, making their sublime motive their only meed, adoring Wisdom for her
sole sake, and set apart in the populous universe, like stars, luminous
with their own light, but too remote from the earth on which they looked,
to shed over its inmates the lustre with which they glowed.

From his youth to the present period, Aram had dwelt little in cities
though he had visited many, yet he could scarcely be called ignorant of
mankind; there seems something intuitive in the science which teaches us
the knowledge of our race. Some men emerge from their seclusion, and
find, all at once, a power to dart into the minds and drag forth the
motives of those they see; it is a sort of second sight, born with them,
not acquired. And Aram, it may be, rendered yet more acute by his
profound and habitual investigations of our metaphysical frame, never
quitted his solitude to mix with others, without penetrating into the
broad traits or prevalent infirmities their characters possessed. In
this, indeed, he differed from the scholar tribe, and even in abstraction
was mechanically vigilant and observant. Much in his nature would, had
early circumstances given it a different bias, have fitted him for
worldly superiority and command. A resistless energy, an unbroken
perseverance, a profound and scheming and subtle thought, a genius
fertile in resources, a tongue clothed with eloquence, all, had his
ambition so chosen, might have given him the same empire over the
physical, that he had now attained over the intellectual world. It could
not be said that Aram wanted benevolence, but it was dashed, and mixed
with a certain scorn: the benevolence was the offspring of his nature;
the scorn seemed the result of his pursuits. He would feed the birds from
his window, he would tread aside to avoid the worm on his path; were one
of his own tribe in danger, he would save him at the hazard of his
life:--yet in his heart he despised men, and believed them beyond
amelioration. Unlike the present race of schoolmen, who incline to the
consoling hope of human perfectibility, he saw in the gloomy past but a
dark prophecy of the future. As Napoleon wept over one wounded soldier in
the field of battle, yet ordered without emotion, thousands to a certain
death; so Aram would have sacrificed himself for an individual, but would
not have sacrificed a momentary gratification for his race. And this
sentiment towards men, at once of high disdain and profound despondency,
was perhaps the cause why he rioted in indolence upon his extraordinary
mental wealth, and could not be persuaded either to dazzle the world or
to serve it. But by little and little his fame had broke forth from the
limits with which he would have walled it: a man who had taught himself,
under singular difficulties, nearly all the languages of the civilized
earth; the profound mathematician, the elaborate antiquarian, the
abstruse philologist, uniting with his graver lore the more florid
accomplishments of science, from the scholastic trifling of heraldry to
the gentle learning of herbs and flowers, could scarcely hope for utter
obscurity in that day when all intellectual acquirement was held in high
honour, and its possessors were drawn together into a sort of brotherhood
by the fellowship of their pursuits. And though Aram gave little or
nothing to the world himself, he was ever willing to communicate to
others any benefit or honour derivable from his researches. On the altar
of science he kindled no light, but the fragrant oil in the lamps of his
more pious brethren was largely borrowed from his stores. From almost
every college in Europe came to his obscure abode letters of
acknowledgement or inquiry; and few foreign cultivators of learning
visited this country without seeking an interview with Aram. He received
them with all the modesty and the courtesy that characterized his
demeanour; but it was noticeable that he never allowed these
interruptions to be more than temporary. He proffered no hospitality, and
shrunk back from all offers of friendship; the interview lasted its hour,
and was seldom renewed. Patronage was not less distasteful to him than
sociality. Some occasional visits and condescensions of the great, he had
received with a stern haughtiness, rather than his wonted and subdued
urbanity. The precise amount of his fortune was not known; his wants were
so few, that what would have been poverty to others might easily have
been competence to him; and the only evidence he manifested of the
command of money, was in his extended and various library.

He had now been about two years settled in his present retreat. Unsocial
as he was, every one in the neighbourhood loved him; even the reserve of
a man so eminent, arising as it was supposed to do from a painful
modesty, had in it something winning; and he had been known to evince on
great occasions, a charity and a courage in the service of others which
removed from the seclusion of his habits the semblance of misanthropy and
of avarice. The peasant drew aside with a kindness mingled with his
respect, as in his homeward walk he encountered the pale and thoughtful
Student, with the folded arms and downeast eyes, which characterised the
abstraction of his mood; and the village maiden, as she curtsied by him,
stole a glance at his handsome but melancholy countenance; and told her
sweetheart she was certain the poor scholar had been crossed in love.

