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LEGENDARY LORE. BY ARCHEUS.

No. V.

THE ONYX RING.

PART II. CHAPTER I.

HASTINGS was lying on some straw, under a canopy of blankets and canvass, with a gipsy man and two or three boys beside him, when he was roused by a rough voice exclaiming, "Come, my lad, if you want to see this job, you must be up and stirring." He then remembered that before his lying down he had settled to accompany some of the men of the party, who were in league with smugglers, for the purpose of helping to land and run a cargo, which, owing to the shortness of the nights, was at this season a difficult undertaking. The party consisted of four men besides Hastings, and it was evident, from their tone and manner, that he had contrived to obtain their entire confidence. They walked for two or three miles at a swift pace till they came out upon the further side of a high bank, from which the dark line of the sea was faintly visible between two cliffs. Here they climbed up a steep ascent, covered with brushwood, at one side of the road, and remained still for ten minutes, till their leader whispered, "Hush-all right," and pointed out a light down below them, apparently from a cottage window. They then crept along a path above the road for a hundred yards, till they reached a point where they again clambered down upon the highway, and after crossing it moved on in a field towards a stile, where they all passed into the orchard of a farm-house, and found there at least fifty other men assembled for the same object. Hastings perceived, by the sounds from a neigh. bouring barn, that it was full of horses. There was a good deal of whispering among the men, and they evidently expected at every moment to receive the signal for rushing to the beach. The gipsy leader felt his way, with his followers, along the orchard hedge— for in the shadow of the trees it was pitch-dark-until they reached the house, where he spoke to a man who stood leaning against the door-post.

Hastings could not catch much of the conversation, but found that they were disputing about him. Suddenly the gipsy took him by the hand and pulled him towards the entrance, when the other said, "Come in, then," and opened the door. The gipsy and Hastings followed him, and found themselves in a low unfurnished room, with a candle on the floor. The man, who was tall and bulky, and dressed as a farmer, looked at Hastings, and said, "Who are you?" Hastings answered that he was nothing but a wanderer for amusement, who had known much of gipsies in his time, and continued to make friends with all he met. The man looked at him with a sharp but quiet eye, and said, "Well, I daresay you are honest, but you are running in the way of mischief that does not concern you. up here and make no disturbance."

Go

So saying he opened a small door at the foot of a narrow staircase, and held the candle to light the way up. Hastings saw that resistance would be useless, and walked up the stairs till he found himself in another small room, where there was hardly a trace of light.

He heard the door locked at the bottom of the staircase. Feeling about him, he found that there was no furniture within his reach; and his next object of interest was the window. Through this he saw the grey line of the sea and the mass of cliff on one side, but could distinguish nothing more. The waves were plainly to be heard beating at regular intervals on the beach. He had not spent five minutes in the room when he heard a whistle and then a swift trampling of men and horses, and the whole throng seemed dashing downwards to the shore. Then came a pistol-shot, and then several, and then a roar of voices. The rush sounded as if returning nearer and nearer to the farm-house. Again some scattered shots were fired, and now Hastings thought he distin

guished the voice of an officer giving orders. Here the tumult approached close to him, and it flashed upon his mind that if the smugglers should retreat, and he be found in their headquarters, his position as a gentleman and a naval officer would be very disagreeable. He, therefore, forced open the window, leapt out at a venture, and fell among a crowd of people, spraining his leg so violently as to give him severe pain. There were many voices loud around him, and clamour and curses expressed the astonishment that his fall had occasioned. But he had sufficient presence of mind to ask for help in the gipsy speech, and the consequence was, that one of his former companions recognised him, and called another to his assistance. Between them they lifted Hastings up, and carried him off at full speed through the retreating hurly-burly. The king's men still hung upon their rear, and prevented them from relaxing in their pace. But most of the loaded horses had gone on before, and the remainder now dispersed in different directions as the roads opened on either hand. Still a body of more than a dozen men held together about Hastings, and twice his bearers were relieved. The pain now became so sharp that he begged they would leave him at the first house. Two or three of the leaders consulted for a moment, and then they all went on again in silence for a quarter of an hour. It was now twilight, and Hastings could see that they stopped at a small gate, which they opened, and followed a short brick-paved path up to the door

of a respectable house. They seated him on the bricks at the door, with his back against the door-post, knocked violently to rouse the inmates, and then all ran off.

