I BREATHED, But not the breath of human life; A serpent round my heart
was wreathed, And stung my very thought to strife.--The Giaour.
“Thank Heaven, the most painful part of my story is at an end. You will
now be able to account for our meeting in the church-yard at------. I
secured myself a lodging at a cottage not far from the spot which held
Gertrude’s remains. Night after night I wandered to that lonely place,
and longed for a couch beside the sleeper, whom I mourned in the
selfishness of my soul. I prostrated myself on the mound; I humbled
myself to tears. In the overflowing anguish of my heart I forgot all
that had aroused its stormier passions into life. Revenge, hatred,--all
vanished. I lifted up my face to the tender heavens: I called aloud to
the silent and placid air; and when I turned again to the unconscious
mound, I thought of nothing but the sweetness of our early love and the
bitterness of her early death. It was in such moments that your footstep
broke upon my grief: the instant others had seen me,--other eyes had
penetrated the sanctity of my regret,--from that instant, whatever was
more soft and holy in the passions and darkness of my mind seemed to
vanish away like a scroll. I again returned to the intense and withering
remembrance which was henceforward to make the very key and pivot of my
existence. I again recalled the last night of Gertrude’s life; I again
shuddered at the low murmured sounds, whose dreadful sense broke slowly
upon my soul. I again felt the cold-cold, slimy grasp of those wan and
dying fingers; and I again nerved my heart to an iron strength, and
vowed deep, deep-rooted, endless, implacable revenge.
“The morning after the night you saw me, I left my abode. I went to
London, and attempted to methodize my plans of vengeance. The first
thing to discover was Tyrrell’s present residence. By accident I heard
he was at Paris, and, within two hours of receiving the intelligence, I
set off for that city. On arriving there, the habits of the gambler
soon discovered him to my search. I saw him one night at a hell. He was
evidently in distressed circumstances, and the fortune of the table
was against him. Unperceived by him, I feasted my eyes on his changing
countenance, as those deadly and wearing transitions of feeling, only to
be produced by the gaming-table, passed over it. While I gazed upon him,
a thought of more exquisite and refined revenge than had yet occurred to
me flashed upon my mind. Occupied with the ideas it gave rise to, I went
into the adjoining room, which was quite empty. There I seated myself,
and endeavoured to develop more fully the rude and imperfect outline of
my scheme.
“The arch tempter favoured me with a trusty coadjutor in my designs. I
was lost in a revery, when I heard myself accosted by name. I looked
up, and beheld a man whom I had often seen with Tyrrell, both at Spa and
(the watering place, where, with Gertrude, I had met Tyrrell). He was a
person of low birth and character; but esteemed, from his love of
coarse humour and vulgar enterprise, a man of infinite parts--a sort
of Yorick--by the set most congenial to Tyrrell’s tastes. By this undue
reputation, and the levelling habit of gaming, to which he was addicted,
he was raised, in certain societies, much above his proper rank: need I
say that this man was Thornton? I was but slightly acquainted with
him; however, he accosted me cordially, and endeavoured to draw me into
conversation.
“‘Have you seen Tyrrell?’ said he, ‘he is at it again; what’s bred in
the bone, you know, etc.’ I turned pale with the mention of Tyrrell’s
name, and replied very laconically, to what purpose I forget. ‘Ah! ah!’
rejoined Thornton, eying me with an air of impertinent familiarity,
‘I see you have not forgiven him; he played you but a shabby trick at
------; seduced your mistress, or something of that sort; he told me all
about it: pray, how is the poor girl now?’
“I made no reply; I sank down and gasped for breath. All I had suffered
seemed nothing to the indignity I then endured. She--she--who had once
been my pride--my honour--life--to be thus spoken of--and--. I could not
pursue the idea. I rose hastily, looked at Thornton with a glance which
might have abashed a man less shameless and callous than himself, and
left the room.
