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THE
Weird of the Wentworths;
A TALE OF GEORGE IV.'S TIME.
BY
JOHANNES SCOTUS.
All nations have their omens drear.
Their legends wild of woe and fear.
SIR WALTER SCOTT.
[Illustration: SANS CHANGER]
IN TWO VOLUMES.--VOL. I.
LONDON: SAUNDERS, OTLEY, AND CO., 66 BROOK STREET, HANOVER SQUARE 1862.
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING
CROSS.
PREFACE.
The objection may be raised that, as the major part of this Romance
takes place during the Regency, such a title as:--"The Weird of the
Wentworths; _a Tale of George IV.'s Time_,"--is inappropriate. When,
however, it is considered that the Regent was king in all but name, and
the manners, customs, and habits differed little after his accession,
the inadvertency will be explained.
In case of exception being taken to the language and sentiments of some
characters introduced into the tale, the Author thinks it sufficient to
say _he utterly repudiates them_! Oaths and ribaldry are, unfortunately,
the concomitants of a depraved mind; and, in delineating faithfully the
darker side of human nature, the Author felt himself compelled to sketch
much that has passed under his own observation, and much that he has
gleaned from the treatment of such characters by many distinguished
novelists, not omitting our northern luminary, Sir Walter Scott.
The moral of the Romance being the triumph of virtue over vice, and
truth over falsehood, he trusts that those fair readers, who may
indulge his work with a perusal, will avoid the dark, and embrace the
bright traits of the other sex; and, marking the gradual development of
rectitude in the character of his heroine, magnify their own by adhering
fixedly to the path of duty and moral conduct, amid all temptations to
swerve from it.
The Author trusts that those noble families, whose names he has chosen
as his _beaux ideals_, will kindly dismiss all personal associations
from their minds, and simply give to the synonyms (which his not
unpardonable preference led him to select) that weight which will ever
attach itself in the eyes of the world, to the great, when also good.
There is one more point which may give rise to discussion--the rapid and
violent deaths occurring in _one_ family. The WEIRD, which, though kept
in the background, is the mainspring of the tale, might explain this;
but that such catastrophes are not beyond the region of possibility, the
Author begs to remind his readers that in more than one family of rank,
whose names both his sympathy and delicacy forbid any allusion to, such
misfortunes and fates have actually happened.
Some of the death-scenes, and very many of the traditions and incidents
embodied in the work, are taken from real life, which often far
surpasses fiction.
_Portobello, near_ EDINBURGH.
_June 19th, 1862._
THE WEIRD OF THE WENTWORTHS;
A TALE OF GEORGE IV.'s TIME.
CHAPTER I.
"And a magic voice and verse
Hath baptized thee with a curse."--_Manfred._
The extent of parents' influence on their offspring has long been a
matter of dispute; yet the fact remains incontestable that children _do_
suffer for their parents' faults, that the sins of the father _are_
visited not only to the third and fourth generation, but often to a
distance that can scarcely be conceived. The leprosy of Naaman cleaved
to Gehazi's seed _for ever_, and it is said many of these unhappy
sufferers still trace their misery to their ancestor's mendacity. We
read in Grecian history how Myrtilus, as he sank, cursed the faithless
Pelops and his race for ever; and we see its dire effects in the
misfortunes of Agamemnon and Iphigenia:--
"Atoning for her father's sin,
A joyless sacrifice."
We might cite the Alcmaeonidae as another instance, and it is rather a
singular thing that in nearly every case faithlessness, or sacrilege,
has first armed the curse with its power. English annals present not a
few examples, and perhaps no "weird" ever crushed a noble race of high
name and lineage so cruelly, as that which is to be found among the
traditions of the Wentworths of Dun Edin Towers. Every scion of that
house was born a slave and bondman to this curse; two hundred and
seventy years have flown since it slew its earliest victim, and its
power is still as deadly, its shaft has lost none of its venom, and in
all that long series of generations no son or daughter of the Wentworths
has ever attained maturity, far less old age. The crown of glory, if it
be found in the right way, was denied them; and in the bloom of their
beauty, and pride of their strength, one by one, they sank beneath the
river of death, too often with all their sins full blown, and unrepented
of. Youth, strength, valour, talent, beauty, were sacrificed at the
shrine of the remorseless deity, and still unrelenting and unappeased
she watched over the race for evil.
