Chapter 30

You call it an ill angel it may be so,
But sure I am, among the ranks which fell,
'Tis the first fiend e'er counsell'd man to rise,
And win the bliss the sprite himself had forfeited.
OLD PLAY.

We must resume our narrative at the period when Mary Avenel was
conveyed to the apartment which had been formerly occupied by the two
Glendinnings, and when her faithful attendant, Tibbie, had exhausted
herself in useless attempts to compose and to comfort her. Father
Eustace also dealt forth with well-meant kindness those apophthegms
and dogmata of consolation, which friendship almost always offers to
grief, though they are uniformly offered in vain. She was at length
left to indulge in the desolation of her own sorrowful feelings. She
felt as those who, loving for the first time, have lost what they
loved, before time and repeated calamity have taught them that every
loss is to a certain extent reparable or endurable.

Such grief may be conceived better than it can be described, as is
well known to those who have experienced it. But Mary Avenel had been
taught by the peculiarity of her situation, to regard herself as the
Child of Destiny; and the melancholy and reflecting turn of her
disposition gave to her sorrows a depth and breadth peculiar to her
character. The grave--and it was a bloody grave--had closed, as she
believed, over the youth to whom she was secretly, but most warmly
attached; the force and ardour of Halbert's character bearing a
singular correspondence to the energy of which her own was capable.
Her sorrow did not exhaust itself in sighs and tears, but when the
first shock had passed away, concentrated itself with deep and steady
meditation, to collect and calculate, like a bankrupt debtor, the full
amount of her loss. It seemed as if all that connected her with earth,
had vanished with this broken tie. She had never dared to anticipate
the probability of an ultimate union with Halbert, yet now his
supposed fall seemed that of the only tree which was to shelter her
from the storm. She respected the more gentle character, and more
peaceful attainments, of the younger Glendinning; but it had not
escaped her (what never indeed escaped woman in such circumstances)
that he was disposed to place himself in competition with what she,
the daughter of a proud and warlike race, deemed the more manly
qualities of his elder brother; and there is no time when a woman does
so little justice to the character of a surviving lover, as when
comparing him with the preferred rival of whom she has been recently
deprived.

The motherly, but coarse kindness of Dame Glendinning, and the doating
fondness of her old domestic, seemed now the only kind feeling of
which she formed the