“That night, as I tossed restless and feverish on my bed of, thorns, I
saw how useful Thornton might be to me in the prosecution of the scheme
I had entered into; and the next morning I sought him out, and purchased
(no very difficult matter) both his secrecy and his assistance. My plan
of vengeance, to one who had seen and observed less of the varieties of
human nature than you have done, might seem far-fetched and unnatural;
for while the superficial are ready to allow eccentricity as natural in
the coolness of ordinary life, they never suppose it can exist in
the heat of the passions,--as if, in such moments, anything was ever
considered absurd in the means which was favourable to the end. Were the
secrets of one passionate and irregulated heart laid bare, there would
be more romance in them than in all the fables which we turn from with
incredulity and disdain, as exaggerated and overdrawn.
“Among the thousand schemes for retribution which had chased each other
across my mind, the death of my victim was only the ulterior object.
Death, indeed--the pang of one moment--appeared to me but very feeble
justice for the life of lingering and restless anguish to which his
treachery had condemned me; but my penance, my doom, I could have
forgiven: it was the fate of a more innocent and injured being which
irritated the sting and fed the venom of my revenge. That revenge no
ordinary punishment could appease. If fanaticism can only be satisfied
by the rack and the flames, you may readily conceive a like unappeasable
fury in a hatred so deadly, so concentrated, and so just as mine; and if
fanaticism persuades itself into a virtue, so also did my hatred.
“The scheme which I resolved upon was to attach Tyrrell more and more
to the gaming-table, to be present at his infatuation, to feast my eyes
upon the feverish intensity of his suspense; to reduce him, step
by step, to the lowest abyss of poverty; to glut my soul with the
abjectness and humiliation of his penury; to strip him of all aid,
consolation, sympathy, and friendship; to follow him, unseen, to his
wretched and squalid home; to mark the struggles of the craving nature
with the loathing pride; and, finally, to watch the frame wear, the eye
sink, the lip grow livid, and all the terrible and torturing progress
of gnawing want to utter starvation. Then, in that last state, but not
before, I might reveal myself; stand by the hopeless and succourless
bed of death; shriek out in the dizzy ear a name, which could treble
the horrors of remembrance; snatch from the struggling and agonizing
conscience the last plank, the last straw, to which, in its madness, it
could cling, and blacken the shadows of departing life, by opening to
the shuddering sense the threshold of an impatient and yawning hell.
“Hurried away by the unhallowed fever of these projects, I thought
of nothing but their accomplishment. I employed Thornton, who still
maintained his intimacy with Tyrrell, to decoy him more and more to the
gambling-house; and, as the unequal chances of the public table were
not rapid enough in their termination to consummate the ruin even of an
impetuous and vehement gamester like Tyrrell so soon as my impatience
desired, Thornton took every opportunity of engaging him in private
play, and accelerating my object by the unlawful arts of which he was
master. My enemy was every day approaching the farthest verge of ruin;
near relations he had none,--all his distant ones he had disobliged;
all his friends, and even his acquaintance, he had fatigued by his
importunity or disgusted by his conduct. In the whole world there seemed
not a being who would stretch forth a helping hand to save him from the
total and penniless beggary to which he was hopelessly advancing. Out of
the wrecks of his former property and the generosity of former friends,
whatever he had already wrung had been immediately staked at the
gaming-house and as immediately lost.
“Perhaps this would not so soon have been the case, if Thornton had not
artfully fed and sustained his expectations. He had been long employed
by Tyrrell in a professional capacity, and he knew well all the
gamester’s domestic affairs: and when he promised, should things come
to the worst, to find some expedient to restore them, Tyrrell easily
adopted so flattering a belief.
“Meanwhile I had taken the name and disguise under favour of which you
met me at Paris, and Thornton had introduced me to Tyrrell as a young
Englishman of great wealth and still greater inexperience. The gambler
grasped eagerly at an acquaintance which Thornton readily persuaded him
he could turn to such account; and I had thus every facility of marking,
day by day, how my plot thickened and my vengeance hastened to its
triumph.
“This was not all. I said there was not in the wide world a being who
would have saved Tyrrell from the fate he deserved and was approaching.