Let us trace it back to its source, and having made our readers
acquainted with the origin of the "Weird of the Wentworths," we shall
next narrate the short lives and untimely deaths of one generation--the
brightest link in a long chain of misery; and if their lives were short,
they were full of romance and vigour, like the torrent, abrupt and
headlong in its course, and still reaching the same bourne that the slow
and tardy river only takes a longer period to arrive at.
Retrace, then, with us the scroll of English history till we come to the
sad page of the Commonwealth. It is not our intention to discuss whether
the Protector was right or wrong, but merely to narrate facts, as they
were.
Cromwell was about this time tolerably secure on his usurped throne--the
heir to the British crown a wandering exile in his native land. Those
were troublous times; days when a man's foes were often those of his
household; when the nearest and dearest ties were severed; and perhaps
under the same roof, dwelt the bigot republican, and the proud royalist
burning to avenge his king's wrongs; each looked on his neighbour with
uncertainty, each feared the other as a traitor in the camp. Cromwell
himself, raised to the utmost pitch of his ambition, was on an
unenviable height--his tiara was a crown of thorns--over his head hung
the sword of Damocles; and, having himself been a rebel to his monarch,
he now feared an assassin in every one who approached his presence, and
it is said almost entirely shut himself out of society, wearing chain
armour beneath his raiment. Still he had faithful supporters, staunch
friends, and loyal soldiers; and of all his admirers no more burning
republican existed than Sir Ralph de Vere, a general in the Protector's
army, one he had himself knighted on the field of Worcester. Sir Ralph,
from being an intolerant Catholic, had now become an intolerant
Protestant, and--
"with all the zeal
That young and fiery converts feel,"
warred against those whose cause he had once warmly espoused, and sought
the destruction of the creed of which he had once been the champion.
Very different from Sir Ralph was his first cousin Augusta de Vere,
then, in her own right, Countess of Wentworth, and Abbess of St.
Clements, a monastic pile on the Wye.
Augusta was the last prop of her declining creed; with tears of sorrow,
not unmixed with anger, she beheld stronghold after stronghold of Rome's
once mighty power surrender into the hands of the Philistines. More
deeply still she lamented the stain in her own family, and bewailed the
falling away of Ralph, the most valorous soldier of the cross in better
days, now the servant of one she deemed an arch impostor and hypocrite;
faithless to his name; doubly faithless to his king; and, worse than
all, faithless to his religion! But Augusta's was one of those noble
minds, which, while it hates the error, pities the erring, and by all
the means in her power she strove to reclaim her apostate cousin. The
Roman Pontiff had not only excommunicated him in this world, but
condemned his forfeit soul to everlasting torments, whilst Augusta, like
her Master, rather sought the wandering sheep, and ceased not night or
day with tears and vigil to remember him in her prayers. Augusta was
also a faithful partisan of the crownless Charles;--during all his
wanderings, as far as was in her power, she provided him with food and
raiment, and he had remained beneath her hospitable roof as long as
prudence would permit him; and when he quitted his ungrateful country
for more friendly shores till Fortune once more smiled on her favourite
son, the Abbess, at the risk of her life, had herself attended him to
the seaside, and blessed him ere he departed.
It was little wonder that when this became known in London, Augusta
brought down all the slumbering ire of Cromwell on her devoted head, and
though nearly six years had passed away since she waved her hand to the
fugitive king, he commissioned Sir Ralph de Vere to punish the haughty
peeress. Sir Ralph was just the man to execute his cruel designs. In his
bigoted hatred of Royalist and Catholic he even forgot how he was
indebted to Augusta for his very life in days when he had fought on the
side he now warred against, and was glad to avail himself of the
sanctuary St. Clements afforded him. It was nothing that she was his
near relative and he had sought her hand ere she had become the Bride of
Heaven; she was a Catholic, "and he that loveth friend more than me,"
said the stern presbyterian, "is not worthy of me;" it was nothing that
she was young and beautiful, so was Herodias' daughter; nothing that she
was good and generous--she was a Royalist, and doomed! On the 26th of
August, 1658, Sir Ralph appeared at the head of an army of fierce
Puritans on the banks of the beautiful Wye. Autumn had stained the
leaves red and yellow, and the golden sheaf still dotted many a field:
the air was calm, the scene one of peace and security, soon to be one of
bloodshed, rapine, and havoc!