Their alarum succeeded, and in a few minutes a servant came to the door and opened it, accompanied by her master, wrapped only in a dressing-gown. When he saw a man lying at the door in the weak light of dawn, he enquired who he was, and what was the matter. Hastings told his name, and said that he was a friend of Sir Charles Harcourt, had met with an accident, and was in so much pain he would beg to be taken into the house, and to be allowed to reserve his story for another time.

The gentleman said that his name was Musgrave, and that he was the clergyman of the parish, and promised to do all in his power to relieve the sufferings of the stranger. He helped to carry him in and lay him on a bed, and, on hearing of the injury to the limb, sent for the nearest surgeon. He, on his arrival, pronounced that the recovery was likely to require several days, during which the patient must remain where he then was. He also ordered the proper applications. After he was gone, Mr Musgrave earnestly assured his new guest that he was most happy to have an opportunity of assisting any human being in distress, and that he need be under no uneasiness as to remaining there so long as it should be convenient to him. Hastings was now a little more at ease, and could thank him for his kindness, which he gladly accepted.

CHAPTER II.

Mr Musgrave was an unmarried clergyman, whose whole look and manner bore the impress of devotion. Delicacy, purity, gentleness, fervour, were combined in his countenance with a shade of pensive melancholy. A thin ascetic-looking face, a high narrow forehead, a slight and bending figure, and a demeanour of the most careful politeness; over these was thrown an air of abstraction, which kept him apart from intimacy with any circle of society. The Bible was the world he lived in, and from it he looked out into the actual world as we look from he earth into the dim atmosphere, or From an island over the sea.

Hastings felt himself, he knew not why, rebuked in the presence of Musgrave, although the clergyman spoke to him but little, and that with the most courteous and even friendly goodwill. But, while the traveller felt that his host had no sympathy with his pursuits or character, he perceived in him an elevation and self-denial which made it impossible to regard him as an inferior, insensible to some higher kind of excellence. He did not attempt to speak on religious, or, as Hastings would have termed it, professional topics. But it was obvious that nothing local and temporary interested him strongly, and yet that

his mind was most fully strained by perpetual thoughts of momentous importance.

It was, of course, by his care that, on a small table beside the bed, there was a Bible laid. When, some hours after the arrival of Hastings, he came to pay his guest a visit, he laid another volume beside the Scriptures, which, on subsequent examination, appeared to be a Prayer-book; and after he was gone, a servant, who came in with some refreshments, added a third book, which the patient found to be a volume of hymns. In weariness and listlessness he took up this and opened it at the following verses, which he read through, and which seemed to him so strange that he then went through them a second time. But the impression which they made on him was that of a perplexing and enticing riddle, rather than of any definite meaning which he could fully grasp.

1.

"See, through nature's blackest night,
Shines a more than sunny light!
God, a man by human birth,
Comes to die for man on earth.

2.

"Shouts of joy and songs of love O'er the captive sound above; Forth from evil's hopeless prison, Man is raised, for Christ has risen.

3.

"Mount, then, up, my soul, to God,
Soar from off this earthly sod;
Mount to God beyond the skies,
Christ is risen, and bids thee rise.
4.

"Fly this dreary stormy shore;
Rise where Christ is gone before;
Fear not God himself to see,
Christ, his image, lives in thee.

5.

"Face to face, O Father, now Frowns no more thy starry brow; Why should we our Maker shun, Now thy life and ours are one?

6.

"Men may dare thy light to scan;
By thee sits the Son of Man:
Men may soar to highest Heaven,
God as man to earth is given.

7.

"Thou to us in Christ art come, Come to call thy children home; Thou in him hast left the skies, But that we in him may rise."