I forgot, there was one who still clung to him with affection, and for
whom he still seemed to harbour the better and purer feelings of less
degraded and guilty times. This person (you will guess readily it was
a woman) I made it my especial business and care to wean away from my
prey; I would not suffer him a consolation he had denied to me. I used
all the arts of seduction to obtain the transfer of her affections.
Whatever promises and vows--whether of love or wealth--could effect were
tried; nor, at last, without success: I triumphed. The woman became
my slave. It was she who, whenever Tyrrell faltered in his course to
destruction, combated his scruples and urged on his reluctance; it was
she who informed me minutely of his pitiful finances, and assisted, to
her utmost, in expediting their decay. The still more bitter treachery
of deserting him in his veriest want I reserved till the fittest
occasion, and contemplated with a savage delight.
“I was embarrassed in my scheme by two circumstances: first, Thornton’s
acquaintance with you; and, secondly, Tyrrell’s receipt (some time
afterwards) of a very unexpected sum of two hundred pounds, in return
for renouncing all further and possible claim on the purchasers of his
estate. To the former, so far as it might interfere with my plans
or lead to my detection, you must pardon me for having put a speedy
termination: the latter threw me into great consternation; for Tyrrell’s
first idea was to renounce the gaming-table, and endeavour to live upon
the trifling pittance he had acquired as long as the utmost economy
would permit.
“This idea Margaret, the woman I spoke of, according to my instructions,
so artfully and successfully combated that Tyrrell yielded to his
natural inclination, and returned once more to the infatuation of his
favourite pursuit. However, I had become restlessly impatient for the
conclusion to this prefatory part of my revenge; and, accordingly,
Thornton and myself arranged that Tyrrell should be persuaded by the
former to risk all, even to his very last farthing, in a private game
with me. Tyrrell, who believed he should readily recruit himself by my
unskilfulness in the game, fell easily into the snare; and on the second
night of our engagement, he not only had lost the whole of his remaining
pittance, but had signed bonds owning to a debt of far greater amount
than he, at that time, could ever even have dreamt of possessing.
“Flushed, heated, almost maddened with my triumph, I yielded to the
exultation of the moment. I did not know you were so near,--I discovered
myself,--you remember the scene. I went joyfully home: and for the
first time since Gertrude’s death I was happy; but there I imagined my
vengeance only would begin; I revelled in the burning hope of marking
the hunger and extremity that must ensue. The next day, when Tyrrell
turned round, in his despair, for one momentary word of comfort from the
lips to which he believed, in the fond credulity of his heart, falsehood
and treachery never came, his last earthly friend taunted and deserted
him. Mark me, Pelham: I was by and heard her! But here my power of
retribution was to close: from the thirst still unslaked and unappeased,
the cup was abruptly snatched. Tyrrell disappeared; no one knew whither.
I set Thornton’s inquiries at work. A week afterwards he brought me word
that Tyrrell had died in extreme want, and from very despair. Will you
credit that, at hearing this news, my first sensations were only rage
and disappointment? True, he had died, died in all the misery my heart
could wish, but I had not seen him die; and the death-bed seemed to me
robbed of its bitterest pang.
“I know not to this day, though I have often questioned him, what
interest Thornton had in deceiving me by this tale: for my own part, I
believe that he himself was deceived; certain it is (for I inquired),
that a person very much answering to Tyrrell’s description had perished
in the state Thornton mentioned; and this might, therefore, in all
probability, have misled him.
“I left Paris, and returned, through Normandy, to England (where I
remained some weeks); there we again met: but I think we did not meet
till I had been persecuted by the insolence and importunity of Thornton.
The tools of our passions cut both ways: like the monarch who employed
strange beasts in his army, we find our treacherous allies less
destructive to others than ourselves. But I was not of a temper to brook
the tauntings or the encroachment of my own creature: it had been with
but an ill grace that I had endured his familiarity, when I absolutely
required his services; much less could I suffer his intrusion when those
services,--services not of love, but hire, were no longer necessary.