Ravaging the country as they went, and leaving a wilderness behind them
where they found an Eden, at last the tall turrets of St. Clements
appeared over the embrowned woods. The scene that followed we shall not
describe; suffice to say the monks were hewn down at the altar, the
helpless inhabitants that lived on the hospitality of the Abbess
murdered in cold blood, without distinction of age or sex, and the fair
Abbess and her nuns turned into the damp woods, there miserably to
perish of hunger and cold.
It was to no account that Augusta pleaded her youth, her relationship,
their early love, his debt of life due to her; with a fierce frown he
bade her "begone," and threatened that, unless she obeyed, worse things
might follow. With a weeping band she departed, and amid their tears she
heard the blessings of those whom she had fed and clothed heaped on her
as she went out not knowing where to rest her head. Meanwhile Sir Ralph,
who now assumed the title of Earl, the guerdon promised by Cromwell as
the price of his slaughter, took possession of his new inheritance. The
gloomy moroseness of the Puritans is well known, and never was an
ascetic more strict than the Earl in his ideas; he abstained from wine,
and thought dancing a damnable practice, and his most common remarks
were interpolated with Holy Writ, according to the custom of the times.
Naturally of a harsh temperament, he never paid the tribute of a thought
to his hapless cousin, far less of a sigh! His ill-gotten towers and
blood-purchased coronet were, however, fated to be a short-lived
possession. About a week after his entry, on the fatal 3rd[A] of
September, the day that saw the conquest of Scotland at Dunbar, and
England at Worcester, and which Cromwell thought a fortunate day, there
appeared in the heavens unmistakeable signs of a coming tempest. During
the afternoon, the gusts of wind, bearing with them showers of leaves,
grew stronger and stronger. As night advanced, the scud blew wildly
across the welkin, and some time after sunset floods of rain descended.
Towards midnight the gale increased to a perfect hurricane--"the rain
fell not from one lone cloud, but as if heaven had caved in," and the
Wye came down in high flood, carrying rocks and trunks of trees in its
turbid course, and overflowing all the lowlands far and near. Ever and
anon a wild crash told the fall of some patriarch of the forest, and
with every blast the towers shook to their very foundations. During this
war of the elements a great soul was passing away; it was a fit ending
to a turbulent life. The wind sung his dirge as the ambitious Cromwell
yielded up his ghost. Unknowing of his master's death, Earl Wentworth
lay on his sleepless couch, and listened with terror to the violence of
the storm; once or twice he thought the whole abbey would yield to its
rage, but the strong masonry manfully repelled the gust, and the thick
foundations rolled back the flood that beat against them. The roaring of
the wind through the trees precluded the idea of sleep, and the thoughts
of that stern man as he lay awake were aught but enviable. Within his
bosom raged a storm, wild as that which howled without. The sins of his
youth--the crimes of his manlier years--like fiends "no exorcism can
bind," all flocked to his remembrance at that awful hour, and as his
room shook, like Felix he, too, trembled, but like the Roman governor
he bade conscience go its way this time, and at a more convenient season
he would listen. Just then occurred one of those fitful pauses, as if
the wind rested a moment to take breath, and regathered its strength for
a still sterner effort. In that hush the moon broke forth from a gap in
the flying clouds; and, looking calmly on the scene of terror, her beams
kissed the raging waves of the flood that hurried by, and lit up the
soldier's rough, weather-beaten features.
It was then that the Earl first became aware he was not alone. Beside
his couch stood a form in white--was it the vision of a troubled mind?
was it some horrid dream? He rubbed his eyes--the figure still stood
there, motionless as a statue! In an instant he recognized Augusta: he
tried to speak--the words froze on his lips, and in speechless terror he
gazed on the apparition. Hunger and distress had not robbed her eye of
its light, nor her face of its strange beauty; but there was something
weird in her glance,--something ghostly in her pale brow,--something
unearthly in her whole appearance. Her hair was dishevelled by the wind,
and dripping with the rain; her mantle torn and soiled; her small white
foot bleeding and cut by the rough paths she had trod. She raised her
hand to heaven, and her look was one of intense earnestness and
beseeching woe, strangely blended with proud hauteur and offended
majesty. She beheld him earnestly till another pause in the storm, and,
in the hush that followed the blast, sung mournfully these lines:--
Unhappy! you deem you are safe;
Secure in your ill-gotten towers,
And the storms which around thee now chafe
Shall sink with life's evening hours!
You deem that in guerdon for this
High mansions above shall be given,
That yours is a lifetime of bliss,
An endless rejoicing in heaven.