And thus passed the Student's life; perhaps its monotony and dullness
required less compassion than they received; no man can judge of the
happiness of another. As the Moon plays upon the waves, and seems to our
eyes to favour with a peculiar beam one long track amidst the waters,
leaving the rest in comparative obscurity; yet all the while, she is no
niggard in her lustre--for though the rays that meet not our eyes seem to
us as though they were not, yet she with an equal and unfavouring
loveliness, mirrors herself on every wave: even so, perhaps, Happiness
falls with the same brightness and power over the whole expanse of Life,
though to our limited eyes she seems only to rest on those billows from
which the ray is reflected back upon our sight.

From his contemplations, of whatsoever nature, Aram was now aroused by a
loud summons at the door;--the clock had gone eleven. Who could at that
late hour, when the whole village was buried in sleep, demand admittance?
He recollected that Madeline had said the Stranger who had so alarmed
them had inquired for him, at that recollection his cheek suddenly
blanched, but again, that stranger was surely only some poor traveller
who had heard of his wonted charity, and had called to solicit relief,
for he had not met the Stranger on the road to Lester's house; and he had
naturally set down the apprehensions of his fair visitants to a mere
female timidity. Who could this be? no humble wayfarer would at that hour
crave assistance;--some disaster perhaps in the village. From his lofty
chamber he looked forth and saw the stars watch quietly over the
scattered cottages and the dark foliage that slept breathlessly around.
All was still as death, but it seemed the stillness of innocence and
security: again! the bell again! He thought he heard his name shouted
without; he strode once or twice irresolutely to and fro the chamber; and
then his step grew firm, and his native courage returned. His pistols
were still girded round him; he looked to the priming, and muttered some
incoherent words; he then descended the stairs, and slowly unbarred the
door. Without the porch, the moonlight full upon his harsh features and
sturdy frame, stood the ill-omened Traveller.




CHAPTER V.

    A DINNER AT THE SQUIRE'S HALL.--A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO
   RETIRED MEN WITH DIFFERENT OBJECTS IN RETIREMENT.--DISTURBANCE
        FIRST INTRODUCED INTO A PEACEFUL FAMILY.

          "Can he not be sociable?"
                 --Troilus and Cressida.

        "Subit quippe etiam ipsius inertiae dulcedo;
         et invisa primo desidia postremo amatur."
                  --Tacitus.

          "How use doth breed a habit in a man!
          This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
          I better brook than flourishing people towns."
                 --Winter's Tale.

The next day, faithful to his appointment, Aram arrived at Lester's. The
good Squire received him with a warm cordiality, and Madeline with a
blush and a smile that ought to have been more grateful to him than
acknowledgements. She was still a prisoner to the sofa, but in compliment
to Aram, the sofa was wheeled into the hall where they dined, so that she
was not absent from the repast. It was a pleasant room, that old hall!
Though it was summer--more for cheerfulness than warmth, the log burnt on
the spacious hearth: but at the same time the latticed windows were
thrown open, and the fresh yet sunny air stole in, rich from the embrace
of the woodbine and clematis, which clung around the casement.

A few old pictures were paneled in the oaken wainscot; and here and
there the horns of the mighty stag adorned the walls, and united with the
cheeriness of comfort associations of that of enterprise. The good old
board was crowded with the luxuries meet for a country Squire. The
speckled trout, fresh from the stream, and the four-year-old mutton
modestly disclaiming its own excellent merits, by affecting the shape and
assuming the adjuncts of venison. Then for the confectionery,--it was
worthy of Ellinor, to whom that department generally fell; and we should
scarcely be surprised to find, though we venture not to affirm, that its
delicate fabrication owed more to her than superintendence. Then the ale,
and the cyder with rosemary in the bowl, were incomparable potations; and
to the gooseberry wine, which would have filled Mrs. Primrose with envy,
was added the more generous warmth of port which, in the Squire's younger
days, had been the talk of the country, and which had now lost none of
its attributes, save "the original brightness" of its colour.