Thornton, like all persons of his stamp, had a low pride, which I was
constantly offending. He had mixed with men more than my equals in rank
on a familiar footing, and he could ill brook the hauteur with which my
disgust at his character absolutely constrained me to treat him. It is
true that the profuseness of my liberality was such that the mean wretch
stomached affronts for which he was so largely paid; but, with the
cunning and malicious spite natural to him, he knew well how to repay
them in kind. While he assisted, he affected to ridicule, my revenge;
and though he soon saw that he durst not, for his very life, breathe
a syllable openly against Gertrude or her memory, yet he contrived, by
general remarks and covert insinuations, to gall me to the very quick
and in the very tenderest point. Thus a deep and cordial antipathy to
each other arose and grew and strengthened, till, I believe, like the
fiends in hell, our mutual hatred became our common punishment.
“No sooner had I returned to England than I found him here awaiting my
arrival. He favoured me with frequent visits and requests for money.
Although not possessed of any secret really important affecting my
character, he knew well that he was possessed of one important to
my quiet; and he availed himself to the utmost of my strong and deep
aversion even to the most delicate recurrence to my love to Gertrude
and its unhallowed and disastrous termination. At length, however, he
wearied me. I found that he was sinking into the very dregs and refuse
of society, and I could not longer brook the idea of enduring his
familiarity and feeding his vices.
“I pass over any detail of my own feelings, as well as my outward and
worldly history. Over my mind a great change had passed: I was no longer
torn by violent and contending passions; upon the tumultuous sea a dead
and heavy torpor had fallen; the very winds, necessary for health, had
ceased:--I slept on the abyss without a surge.”
“One violent and engrossing passion is among the worst of all
immoralities, for it leaves the mind too stagnant and exhausted for
those activities and energies which constitute our real duties. However,
now that the tyrant feeling of my mind was removed, I endeavoured
to shake off the apathy it had produced, and return to the various
occupations and businesses of life. Whatever could divert me from my own
dark memories, or give a momentary motion to the stagnation of my mind,
I grasped at with the fondness and eagerness of a child. Thus, you
found me surrounding myself with luxuries which palled upon my taste the
instant that their novelty had passed: now striving for the vanity of
literary fame; now, for the emptier baubles which riches could procure.
At one time I shrouded myself in my closet, and brooded over the dogmas
of the learned and the errors of the wise; at another, I plunged into
the more engrossing and active pursuits of the living crowd which rolled
around me,--and flattered my heart, that amid the applause of senators
and the whirlpool of affairs, I could lull to rest the voices of the
past and the spectre of the dead.
“Whether these hopes were effectual, and the struggle not in vain,
this haggard and wasting form, drooping day by day into the grave, can
declare; but I said I would not dwell long upon this part of my history,
nor is it necessary. Of one thing only, not connected with the main part
of my confessions, it is right, for the sake of one tender and guiltless
being, that I should speak.
“In the cold and friendless world with which I mixed, there was a heart
which had years ago given itself wholly up to me. At that time I was
ignorant of the gift I so little deserved, or (for it was before I knew
Gertrude) I might have returned it, and been saved years of crime and
anguish. Since then, the person I allude to had married, and, by the
death of her husband, was once more free. Intimate with my family,
and more especially with my sister, she now met me constantly; her
compassion for the change she perceived in me, both in mind and person,
was stronger than even her reserve, and this is the only reason why I
speak of an attachment which ought otherwise to be concealed: I believe
that you already understand to whom I allude, and since you have
discovered her weakness, it is right that you should know also her
virtue; it is right that you should learn that it was not in her the
fantasy or passion of a moment, but a long and secreted love; that
you should learn that it was her pity, and no unfeminine disregard to
opinion, which betrayed her into imprudence; and that she is, at this
moment, innocent of everything but the folly of loving me.
“I pass on to the time when I discovered that I had been either
intentionally or unconsciously deceived, and that my enemy yet lived!
lived in honour, prosperity, and the world’s blessings. The information
was like removing a barrier from a stream hitherto pent into quiet and
restraint. All the stormy thoughts, feelings, and passions so long
at rest rushed again into a terrible and tumultuous action. The
newly-formed stratum of my mind was swept away; everything seemed a
wreck, a chaos, a convulsion of jarring elements; but this is a trite
and tame description of my feelings; words would be but commonplace to
express the revulsion which I experienced: yet, amidst all, there was
one paramount and presiding thought, to which the rest were as atoms
in the heap,--the awakened thought of vengeance!-but how was it to be
gratified?