The dreaming and monkish oddity of these thoughts struck him as quite unlike any thing he had known among intelligent men, and led his thoughts away to the Parsees and Santons of the East, and to one or two strange old fragments of Christian hymns which he had heard under picturesque and impressive circumstances in Spain and at Jerusalem. Something unusual, he knew not what, seemed clinging to him, and he felt half relieved, half interrupted by the entrance of Sir Charles Harcourt, to whom Musgrave had sent tidings of the traveller's condition. He had now to shape his story as plausibly as he could, in order to avoid unnecessary ridicule from his friends. A midnight ramble with the gipsics he could not but acknowledge, and his reputation for hare-brained adventure was well enough established to make any thing of the kind credible. Sir Charles promised to send him books, and to come to see him. But Hastings could not help faneying that, under an exterior of the most amicable politeness, his friend was inwardly laughing at him. He felt pleased at his departure, and said to himself, "With all his taste and fashion, he is but a poor ladylike creature."

In the afternoon Musgrave came again to see him. The hymn, and the fancies it had suggested, were seething in his brain, and he felt a little stronger interest than before in the clergyman who sat beside his bed and asked if he could render him any service. Hastings thanked him, and said, "No." He then closed his eyes, and added, "It seems to me very strange that I should be here now, with you sitting by me. The last time I was laid up it was by a wound received in a lionhunt among the Caffres. I was confined for three weeks in one of their huts, and attended by a copper-coloured girl, who had never seen another European. She sang to me the songs of her tribe in a low droning voice, and told me stories of their chases after the cameleopard and the rhinoceros. She spoke of their charms against snake-bites and poisoned arrows, and of the powers of their Amakiras or witch-doctors. Then she brought me drink in a calabash, and morsels of broiled antelope, and fanned me with a fan of leaves. Even now, when I shut my eyes, I can hardly help fancying that I am a stranger in

"No doubt. But while in this state of existence I take the best that it can supply, and that is movement, change, exertion, enjoyment."

that African village, and when I hear a step at a distance, I have before me for a moment the image of that poor savage girl, though few European footsteps are as light as hers." Musgrave seemed interested, and asked him about his travels, which Hastings spoke of with eagerness and vivacity. While he talked it seemed as if the round green world were spinning under him, while he occupied some starry post, and looking down described each country at the moment that the real map revolved beneath his eye. Cities, nations, landscapes, races of animals, seas of islands, fleets, caravans, and adventures, arose, and shifted, and passed away like dreams.

When he paused, Musgrave looked upward and then at him, and said in a subdued voice, " In any of your travels, Mr Hastings, did you ever find peace of mind?”

He was silent for a minute, and then replied, "No, I never sought it; I should not know what to do with it if I had it. But I found ever-varying, never-ceasing excitement, and I suppose that is as much as earth can furnish."

"As much indeed," said Musgrave. "For peace we must look elsewhere." "To heaven?" asked the other.

"If we have not something of heaven even here, I fear we can hope for but little of it hereafter. Peace and life are not at war with each other, but each in the highest sense requires and includes the other. Perhaps this is a kind of truth of which in all your travels you have not experienced the reality."

"Certainly I have never managed to be asleep and awake at the same time."

"Well, if I took your own illustration, I should say that the true peace of the spirit of man is not to be found when it is the slave of its dreams, but when it is the lord of its thoughts. And this is also the state in which it is most conscious of enjoying the deepest and fullest life. But I will not trouble you with disputing. only wish you would believe that there is one region of human existence in which you have not yet sufficiently travelled, and which is not the meanest or poorest."

I

Neither desired to continue the conversation, and Musgrave soon again left Hastings to himself.

CHAPTER III.

That strange hymn continued to float round the pillow, and the image of the clergyman perpetually returned to him. The traveller felt, that in Musgrave's deep and fervent sincerity of devotion, there was a kind of power by which he had never before been influenced. So, in bodily suffering, in mental disturbance, and in discontent at his own inaction, his life went on from day to day. Sir Charles Harcourt sent him the books he had promised, which were new and fashionable novels, and took no hold of his mind. Musgrave passed with him an hour or two daily, and he never could shake off the impression made by his manner and language. When he found this image wearisome, he could not rid himself of it as he had been used to do when any thing annoyed him, by shooting out into action, for he was confined by his injured limb to the room he had been first placed in. Vexed and fretted at a stillness

