e is sure,
if possible, to deface the pictures altogether, or to leave the lines
less clear. With Wilton he had done much to blot out and to confuse. At
first, memory seemed all a blank beyond the period of his schoolboy
days; but gradually one image after another rose out of the void, and
one called up another as they came. Still they were clouded and
indistinct, like the vague phantoms of a dream. It was with great
difficulty that he recollected any names, and could not at all tell in
what land it was, that some of the brightest of his memories lay. It was
all unconnected, too, with the present, and from it Wilton could derive
no clue in regard to the great change that was coming. Between him and
the future there appeared to hang a dark pall, which his eye could not
penetrate, but behind which was Fate. He tried to combat such feelings:
he tried long, as he rode, to conquer them; to put them down by the
power of a vigorous mind; to overthrow sensation by thought.
When, however, he found that he could not succeed, when, after many
efforts, the oppression--for I will not call it despondency--remained
still as powerful as ever, he mentally turned, as if to face an enemy
that pursued him, and to gaze full upon the inevitable power itself; all
the more awful as it was, in the misty grandeur which shrouded the
frowning features from his view. He nerved his heart, too, and resolved,
whatever it might be that was in store for him, whatever might be the
change, the loss, the adversity, which all his sensations seemed to
prophesy, that he would bear it with unshrinking courage, with resolute
determination; nay, with what was still more with one of his
disposition, with unmurmuring patience.
In the meanwhile, however, he strove, as he went along, to persuade
himself that the presentiment was but the work of fancy; that there was
nothing real in it; that he had excited himself to fears and
apprehensions that were groundless; that the expedition of the Earl to
Italy was but a temporary undertaking, and that it would most probably
make no change in his situation, no alteration in his fortunes.
Thus thought he, as he rode slowly onward, when, at the distance of
about a quarter of a mile, he perceived another horseman, proceeding at
a pace perhaps still slower than his own. The aspect of the country
between Oxford and London was as different in that day from that which
it is at present as it is possible to conceive. There is nothing in all
England--with all the chang