You err, oh! how deeply you err!
This night hath your dark doom been spoken;
And vainly you strive to deter
Heaven's vengeance, whose laws you have broken.
And the portals of heaven are closed,
And vain are the hopes that you cherish,
Hopes in which you too long have reposed--
Your soul shall eternally perish!
And not only this, but your sons
Shall suffer in you, and your daughters,
Their lives shall be desolate ones,
Acquainted with suffering and slaughters;
Cut off in the bloom of their youth,
In the beautiful hour of life's morning,
Oh! hearken--these tidings are truth,
Oh! listen--and heed my dread warning.
But Heaven is merciful yet,
Her blasting may turn to a blessing:
Thine errors she longs to forget,
Thy bloodshed her spirit distressing!
Repent of each murderous deed,
My tongue is still filled with glad tidings!
Return to your desolate creed,
And weep o'er your fatal backslidings.
Then your flocks and your barns shall increase,
Your name shall be famous in story,
The terrors of war sink to peace,
Your sons change from glory to glory!
And Heaven's glad song thou shalt learn
In mansions more splendid and spacious.
Return, oh! my brother, return!
Heaven is waiting--still waits--to be gracious!
The sound ceased, and again the voice of the storm rose high; clouds
shrouded the lady of the night, and darkness sank in treble deepness.
Still something undefined, but dimly bright, shone near the renegade's
bedside, and made him aware that the Abbess awaited his reply: but, like
another renegade, a modern poet has so finely drawn,--
"His heart was swollen, and turned aside
By deep, interminable pride.
* * * he be dismayed
By wild words of a timid maid?"
"No. Be thou living form, or fleshless spirit," he answered, "I have but
one reply: I will not return like the sow to her wallowing in the mire.
Having once shaken off the trammels of Rome, I will not lightly bear
again her yoke, which is neither easy nor light; nay, fair cousin,
methinks I have been but too merciful: to-morrow, God help me, will I
raze the altar of Baal with the ground, unless this storm saves me the
labour." He looked to see the effect of his reply--the dim light was
gone; he only heard the wild wind.
Early next morning he rose to fulfil his threat. It was one of those
beautiful mornings after a night of rain and tempest, and the sun shone
brightly on the wreck left by the gale. Not a breath was stirring, and
it was a strange sight to see the uprooted trees, the ruins of part of
the chapel thrown down in the night, and the debris left by the Wye,
which had nearly sunk to its wonted bed, lying in disjointed heaps on
the sward. The silence was only broken by the robin's note, or the rush
of the subsiding river, when the Earl proceeded to demolish the high
altar. Rough as his soldiery were, they were not entirely freed from old
superstitions, and there was not one hardy enough to obey his behest;
so, after censuring them for lukewarmness in a blessed cause, he himself
seized a sledgehammer from a bystander, and prepared to perform the
sacrilegious act. He was a tall, stout man, of about thirty-five years,
in the full strength of manhood, and he whirled the heavy instrument
round his head as if it had been a withe; it descended on the altar with
tremendous force, and in a moment brought down in dire destruction the
marble shrine and image of the Virgin. Again he swung the hammer
high--his face was red with passion, and his eye unnaturally bright.
Suddenly a mortal paleness suffused his features, his powerful arm
dropped down as if broken, and he fell heavily to the earth. Extreme
passion had so excited him that a large blood-vessel burst, and as he
lay on the earth, the red blood bubbled from his mouth. There were those
who saw in his fate the retributive punishment of God for his cousin's
death! He never spoke again, and after lingering some hours in great
suffering, his spirit passed away, a few hours after his great
chieftain's demise.
From that hour, the curse of Augusta has reigned malignantly over all
his race;--the brave, the beautiful, have alike paid the debt, and one
by one, but surely as the leaf falls before October's blast, have the
members of that noble house succumbed to their fate. Some on the
battle-field, some on the fevered couch, some in the blue lone sea, some
by accidental death, some in mortal fray; but of all the many hearts
that have braved life's storms, none have lived to be old in this world
of sin and sorrow. They learned to love despair, ay, even to be proud of
their doom!
We trust we have not wearied our reader by this introductory chapter,
without which the strange fates and vicissitudes of the family whose
history we are about to narrate might perhaps seem overdrawn, but whose
early fall will no longer seem strange to one who knows the origin of
the WEIRD OF THE WENTWORTHS.[B]