“Placed as Tyrrell now was in the scale of society, every method of
retribution but the one formerly rejected seemed at an end. To that one,
therefore, weak and merciful as it appeared to me, I resorted; you took
my challenge to Tyrrell; you remember his behaviour: Conscience doth
indeed make cowards of us all! The letter enclosed to me in his to you
contained only the commonplace argument urged so often by those who have
injured us; namely, the reluctance at attempting our life after having
ruined our happiness. When I found that he had left London my rage knew
no bounds: I was absolutely frantic with indignation; the earth
reeled before my eyes; I was almost suffocated by the violence--the
whirlpool--of my emotions. I gave myself no time to think,--I left town
in pursuit of my foe.
“I found that--still addicted, though, I believed, not so madly as
before, to the old amusements--he was in the neighbourhood of Newmarket,
awaiting the races shortly to ensue. No sooner did I find his address
than I wrote him another challenge, still more forcibly and insultingly
worded than the one you took. In this I said that his refusal was of no
avail; that I had sworn that my vengeance should overtake him; and that
sooner or later, in the face of heaven and despite of hell, my oath
should be fulfilled. Remember those words, Pelham, I shall refer to them
hereafter.
“Tyrrell’s reply was short and contemptuous: he affected to treat me
as a madman. Perhaps (and I confess that the incoherence of my letter
authorized such suspicion) he believed I really was one. He concluded by
saying that if he received more of my letters, he should shelter himself
from my aggressions by the protection of the law.
“On receiving this reply, a stern, sullen, iron spirit entered into my
bosom. I betrayed no external mark of passion; I sat down in silence;
I placed the letter and Gertrude’s picture before me. There, still and
motionless, I remained for hours. I remember well I was awakened from my
gloomy revery by the clock, as it struck the first hour of the morning.
At that lone and ominous sound, the associations of romance and dread
which the fables of our childhood connect with it rushed coldly and
fearfully into my mind: the damp dews broke out upon my forehead and
the blood curdled in my limbs. In that moment I knelt down and vowed
a frantic and deadly oath--the words of which I would not now dare to
repeat--that before three days expired, hell should no longer be cheated
of its prey. I rose,--I flung myself on my bed, and slept.
“The next day I left my abode. I purchased a strong and swift horse;
and, disguising myself from head to foot in a long horseman’s cloak, I
set off alone, locking in my heart the calm and cold conviction that my
oath should be kept. I placed, concealed in my dress, two pistols; my
intention was to follow Tyrrell wherever he went, till we could find
ourselves alone, and without the chance of intrusion. It was then my
determination to force him into a contest, and that no trembling of the
hand, no error of the swimming sight, might betray my purpose, to place
us foot to foot, and the mouth of each pistol almost to the very temple
of each antagonist. Nor was I deterred for a moment from this resolution
by the knowledge that my own death must be as certain as my victim’s. On
the contrary, I looked forward to dying thus, and so baffling the more
lingering, but not less sure, disease which was daily wasting me away,
with the same fierce, yet not unquiet delight with which men have rushed
into battle, and sought out a death less bitter to them than life.
“For two days, though I each day saw Tyrrell, fate threw into my way
no opportunity of executing my design. The morning of the third
came,--Tyrrell was on the race-ground; sure that he would remain there
for some hours, I put up my wearied horse in the town, and, seating
myself in an obscure corner of the course, was contented with watching,
as the serpent does his victim, the distant motions of my enemy. Perhaps
you can recollect passing a man seated on the ground and robed in a
horseman’s cloak. I need not tell you that it was I whom you passed and
accosted. I saw you ride by me; but the moment you were gone I forgot
the occurrence. I looked upon the rolling and distant crowd as a child
views the figures of the phantasmagoria, scarcely knowing if my
eyes deceived me, feeling impressed with some stupefying and ghastly
sensation of dread, and cherishing the conviction that my life was not
as the life of the creatures that passed before me.
