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CHAPTER VI.

"Now broach ye a pipe of malvoisie,
Bring pasties of the doe."

MARMION.

AGAIN and again the trumpets had sent forth their brazen summons to the guests in the Red Castle; yet, save the aged countess and her lovely niece, none were as yet assembled in the grand saloon.

And there, in high state, with liveried pages waiting at the doors at the lower end of the immense tapestried apartment, in strange contrast the one to the other, sat those two women, silent and alone, and both, as it would seem, oppressed by deep and anxious thought.

Had a painter been desirous of introducing into his noblest work the type of the most perfect majesty of womanhood in extreme age, and the ideal of female loveliness in its youthful prime, he could not have done so with more complete effect than by copying those ladies as they sate there, beneath the crimson canopy, upon the elevated deas at the upper end of the saloon, as if expecting to receive the homage of a glittering court.

The elder lady, not only as the wife and mother of one of the proudest races in the island, but as in her own line and person the descendant and direct heiress of one of the traditionary kings of Erin, was perhaps the haughtiest woman in the kingdom; yet was her haughtiness rather mental than personal—rather ideal and imaginary than practical or real. Her bearing and demeanor were framed and regulated upon a purely fanciful model; and as she was constantly representing to her own inner self, her wrongs, her sufferings, and her sorrows, as a dispossessed and discrowned sovereign, so was she continually considering and devising how, when she should be

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brought into contact with the usurping majesty of England, or his viceroy, she should best assert her dignity, and display her contempt of so brief a line, and ill-founded a succession.

It must not be supposed, however, that she had the slightest idea of ever asserting, or even the desire to assert, a dignity which her good sense assured her had departed not only from her house, but from her people forever. The stateliness of bearing and maintenance of personal grandeur, was but a tribute, which she thought it necessary to pay to the hereditary splendor of her race—and was so largely mixed with a sort of subdued mournfulness and serene depression of spirits, that they were thereby deprived of all that would otherwise have been both ludicrous and absurd. As it was, the most irrepressible of laughers could have discovered nothing at which to smile in the ancestral pride of that aged lady, even if she did sit beneath a royal canopy, and did exact service of the most profound humility, and upon the bended knee. The rather that the qualities of her mind and her personal appearance were alike adapted to the station which she asserted; and that her presence was such as could not fail to impress a stranger with something not far removed from awe; although her graciousness to her dependants, and her affection for her children, were maternally benevolent, and fond, even to tender

ness.

She was extremely old-far older than the ordinary term to which human life is protracted even at the utmost; and it seemed strange that one so aged should be the mother of a youth still in the first prime and power of mature manhood.But he was her last-born son, the child of her almost decrepitude, as of her sorrow; for she had borne six goodly sons before him to the great earl, his father; and, each after each, she had seen them perish almost before her eyes, by violent and untimely deaths-four on the battle-field, one on the stormy ocean, and one-too common a fate, alas! in those days—upon the blood-stained scaffold; so that they had despaired, at one

time, of leaving any scion to uphold the honors of their race. But in her old age she had borne this last and noblest of her boys,. Dermot O'Brien, to succeed to his father's dignities, when he, like all his race, fell for his loyalty to his king, and his faith in the God of his fathers, by the unsparing steel of the Puritan usurpers of all privilege, all prerogative, all liberty.

In person, the countess was taller than the utmost height to which women attain-overlooking all her attendants, and even her fair niece, almost by a head and shoulders; and, indeed, exceeding almost all the men of her clan in stature, with the exception of her son and some of his kindred chieftains, who were all proportioned, more or less, after the fashion of the sons of Arak. What rendered her height more conspicuous, was, that in despite the depredations of years, and the remarkable emaciation of her frame, she was still as erect and unbending as one of the pine-trees on her native mountains of Slievh-Buy. Years, indeed, seemed to have glided by her, as do the keenest blasts of heaven by those giants of the greenwood, shearing away the graces of their foliage, and minishing the grandeur of their umbrage, yet leaving them erect in unbended hardihood, and still proof against all, save steel or fire, or an earthquake's shock, to move them.

