SIBYLL.
While Montagu in anxious forethought awaited the revolt that Robin of
Redesdale had predicted; while Edward feasted and laughed, merry-made
with his courtiers, and aided the conjugal duties of his good citizens
in London; while the queen and her father, Lord Rivers, more and more
in the absence of Warwick encroached on all the good things power can
bestow and avarice seize; while the Duchess of Bedford and Friar
Bungey toiled hard at the waxen effigies of the great earl, who still
held his royal son-in-law in his court at Calais,--the stream of our
narrative winds from its noisier channels, and lingers, with a quiet
wave, around the temple of a virgin's heart. Wherefore is Sibyll sad?
Some short month since and we beheld her gay with hope and basking in
the sunny atmosphere of pleasure and of love. The mind of this girl
was a singular combination of tenderness and pride,--the first wholly
natural, the last the result of circumstance and position. She was
keenly conscious of her gentle birth and her earlier prospects in the
court of Margaret; and the poverty and distress and solitude in which
she had grown up from the child into the woman had only served to
strengthen what, in her nature, was already strong, and to heighten
whatever was already proud. Ever in her youngest dreams of the future
ambition had visibly blent itself with the vague ideas of love. The
imagined wooer was less to be young and fair than renowned and
stately. She viewed him through the mists of the future, as the
protector of her persecuted father, as the rebuilder of a fallen
House, as the ennobler of a humbled name; and from the moment in which
her girl's heart beat at the voice of Hastings, the ideal of her soul
seemed found. And when, transplanted to the court, she learned to
judge of her native grace and loveliness by the common admiration they
excited, her hopes grew justified to her inexperienced reason. Often
and ever the words of Hastings, at the house of Lady Longueville, rang
in her ear, and thrilled through the solitude of night,--"Whoever is
fair and chaste, gentle and loving, is in the eyes of William de
Hastings the mate and equal of a king." In visits that she had found
opportunity to make to the Lady Longueville, these hopes were duly
fed; for the old Lancastrian detested the Lady Bonville, as Lord
Warwick's sister, and she would have reconciled her pride to view with
complacency his alliance with the alchemist's daughter, if it led to
his estrangement from the memory of his first love; and, therefore,
when her quick eye penetrated the secret of Sibyll's heart, and when
she witnessed--for Hastings often encountered (and seemed to seek the
encounter) the young maid at Lady Longueville's house--the unconcealed
admiration which justified Sibyll in her high-placed affection, she
scrupled not to encourage the blushing girl by predictions in which
she forced her own better judgment to believe. Nor, when she learned
Sibyll's descent from a family that had once ranked as high as that of
Hastings, would she allow that there was any disparity in the alliance
she foretold. But more, far more than Lady Longueville's assurances,
did the delicate and unceasing gallantries of Hastings himself flatter
the fond faith of Sibyll. True, that he spoke not actually of love,
but every look implied, every whisper seemed to betray it. And to her
he spoke as to an equal, not in birth alone, but in mind; so superior
was she in culture, in natural gifts, and, above all, in that train of
high thought and elevated sentiment, in which genius ever finds a
sympathy, to the court-flutterers of her sex, that Hastings, whether
or not he cherished a warmer feeling, might well take pleasure in her
converse, and feel the lovely infant worthy the wise man's trust. He
spoke to her without reserve of the Lady Bonville, and he spoke with
bitterness. "I loved her," he said, "as woman is rarely loved. She
deserted me for another--rather should she have gone to the convent
than the altar; and now, forsooth, she deems she hath the right to
taunt and to rate me, to dictate to me the way I should walk, and to
flaunt the honours I have won."
"May that be no sign of a yet tender interest?" said Sibyll, timidly.
The eyes of Hastings sparkled for a moment, but the gleam vanished.
"Nay, you know her not. Her heart is marble, as hard and as cold; her
very virtue but the absence of emotion,--I would say, of gentler
emotion; for, pardieu, such emotions as come from ire and pride and
scorn are the daily growth of that stern soil. Oh, happy was my
escape! Happy the desertion which my young folly deemed a curse!
