by the meanest of his former vassals, wounded deeply – "alas! is this the end of all my splendid visions? Was it for this that I have abandoned my country and my profession? Was it for this that I gave up the lord keeper's wig? To sit in the stocks and be pelted by Peter Cakebread? My race is run; my sun is set. Still, although the saints have conquered the sinner, shall they not crush his spirit? Do your worst, ye chosen of the Lord! degrade his person, confiscate his worldly goods, ye terrify him not, 'Si fractus illabatur orbis, CHAPTER XVII. THE KNIGHT'S LAST SCHEME. SEVERAL Weeks after the occurrence of the last scenes which have been depicted, Esther Ludlow was walking in the neighborhood of her new home. Her destiny seemed still perverse. Now that the great cause, to which her soul had been devoted, had triumphed over every obstacle, and had already established itself upon foundations never to be shaken; now that she could have gone exultingly forth, like Miriam, with timbrel and song of triumph, was she yet oppressed with a deep sense of her own. personal disappointment? A change had come over her destiny during the interval which had elapsed. Maudsley was still away, and nothing concerning his fate had reached her for a long time. But although an ocean rolled between them, their hearts were no longer separated by an unfathomable gulf of suspicion and mutual distrust. Maudsley had left New England, believing that Esther's affections had been alienated from him, doubting, indeed, whether there had ever been the faintest response upon her part to his deep and absorbing passion. He had, however, previously to his departure, allowed himself, as we have seen, to send a solemn warning to her, touching the character of the man who appeared to have exercised over her some mysterious and unnatural fascination. He would have been incapable, moved by jealousy alone, to have traduced the character of one, concerning whom he knew little, while he suspected much; but even had Esther been nothing to him, he would still have felt it his imperious duty to warn her of her danger, such reliance did he place upon his presentiments, his dim reminiscences, and the fragmentary knowledge which he had acquired through Cakebread's treachery. Neither did he hesitate, although a delicate sense of honor would at first seem to have forbidden it, to make full use of all the information conveyed to him by that crafty knave. The reader will judge in the sequel, whether the nature of the circumstances did not more than justify him in such a course. The very first letter received by him after his departure from New England was from Walter Ludlow. His own answer paved the way in the most natural manner possible, for a full and free explanation on the part both of the brother and sister. The clear sunlight of truth dissolved all the misty phantoms which had disturbed his reason, and he bitterly acknowledged and deplored the wilful and blind impetuosity by which he had both suffered and inflicted so much distress. But Esther was happy, when she reflected that her lover now sympathized fully, deeply with her own feelings; and his letters, which reached her at long intervals, breathed at once the most passionate devotion to herself, and the most ardent affection for the great cause which, in accordance with the enthusiastic temperament of that age of religion, his impressionable spirit had felt itself suddenly called upon, as was St. Paul's, by a supernatural voice, to reverence, and with all his heart to serve. Still his absence was protracted, and although Esther was aware that matters of deep import had occupied him, and required his presence in different parts of Europe, yet she felt sick at heart, when she reflected upon the many dangers that might still lie in his pathway. Reflecting intensely and sadly upon these matters, Esther lingered that morning in the leafless grove which extended westerly from her new abode. A presentiment of coming evil, for which she could not account, and which she could not shake off, weighed upon her spirit, as the coming thunder-storm oppresses and surcharges the yet cloudless atmosphere. The radiant autumn was no more. Bleak December, with its long nights of stormy darkness, and its short hours of pale and broken sunshine, sat upon its gloomy throne. The day was chill, the landscape brown and dreary. Suddenly Esther heard a step in the forest; she looked up, and for the first time in many months saw the form of Sir Christopher Gardiner. The warning images which had thronged her brain for the past hours, now seemed to have had their meaning. They seemed suddenly to have been compressed and concentrated into one threatening phantom, and that phantom wore the form of the hated and mysterious knight. She had thought him absent, never to return; she had almost deemed him dead, at least she had schooled herself into the conviction that his dark countenance was never again to be bent upon her own, that his stealthy step was never again to cross her path; when lo! at the very instant when her soul was most gloomy, when her heart hung like lead in her bosom, at that very instant Sir Christopher Gardiner stood before her. 'T was strange, she had certainly seen him, gliding beneath the leafless branches of an oak. That spare, Arab-like figure, those dark and frowning features, could not be mistaken; and yet, as she looked again, he was not there. Could he have passed her by without observing or without recognising her? Had he gone forward to the house which stood at no great distance from the spot? Was the apparition but a creation of her boding and disordered fancy? Had the earth suddenly gaped and swallowed him? It was a mystery, but every thing connected with the knight was a mystery. All that she knew was, that she had seen him within ten yards of the spot where she stood, and that now he had disappeared. While she was thus ruminating upon the strangeness of the circumstance, she felt herself suddenly seized from behind, . with determined although gentle force. She would have cried aloud, but even as in the motionless tortures of a night-mare, her tongue clove to the roof her mouth. She would have struggled, but her limbs refused to obey her will. A sensation as if, after all, she was but suffering the short-lived agony of a waking dream, overpowered her. In an instant afterwards her face was muffled in a cloak, her arms were bound, and thus pinioned, blinded, and deprived of all power of motion or utterance, she found herself rapidly borne away she knew not whither. Within five minutes afterwards, she felt herself gently deposited upon a seat, and after à brief delay, she learned by the rocking motion and the noise of dashing waves, that she had been placed in a boat, and was now upon the water. Whither, wherefore, or in whose company, she knew not. Not a whisper reached her ear, not a ray of light pierced the thick veil by which her vision was carefully shrouded. Gardiner's dark image rose again to affright her soul, and she entertained not a doubt that he was the author of this fearful misfortune, which had now befallen her, and seemed to threaten her destruction. Whether the knight, still brooding angrily over her absolute and peremptory rejection of his addresses, had returned after so long an absence to wreak that vengeance upon her which he had so darkly and obscurely threatened at their last and decisive interview; whether she had fallen suddenly into the hands of some prowling party of savages; whether she was now floating in a canoe, to be borne away into fearful captivity in the remote wilderness; whether she was to be placed on board some outward bound vessel, of which she knew there were one or two to set sail immediately from the colony, to be borne beyond the ocean, she knew not; and she lay shuddering, praying and anxiously expecting her doom with horror as intense as could pervade, without absolutely overmastering and destroying, a solitary woman's reason. An eternity of anguish seemed to have passed over her, al |