Her hair was as white as the untrodden snow on the loftiest mountain-peak, and as bright, as glossy, and as glittering, as when in her virgin beauty it shamed the wing of the wild raven by its rich metallic lustre. It was luxuriant too, as in her seventeenth summer, and was still braided on either side her broad, pale, lofty forehead, in plaited bands, and raised upon her crown in a tall, elaborate diadem of tresses, undisguised and undisfigured by the hideous hair-powder with which it was the mode of that day to change even the bright locks of youth and beauty.

Her lineaments were all high and noble; and it was evident that even when she was at her freshest and fairest, nobility and dignity, rather than softness or tenderness, must have been the

character of her countenance; for, although all her features were well-formed and handsome, they were all of that style which belongs to the keenest and most aquiline contour. Her brows were straight, and must have been of old strongly defined-though now, like her hair, they were silver white; and the eyes, which looked from beneath these, large, open, and undazzled as the eagle's, had a clear, penetrating glance, which seemed to pry into the very soul of whom she would scrutinise; and at such time, their lustre was intense, and almost painful to the beholder. The nose, though not prominent, was high and curved, with large, thorough-bred nostrils, which she had a habit of expanding, as if she would snuff the air, when chafed or irritated by anything which she deemed little or unworthy. Her mouth was well-shaped, although the lips were now thin and pale, and expressing rather firmness and resolution of character, than any more womanly feeling in their ordinary aspect; although at times, a smile of ineffable benevolence and softness would play over it, and light up all the face into loving warmth and lustre, even as a sunset gleam will at times irradiate a landscape, which all day long has been grave and lowering.

The Countess O'Brien-for so she preferred to be styled, regarding the name as older and more noble than the title which she bore of right-was clad suitably to her age, her sorrows, and her rank, in a plain robe of heavy black silk, covering her person from the collar-bone to the wrists, and to the clasps of her high-heeled shoes, perfectly plain and straight cut, and gathered in about her waist by a black velvet cincture with a jet buckle. A mantelet of black velvet, sitting closely to her shape, fell down to the ground, and extended in a train of several yards in length behind, which was borne, when she was in motion, by two handsome girls, who were now seated on low stools at the foot of the deas-and whose fresh, plump prettiness offered a striking, though of course unin

tentional, contrast to the grey-haired and attenuated majesty of their mistress.

She had no ornament of any kind upon her person, unless the diamond buckles in her shoes, which were then worn by every person of any distinction, can be called such, or her husband's signet-ring, which, notwithstanding her son's majority, she still bore as a thumb-ring; nor did she need any such-if the meaning of these things be to signify and render evident personal eminence and distinction—for if she had been clad in the coarsest servile weeds, her native aristocracy of bearing must have proved at once her title to hereditary honor.

Ellinor Desmond, as she sat beside her aged relative, on a seat something less elevated than her chair of dignity, was such as I have before described her, the fairest of a country and a race distinguished at all times by a high style of female loveliness. She had just reached that period of life when the young female has attained the fullest and most perfect development of every feminine charm; when every beauty of form, feature, and expression, is in its flower and flush of luxuriant ripeness; and before one of the graces, the delicacies, or the fresh softnesses of youth have yielded to the touch of time, or grown hard through contact with the world's stern realities.

She, too, was attired according to her age and station, but with a degree of taste peculiarly her own, and with more reference to the fine models of costume afforded by the portraits of the fair and noble of the middle ages, than to the frightful fashions of puritanical austerity, or the new modes of French frippery, which were becoming current latterly among the families of the cavaliers.

Her long robe-admirably fitted to the soft, undulating outlines of a shape which had never been disfigured by the pressure of the rigid whalebone which rendered the corsage of a lady of those days scarcely less iron than the corslet of her lord-was of rich emerald-colored velvet, just edged with a narrow stripe of gold, and gathered round her slender waist

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