so unlike his usual life, he became at last thoroughly impatient. One day he gave vent to this feeling, in words of something like displeasure, while speaking to Musgrave. The clergyman's pale cheek coloured slightly, and, as was his fashion, he paused for a moment before he spoke. He then said to Hastings that he feared his society was burthensome, and begged his pardon if it were so, but assured him that he had been in the habit of visiting him only in hopes of being in some way useful or agreeable. The patient felt much ashamed at his own folly, entreated forgiveness, earnestly thanked Musgrave for all his kindness, and begged him to continue his visits as often as might be convenient to him. Indeed, he added, his host's company sometimes gave him a kind of strange obscure pleasure, such as he had never but once before experienced.

"Nine years ago," he said, "I was

I rose

travelling in Armenia, and the night fell while I was examining some noble ruins on the banks of the Araxes, with the peak of Ararat in view before me. I secured my horse in a nook of the decayed and shattered buildings, and lay down beside him for the night, when I heard at a great distance the sound of men's voices singing a hymn, which, to my present recollection, had much the rhythm and tone of one that struck me in your hymn-book. The singers were, doubtless, monks engaged in their evening devotions. and went a few paces in the direction of the sound to listen, when I saw a figure moving among the ruins, as if coming towards me, from the river. As he drew nearer, leaning on his staff, I saw by the moonlight that he much resembled pictures I have met with of Saint Joseph, the husband of Mary. When close at hand, he looked at me intently, and I felt that I had never seen so venerable a being. He then addressed me in the Armenian tongue, of which I had learnt something from the Mekhitaristes of San Lazaro at Venice, and he said, son, thou seekest many things on earth; but the one thing which thou needest thou seekest not; else wouldst thou find it with less journeying.' "And what,' I said, Father, is that?'

"Peace.'

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"Hast thou then found it ?' "If I knew it not, then, like others,

I should not believe in its existence. Farewell. Remember the measure of the divine song thou hast but now heard; and remember me.'

"He turned away, and in a moment was hidden by a massive pier. The feeling that his presence gave me I have never since experienced till I met with you."

Musgrave seemed much surprised and confused at this remark, but they parted for the night in very friendly terms. It was now the close of the week which Hastings had spent in a bodily inactivity hardly ever known to him before. That evening he spent, hour after hour, in reviewing the innumerable images of the past, which floated before him, and sometimes in forming plans for the future. At last it was deep night, and he heard the clock of the neighbouring church strike twelve. The last stroke had scarcely trembled away over the churchyard when he recollected the destiny to which he was subject, and saw standing before him, in the brightness of reality, the different beings in whose lot he had so lately sharedEdmonstone Harcourt - Wilsonand, lastly, Hastings. As in none of these had he been perfectly happy, and as little in his last character as in any of the former ones, he remembered, at the same time, that the power of the ring was not ended, and with little hesitation he breathed upon it, and named the name of Musgrave.

CHAPTER IV.

Musgrave went through the duties of his station with an exemplary zeal and devotion. But his heart was in his solitude, where in private study, meditation, and prayer, he cherished the mild and musing temper of an eremite. The world that he outwardly lived in lay at a distance from his apprehension; nor was he ever truly at ease and joyous but when he felt himself in an imaginary heaven conversing only with visionary beings and the transfigured personages of sacred story, or lost in the flaming beatitude of prayer and praise. He was respected, and even beloved by his parishioners, but as a creature of another race, a chance visitor to them from a different state of existence.

They thought of him less as a better

and wiser man, with a true and warm, but ennobled human heart, than as a seraphic phantom breathing always some celestial air, and having, instead of life-blood, an immaterial spirit.

He performed, however, his Sunday duties with meek and graceful fervour, and the worst and most embruted of those who heard him at least carried away the impression that he was a sincerely good and godly man. The next day, as indeed almost every day, he spent some hours in visiting different members of his flock. The cottages of the poor opened very various prospects of human life, which, as such merely, had to him but little meaning. In all the best, as much as in the worst, he saw only illustrations of the futility of all human

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