The bride was lifted on
her palfrey by two peers,--Margaret rode beside her gallantly
attended,--and Mrs Ann, who once more saw nobles contending for her
withered hand, and adjusting her silken rein, felt the long-faded
glories of her family revive, and led the van of the pompous procession
with as much dignity of demeanour, and as much glow of faded beauty,
once eminent and resistless, as if she still followed the gorgeous
nuptial progress of the princess palatine. They arrived at the
church,--the bride, the relatives, the splendid company, the
minister--all but the bridegroom, were there. There was a long painful
silence. Several gentlemen of the bridal party rode rapidly out in every
direction in which it was thought probable to meet him,--the clergyman
stood at the altar, till, weary of standing, he retired. The crowd from
the neighbouring villages, combined with the numerous attendants, filled
the church-yard. Their acclamations were incessant,--the heat and
distraction became intolerable, and Elinor begged for a few moments to
be allowed to retire to the vestry. “There was a casement window which opened on the road, and Mrs Ann
supported the bride as she tottered towards it, attempting to loose her
wimple, and veil of costly lace. As Elinor approached the casement, the
thundering hoofs of a horse at full speed shook the road. Elinor looked
up mechanically,--the rider was John Sandal,--he cast a look of horror
at the pale bride, and plunging his desperate spurs deeper, disappeared
in a moment. * * * * *

“A year after this event, two figures were seen to walk, or rather
wander, almost every evening, in the neighbourhood of a small hamlet in
a remote part of Yorkshire. The vicinage was picturesque and attractive,
but these figures seemed to move amid the scenery like beings, who, if
they still retained eyes for nature, had lost all heart for it. That wan
and attenuated form, so young, yet so withered, whose dark eyes emit a
fearful light amid features chill and white as those of a statue, and
the young graces of whose form seem to have been nipt like those of a
lily that bloomed too soon in spring, and was destroyed by the frost of
the treacherous season, whose whispers had first invited it to
bud,--that is Elinor Mortimer,--and that figure that walks beside her,
so stiff and rectangular, that it seems as its motion was regulated by
mechanism, whose sharp eyes are directed so straight forward, that they
see neither tree on the right hand, or glade on the left, or heaven
above, or earth beneath, or any thing but a dim vision of mystic
theology for ever before them, which is aptly reflected in their cold
contemplative light, that is the Puritan maiden sister of her mother,
with whom Elinor had fixed her residence. Her dress is arranged with as
much precision as if a mathematician had calculated the angles of every
fold,--every pin’s point knows its place, and does its duty--the plaits
of her round-eared cap do not permit one hair to appear on her narrow
forehead, and her large hood, adjusted after the fashion in which it was
worn by the godly sisters, who rode out to meet Prynne on his return
from the pillory, lends a deeper shade to her rigid features,--a
wretched-looking lacquey is carrying a huge clasped bible after her, in
the mode in which she remembered to have seen Lady Lambert and Lady
Desborough march to prayer, attended by their pages, while she proudly
followed in their train, distinguished as the sister of that godly man
and powerful preacher of the word, Sandal. From the day of her
disappointed nuptials, Elinor, with that insulted feeling of maiden
pride, which not even the anguish of her broken heart could suppress,
had felt an unappeaseable anxiety to quit the scene of her disgrace and
her misfortune. It was vainly opposed by her aunt and Margaret, who,
horror-struck at the event of those disastrous nuptials, and wholly
unconscious of the cause, had implored her, with all the energy of
affection, to fix her residence at the Castle, within whose walls they
pledged themselves he who had abandoned her should never be permitted to
place his foot. Elinor answered the impassioned importunities, only by
eager and clinging pressures of her cold hands, and by tears which
trembled on her eye-lids, without the power to fall.--“Nay, stay with
us,” said the kind and noble-hearted Margaret, “you shall not leave us!”
And she pressed the hands of her kinswoman, with that cordial touch that
gives a welcome as much to the heart as to the home of the
inviter.--“Dearest cousin,” said Elinor, answering, for the first time,
this affectionate appeal with a faint and ghastly smile--“I have so many
enemies within these walls, that I can no longer encounter them with
safety to my life.”--“Enemies!” repeated Margaret.--“Yes, dearest
cousin--there is not a spot where _he_ trod--not a prospect on which he
has gazed--not an echo which has repeated the sound of his voice,--that
does not send daggers through my heart, which those who wish me to live
would not willingly see infixed any longer.” To the emphatic agony with
which these words were uttered, Margaret had nothing to reply but with
tears; and Elinor set out on her journey to the relative of her mother,
a rigid Puritan, who resided in Yorkshire. “As the carriage was ordered for her departure, Mrs Ann, supported by
her female attendants, stood on the draw-bridge to take leave of her
niece, with solemn and affectionate courtesy. Margaret wept bitterly,
and aloud, as she stood at a casement, and waved her hand to Elinor. Her
aunt never shed a tear, till out of the presence of the domestics,--but
when all was over,--“she entered into her chamber, and wept there.”

“When her carriage had driven some miles from the Castle, a servant on a
fleet horse followed it at full speed with Elinor’s lute, which had been
forgotten,--it was offered to her, and after viewing it for some moments
with a look in which memory struggled with grief, she ordered its
strings to be broken on the spot, and proceeded on her journey. “The retreat to which Elinor had retired, did not afford her the
tranquillity she expected. Thus, change of place always deceives us with
the tantalizing hope of relief, as we toss on the feverish bed of life. “She went in a faint expectation of the revival of her religious
feelings--she went to wed, amid the solitude and desert where she had
first known him, the immortal bridegroom, who would never desert her as
the mortal one had done,--but she did not find him there--the voice of
God was no longer heard in the garden--either her religious sensibility
had abated, or those from whom she first received the impression, had no
longer power to renew it, or perhaps the heart which has exhausted
itself on a mortal object, does not find its powers soon recruited to
meet the image of celestial beneficence, and exchange at once the
visible for the invisible,--the felt and present, for the future and the
unknown.