But (the wine excepted) these various dainties met with slight honour
from their abstemious guest; and, for though habitually reserved he was
rarely gloomy, they remarked that he seemed unusually fitful and sombre
in his mood. Something appeared to rest upon his mind, from which, by the
excitement of wine and occasional bursts of eloquence more animated than
ordinary, he seemed striving to escape; and at length, he apparently
succeeded. Naturally enough, the conversation turned upon the curiosities
and scenery of the country round; and here Aram shone with a peculiar
grace. Vividly alive to the influences of Nature, and minutely acquainted
with its varieties, he invested every hill and glade to which remark
recurred with the poetry of his descriptions; and from his research he
gave even scenes the most familiar, a charm and interest which had been
strange to them till then. To this stream some romantic legend had once
attached itself, long forgotten and now revived;--that moor, so barren to
an ordinary eye, was yet productive of some rare and curious herb, whose
properties afforded scope for lively description;--that old mound was yet
rife in attraction to one versed in antiquities, and able to explain its
origin, and from such explanation deduce a thousand classic or celtic
episodes.

No subject was so homely or so trite but the knowledge that had neglected
nothing, was able to render it luminous and new. And as he spoke, the
scholar's countenance brightened, and his voice, at first hesitating and
low, compelled the attention to its earnest and winning music. Lester
himself, a man who, in his long retirement, had not forgotten the
attractions of intellectual society, nor even neglected a certain
cultivation of intellectual pursuits, enjoyed a pleasure that he had not
experienced for years. The gay Ellinor was fascinated into admiration;
and Madeline, the most silent of the groupe, drank in every word,
unconscious of the sweet poison she imbibed. Walter alone seemed not
carried away by the eloquence of their guest. He preserved an unadmiring
and sullen demeanour, and every now and then regarded Aram with looks of
suspicion and dislike. This was more remarkable when the men were left
alone; and Lester, in surprise and anger, darted significant and
admonitory looks towards his nephew, which at length seemed to rouse him
into a more hospitable bearing. As the cool of the evening now came on,
Lester proposed to Aram to enjoy it without, previous to returning to the
parlour, to which the ladies had retired. Walter excused himself from
joining them. The host and the guest accordingly strolled forth alone.

"Your solitude," said Lester, smiling, "is far deeper and less broken
than mine: do you never find it irksome?"

"Can Humanity be at all times contented?" said Aram. "No stream,
howsoever secret or subterranean, glides on in eternal tranquillity."

"You allow, then, that you feel some occasional desire for a more active
and animated life?"

"Nay," answered Aram; "that is scarcely a fair corollary from my remark.
I may, at times, feel the weariness of existence--the tedium vitae; but I
know well that the cause is not to be remedied by a change from
tranquillity to agitation. The objects of the great world are to be
pursued only by the excitement of the passions. The passions are at once
our masters and our deceivers;--they urge us onward, yet present no limit
to our progress. The farther we proceed, the more dim and shadowy grows
the goal. It is impossible for a man who leads the life of the world, the
life of the passions, ever to experience content. For the life of the
passions is that of a perpetual desire; but a state of content is the
absence of all desire. Thus philosophy has become another name for mental
quietude; and all wisdom points to a life of intellectual indifference,
as the happiest which earth can bestow."

"This may be true enough," said Lester, reluctantly; "but--"

"But what?"

"A something at our hearts--a secret voice--an involuntary
impulse--rebels against it, and points to action--action, as the true
sphere of man."

A slight smile curved the lip of the Student; he avoided, however, the
argument, and remarked,

"Yet, if you think so, the world lies before you; why not return to it?"

"Because constant habit is stronger than occasional impulse; and my
seclusion, after all, has its sphere of action--has its object."

"All seclusion has."

"All? Scarcely so; for me, I have my object of interest in my children."

"And mine is in my books."

"And engaged in your object, does not the whisper of Fame ever animate
you with the desire to go forth into the world, and receive the homage
that would await you?"

"Listen to me," replied Aram. "When I was a boy, I went once to a
theatre. The tragedy of Hamlet was performed: a play full of the noblest
thoughts, the subtlest morality, that exists upon the stage. The audience
listened with attention, with admiration, with applause. I said to
myself, when the curtain fell, 'It must be a glorious thing to obtain
this empire over men's intellects and emotions.' But now an Italian
mountebank appeared on the stage,--a man of extraordinary personal
strength and slight of hand. He performed a variety of juggling tricks,
and distorted his body into a thousand surprising and unnatural postures.
The audience were transported beyond themselves: if they had felt delight
in Hamlet, they glowed with rapture at the mountebank: they had listened
with attention to the lofty thought, but they were snatched from
themselves by the marvel of the strange posture. 'Enough,' said I; 'I
correct my former notion. Where is the glory of ruling men's minds, and
commanding their admiration, when a greater enthusiasm is excited by mere
bodily agility, than was kindled by the most wonderful emanations of a
genius little less than divine?' I have never forgotten the impression of
that evening."

