The Hampdens. Harriet MartineauЧитать онлайн книгу.

      CHAPTER I. A HONEYMOON IN MERRY ENGLAND.

      “Now you have seen the sea!” said Richard Knightley to his young bride, as they stood looking abroad from a point of the Cornish coast, at sunset, one bright April evening of 1635. “Now you have seen the sea at last!”

      “At last!” repeated the young bride who, at seventeen, felt as if she had been longing to see the sea for an immeasurable length of years. Aware that her husband looked to her for an opinion on the spectacle, she observed:

      “It is very beautiful; but—”

      “But not so grand as you had imagined. That is what I felt when my father took me to the coast, to see the company sail for the Plantations.”

      “That was from Plymouth.”

      “Yes; but my father came hither on a visit to Sir John Eliot; and we saw much of the coast as we travelled. I grew more afraid of the great ocean as I saw more of it, in winds and on cloudy days; and, being little better than a child then, I suffered under a torture of fear in hearing my father and Sir John Eliot discourse of the lot of those who went to the Plantations, and of the expediency of others following, if the times should grow too hard for honest men. Every night, after hearing these discoursings, I made a venture to pray that my father’s mind might be turned from carrying me away over the wide sea.”

      “I thank God that it was!” the young wife whispered. “I was but a young child then; and if you had gone away—”

      “We might yet have been married,” said Richard Knightley, smiling. “If Sir Richard Knightley and Sir John Eliot had emigrated, Mr. Hampden would not have been left behind. You and I should have understood each other on the voyage, and have been betrothed and married in some wild forest conventicle in Massachusetts; and we should now be looking forward to troubles from Indian chiefs, instead of our headstrong King. I should have been an office-bearer in the nearest township; and my Margaret would have had to spend her days in the dairy and at the spinning-wheel, instead of tending her flower garden at Fawsley. How would you have liked to entertain squaws, instead of the ladies of Northamptonshire squires?”

      Margaret shuddered. She would have been glad to be satisfied that her father would not ​even yet go to America. She knew that her husband had no such thought: but she was one of a family of nine; and the remotest hint of a family separation so complete and final always clouded her countenance and her spirits. Her husband comforted her with the assurance that such an emigration became more improbable from year to year; and that there were certain circumstances in her father’s position now which made it evident that his duty would lie in England henceforth.

      Margaret revived all the more rapidly for what she now saw. At that part of the horizon where the twilight and its mists seemed to have settled most darkly, a golden star rose up from the waters. It was the first spark of the moon; and as she showed her broad disk, the heaving of the sea-line against it delighted Margaret. She had never seen anything like it before.

      She could have sat for hours watching the progress of the moon’s trail upon the sea—gradual as the movement of the hand on the clock-face: but Richard and she had agreed to visit the ruins of the Priory by moonlight; and Richard held out his hand to lift her from the grass on which they were sitting.

      As they turned to go, Margaret said that she now understood the mournful vehemence of her father’s regrets that his friend Eliot could not breathe one breath of Cornish air, when he was pining in the Tower.

      “To think,” she exclaimed, “that he might have been living now—might have been playing the host to us, in health and strength, if his friends could have obtained for him either a trial or release! I well remember seeing the bitter tears that were wrung from my father, when he strove for this, and when the cold answers came which told him that all his efforts were in vain.”

      “He knew what such durance was,” Richard observed. “My father says that Mr. Hampden has never been the same man since that he was before the bolt of the Gate House prison was shot behind him.”

      “I do not know,” said Margaret. “I cannot remember so far back. But how he could be in any way better than he is now, who would undertake to say?”

      “It is only that he is of a graver countenance than was his wont; and perhaps that his strength of eye and of limb is less eminent. Ah! Margaret, we can understand now his affection for this spot, and his plan for our coming hither when we married.”

      “I believe he often dreams of Port Eliot, and the Priory, and the sea,” said Margaret. “And he well may,” she observed, as she paused, and turned for another view of the bay, and the dim lines of the opposite coast, and the moonlit open sea. “That ship—you see it in the shadow yonder—should be between us and the moon’s trail; and then it would be like the pictures. Pictures of the sea seem always to have a ship in the middle.”

      “I wonder,” Richard observed, “why that vessel is so deep in the shadow. It looks dangerous to hug the land in that way: but I suppose she has a reason.”

      “And we,” said Margaret, “have a reason for making better speed. My aunt will be sending searchers down to the sands, to see if we have fallen from the rocks.”

      “She thinks we are at the Priory ruins, my dear. Hark! It seems as if she had sent our whole party there, to look for us.”

      There were several merry voices singing about the ruins as the young couple arrived there. The travelling party had been a large one, for it included several bridesmaids—Knightleys and Hampdens—and the two Eliots, youths under the guardianship of Mr. Hampden; also cousin Harry Carewe, and his mother, Lady Carewe, who had had time, since she became a widow, to keep a strict and tender watch over the children of her long dead sister, Mrs. Hampden. All the party but Lady Carewe had turned out of the house for a ramble in the grounds before supper; and most of them had met at the Priory ruins, which were indeed the principal object within the park fence.

      “O Margaret!” cried her young sister Alice, running up as soon as Margaret appeared in the broad moonlight of the lawn, “did you ever see such a beautiful place as this before?”

      “No, dear; I never did,” her sister answered. Whereupon a booted and spurred figure emerged from the nearest arch, and made an obeisance of mock solemnity. It was John Eliot, who professed himself extremely flattered that his humble mansion was honoured with the approbation of his friends.

      “It is not the mansion,” Alice unceremoniously declared. She did not care for fine rooms, and great staircases, and galleries full of pictures. It was the green slope towards the sea that was so charming, and the rocks, and the bay, and those beautiful ruins, where one might play hide-and-seek all day long.

      “Is Henrietta taking her turn to hide?” Margaret asked. Henrietta, the next in age to Margaret, was in nominal charge of the younger ones; but it seemed as if she had forgotten them, and they her. Nobody could tell