No!" he added, with a sarcastic quiver of his lip--"no; what stings
and galls the Lady of Harrington and Bonville, what makes her
countenance change in my presence, and her voice sharpen at my accost,
is plainly this: in wedding her dull lord and rejecting me, Katherine
Nevile deemed she wedded power and rank and station; and now, while we
are both young, how proves her choice? The Lord of Harrington and
Bonville is so noted a dolt, that even the Neviles cannot help him to
rise,--the meanest office is above his mind's level; and, dragged down
by the heavy clay to which her wings are yoked, Katherine, Lady of
Harrington and Bonville--oh, give her her due titles!--is but a
pageant figure in the court. If the war-trump blew, his very vassals
would laugh at a Bonville's banner, and beneath the flag of poor
William Hastings would gladly march the best chivalry of the land.
And this it is, I say, that galls her. For evermore she is driven to
compare the state she holds as the dame of the accepted Bonville with
that she lost as the wife of the disdained Hastings."
And if, in the heat and passion that such words betrayed, Sibyll
sighed to think that something of the old remembrance yet swelled and
burned, they but impressed her more with the value of a heart in which
the characters once writ endured so long, and roused her to a tender
ambition to heal and to console.
Then looking into her own deep soul, Sibyll beheld there a fund of
such generous, pure, and noble affection, such reverence as to the
fame, such love as to the man, that she proudly felt herself worthier
of Hastings than the haughty Katherine. She entered then, as it were,
the lists with this rival,--a memory rather, so she thought, than a
corporeal being; and her eye grew brighter, her step statelier, in the
excitement of the contest, the anticipation of the triumph. For what
diamond without its flaw? What rose without its canker? And bedded
deep in that exquisite and charming nature lay the dangerous and fatal
weakness which has cursed so many victims, broken so many hearts,--the
vanity of the sex. We may now readily conceive how little predisposed
was Sibyll to the blunt advances and displeasing warnings of the Lady
Bonville, and the more so from the time in which they chanced. For
here comes the answer to the question, "Why was Sibyll sad?"
The reader may determine for himself what were the ruling motives of
Lord Hastings in the court he paid to Sibyll. Whether to pique the
Lady Bonville, and force upon her the jealous pain he restlessly
sought to inflict; whether, from the habit of his careless life,
seeking the pleasure of the moment, with little forethought of the
future, and reconciling itself to much cruelty, by that profound
contempt for human beings, man, and still more for woman, which sad
experience often brings to acute intellect; or whether, from the purer
and holier complacency with which one whose youth has fed upon nobler
aspirations than manhood cares to pursue, suns itself back to
something of its earlier lustre in the presence and the converse of a
young bright soul,--whatever, in brief, the earlier motives of
gallantries to Sibyll, once begun, constantly renewed, by degrees
wilder and warmer and guiltier emotions roused up in the universal and
all-conquering lover the vice of his softer nature. When calm and
unimpassioned, his conscience had said to him, "Thou shalt spare that
flower." But when once the passion was roused within him, the purity
of the flower was forgotten in the breath of its voluptuous sweetness.
And but three days before the scene we have described with Katherine,
Sibyll's fabric of hope fell to the dust. For Hastings spoke for the
first time of love, for the first time knelt at her feet, for the
first time, clasping to his heart that virgin hand, poured forth the
protestation and the vow. And oh! woe--woe! for the first time she
learned how cheaply the great man held the poor maiden's love, how
little he deemed that purity and genius and affection equalled the
possessor of fame and wealth and power; for plainly visible, boldly
shown and spoken, the love that she had foreseen as a glory from the
heaven sought but to humble her to the dust.
The anguish of that moment was unspeakable,--and she spoke it not.
But as she broke from the profaning clasp, as escaping to the
threshold she cast on the unworthy wooer one look of such reproachful
sorrow as told at once all her love and all her horror, the first act
in the eternal tragedy of man's wrong and woman's grief was closed.
And therefore was Sibyll sad!