These qualities,
with their adjuncts, had been always represented to her as co-existent
with an attachment to monarchy and Episcopacy, and vested solely in
those heroic characters of her ancestry, whose lives, and even deaths,
it was a proud delight to their young descendant to listen to,--while
all the opposite qualities,--all that man can hate, or woman
despise,--had been represented to her as instinctively resident in the
partizans of republicanism and the Presbytery. Thus her feelings and her
principles,--her reasoning powers and the habits of her life, all took
one way; and she was not only unable to make the least allowance for a
divergence from this way, but utterly unable to conceive that another
existed for those who believed in a God, or acknowledged human power at
all. She was as much at a loss to conceive how any good could come out
of that Nazareth of her abhorrence, as an ancient geographer would have
been to have pointed out America in a classical map.--Such was Margaret. “Elinor, on the other hand, bred up amid a clamour of perpetual
contention,--for the house of her mother’s family, in which her first
years had been passed, was, in the language of the profane of those
times, a scruple-shop, where the godly of all denominations held their
conferences of contradiction,--had her mind early awakened to
differences of opinion, and opposition of principle. Accustomed to hear
these differences and oppositions often expressed with the most unruly
vehemence, she had never, like Margaret, indulged in a splendid
aristocracy of imagination, that bore every thing before it, and made
prosperity and adversity alike pay tribute to the pride of its triumph. Since her admission into the house of her grandfather, the mind of
Elinor had become still more humble and patient,--more subdued and
self-denied. Compelled to hear the opinions she was attached to decried,
and the characters she reverenced vilified, she sat in reflective
silence; and, balancing the opposite extremes which she was destined to
witness, she came to the right conclusion,--that there must be good on
both sides, however obscured or defaced by passion and by interest, and
that great and noble qualities must exist in either party, where so much
intellectual power, and so much physical energy, had been displayed by
both. Nor could she believe that these clear and mighty spirits would be
for ever opposed to each other in their future destinations,--she loved
to view them as children who had “fallen out by the way,” from mistaking
the path that led to their father’s house, but who would yet rejoice
together in the light of his presence, and smile at the differences that
divided them on their journey. “In spite of the influence of her early education, Elinor had learned to
appreciate the advantages of her residence in her grandfather’s castle. She was fond of literature and of poetry. She possessed imagination and
enthusiasm,--and these qualities met with their loveliest indulgence
amid the picturesque and historical scenery that surrounded the
Castle,--the lofty tales told within its walls, and to which every stone
in them seemed to cry out in attestation,--and the heroic and chivalrous
characters of its inmates, with whom the portraits of their high
descended ancestry seemed starting from their gorgeous frames to
converse, as the tale of their virtues and their valour was told in
their presence. This was a different scene from that in which she had
passed her childhood. The gloomy and narrow apartments, divested of all
ornament, and awaking no associations but those of an awful
futurity--the uncouth habits, austere visages, denunciatory language,
and polemical fury of its inmates or guests, struck her with a feeling
for which she reproached herself, but did not suppress; and though she
continued a rigid Calvinist in her creed, and listened whenever she
could to the preaching of the non-conformist ministers, she had adopted
in her pursuits the literary tastes, and in her manners the dignified
courtesy, that became the descendant of the Mortimers. “Elinor’s beauty, though of a style quite different from that of her
cousin, was yet beauty of the first and finest character. Margaret’s was
luxuriant, lavish, and triumphant,--every movement displayed a conscious
grace,--every look demanded homage, and obtained it the moment it was
demanded. Elinor’s was pale, contemplative, and touching;--her hair was
as black as jet, and the thousand small curls into which, according to
the fashion of the day, it was woven, seemed as if every one of them had
been twined by the hand of nature,--they hung so softly and shadowingly,
that they appeared like a veil dropping over the features of a nun, till
she shook them back, and there beamed among them an eye of dark and
brilliant light, like a star amid the deepening shades of twilight. She
wore the rich dress prescribed by the taste and habits of Mrs Ann, who
had never, even in the hour of extreme adversity, relaxed in what may be
called the rigour of her aristocratical costume, and would have thought
it little less than a desecration of the solemnity, had she appeared at
prayers, even though celebrated (as she loved to term it) in the
Castle-hall, unless arrayed in satins and velvets, that, like ancient
suits of armour, could have stood alone and erect without the aid of
human inhabitant. There was a soft and yielding tone in the gently
modulated harmony of Elinor’s form and movements,--a gracious melancholy
in her smile,--a tremulous sweetness in her voice,--an appeal in her
look, which the heart that refused to answer could not have living pulse
within its region. No head of Rembrandt’s, amid its contrasted luxuries
of light and shade,--no form of Guido’s, hovering in exquisite and
speechful undulation between earth and heaven, could vie with the tint
and character of Elinor’s countenance and form. There was but one touch
to be added to the picture of her beauty, and that touch was given by no
physical grace,--no exterior charm. It was borrowed from a feeling as
pure as it was intense,--as unconscious as it was profound. The secret
fire that lit her eyes with that lambent glory, while it caused the
paleness of her young cheek,--that preyed on her heart, while it seemed
to her imagination that she clasped a young cherub in her arms, like the
unfortunate queen of Virgil,--that fire was a secret even to
herself.--She knew she felt, but knew not what she felt. “When first admitted into the Castle, and treated with sufficient
_hauteur_ by her grandfather and his sister, who could not forget the
mean descent and fanatic principles of her father’s family, she
remembered, that, amid the appalling grandeur and austere reserve of her
reception, her cousin, John Sandal, was the only one who spoke to her in
accents of tenderness, or turned on her an eye that beamed consolation.