Lester attempted to combat the truth of the illustration, and thus
conversing, they passed on through the village green, when the gaunt form
of Corporal Bunting arrested their progress.

"Beg pardon, Squire," said he, with a military salute; "beg pardon, your
honour," bowing to Aram; "but I wanted to speak to you, Squire, 'bout the
rent of the bit cot yonder; times very hard--pay scarce--Michaelmas close
at hand--and--"

"You desire a little delay, Bunting, eh?--Well, well, we'll see about it,
look up at the Hall to-morrow; Mr. Walter, I know wants to consult you
about letting the water from the great pond, and you must give us your
opinion of the new brewing."

"Thank your honour, thank you; much obliged I'm sure. I hope your honour
liked the trout I sent up. Beg pardon, Master Aram, mayhap you would
condescend to accept a few fish now and then; they're very fine in these
streams, as you probably know; if you please to let me, I'll send some up
by the old 'oman to-morrow, that is if the day's cloudy a bit."

The Scholar thanked the good Bunting, and would have proceeded onward,
but the Corporal was in a familiar mood.

"Beg pardon, beg pardon, but strange-looking dog here last evening--asked
after you--said you were old friend of his--trotted off in your
direction--hope all was right, Master?--augh!"

"All right!" repeated Aram, fixing his eyes on the Corporal, who had
concluded his speech with a significant wink, and pausing a full moment
before he continued, then as if satisfied with his survey, he added:

"Ay, ay, I know whom you mean; he had known me some years ago. So you saw
him! What said he to you of me?"

"Augh! little enough, Master Aram, he seemed to think only of satisfying
his own appetite; said he'd been a soldier."

"A soldier, humph!"

"Never told me the regiment, though,--shy--did he ever desert, pray, your
honour?"

"I don't know;" answered Aram, turning away. "I know little, very little,
about him!" He was going away, but stopped to add: "The man called on me
last night for assistance; the lateness of the hour a little alarmed me.
I gave him what I could afford, and he has now proceeded on his journey."

"Oh, then, he won't take up his quarters hereabouts, your honour?" said
the Corporal, inquiringly.

"No, no; good evening."

"What! this singular stranger, who so frightened my poor girls, is really
known to you;" said Lester, in surprise: "pray is he as formidable as he
seemed to them?"

"Scarcely," said Aram, with great composure; "he has been a wild roving
fellow all his life, but--but there is little real harm in him. He is
certainly ill-favoured enough to--" here, interrupting himself, and
breaking into a new sentence, Aram added: "but at all events he will
frighten your nieces no more--he has proceeded on his journey northward.
And now, yonder lies my way home. Good evening." The abruptness of this
farewell did indeed take Lester by surprise.

"Why, you will not leave me yet? The young ladies expect your return to
them for an hour or so! What will they think of such desertion? No, no,
come back, my good friend, and suffer me by and by to walk some part of
the way home with you."

"Pardon me," said Aram, "I must leave you now. As to the ladies," he
added, with a faint smile, half in melancholy, half in scorn, "I am not
one whom they could miss;--forgive me if I seem unceremonious. Adieu."

Lester at first felt a little offended, but when he recalled the peculiar
habits of the Scholar, he saw that the only way to hope for a continuance
of that society which had so pleased him, was to indulge Aram at first in
his unsocial inclinations, rather than annoy him by a troublesome
hospitality; he therefore, without further discourse, shook hands with
him, and they parted.

When Lester regained the little parlour, he found his nephew sitting,
silent and discontented, by the window. Madeline had taken up a book, and
Ellinor, in an opposite corner, was plying her needle with an air of
earnestness and quiet, very unlike her usual playful and cheerful
vivacity. There was evidently a cloud over the groupe; the good Lester
regarded them with a searching, yet kindly eye.

"And what has happened?" said he, "something of mighty import, I am sure,
or I should have heard my pretty Ellinor's merry laugh long before I
crossed the threshold."

Ellinor coloured and sighed, and worked faster than ever. Walter threw
open the window, and whistled a favourite air quite out of tune. Lester
smiled, and seated himself by his nephew.

"Well, Walter," said he, "I feel, for the first time in these ten years,
I have a right to scold you. What on earth could ma