“The day waned: I went back for my horse; I returned to the course, and,
keeping at a distance as little suspicious as possible, followed the
motions of Tyrrell. He went back to the town, rested there, repaired
to a gaming-table, stayed in it a short time, returned to his inn, and
ordered his horse.
“In all these motions I followed the object of my pursuit; and my
heart bounded with joy when I at last saw him set out alone and in the
advancing twilight. I followed him till he left the main road. Now, I
thought, was my time. I redoubled my pace, and had nearly reached him,
when some horsemen appearing, constrained me again to slacken my pace.
Various other similar interruptions occurred to delay my plot. At length
all was undisturbed. I spurred my horse, and was nearly on the heels
of my enemy, when I perceived him join another man: this was you; I
clenched my teeth and drew my breath, as I once more retreated to a
distance. In a short time two men passed me, and I found that, owing to
some accident on the road, they stopped to assist you. It appears, by
your evidence on a subsequent event, that these men were Thornton and
his friend Dawson; at the time they passed too rapidly, and I was too
much occupied in my own dark thoughts, to observe them: still I kept
up to you and Tyrrell, sometimes catching the outlines of your figures
through the moon, light, at others (with the acute sense of anxiety),
only just distinguishing the clang of your horses’ hoofs on the stony
ground. At last a heavy shower came on: imagine my joy when Tyrrell left
you and rode off alone!
“I passed you, and followed my enemy as fast as my horse would permit;
but it was not equal to Tyrrell’s, which was almost at its full speed.
However, I came, at last, to a very steep and almost precipitous
descent. I was forced to ride slowly and cautiously; this, however, I
the less regarded, from my conviction that Tyrrell must be obliged
to use the same precaution. My hand was on my pistol with a grasp of
premeditated revenge, when a shrill, sharp, solitary cry broke on my
ear.
“No sound followed: all was silence. I was just approaching towards
the close of the descent, when a horse without its rider passed me.
The shower had ceased, and the moon broke from the cloud some minutes
before; by its light I recognized the horse rode by Tyrrell; perhaps, I
thought, it has thrown its master, and my victim will now be utterly in
my power. I pushed hastily forward in spite of the hill, not yet wholly
passed. I came to a spot of singular desolation: it was a broad patch
of waste land, a pool of water was on the right, and a remarkable and
withered tree hung over it. I looked round, but saw nothing of life
stirring. A dark and imperfectly developed object lay by the side of the
pond; I pressed forward: merciful God! my enemy had escaped my hand, and
lay in the stillness of death before me!”
“What!” I exclaimed, interrupting Glanville, for I could contain myself
no longer, “it was not by you then that Tyrrell fell?” With these
words, I grasped his hand; and, excited as I had been by my painful and
wrought-up interest in his recital, I burst into tears of gratitude and
joy. Reginald Glanville was innocent: Ellen was not the sister of an
assassin!
After a short pause, Glanville continued:
“I gazed upon the upward and distorted face, in a deep and sickening
silence; an awe, dark and undefined, crept over my heart: I stood
beneath the solemn and sacred heavens, and felt that the hand of God
was upon me; that a mysterious and fearful edict had gone forth; that
my headlong and unholy wrath had, in the very midst of its fury, been
checked, as if but the idle anger of a child; that the plan I had laid
in the foolish wisdom of my heart had been traced, step by step, by an
all-seeing eye, and baffled in the moment of its fancied success by an
inscrutable and awful doom. I had wished the death of my enemy: lo! my
wish was accomplished,--how, I neither knew nor guessed; there, a still
and senseless clod of earth, without power of offence or injury, he lay
beneath my feet: it seemed as if, in the moment of my uplifted arm, the
Divine Avenger had asserted His prerogative,--as if the angel which
had smitten the Assyrian had again swept forth, though against a meaner
victim; and while he punished the guilt of a human criminal, had set an
eternal barrier to the vengeance of a human foe!
“I dismounted from my horse, and bent over the murdered man. I drew from
my bosom the miniature, which never forsook me, and bathed the lifeless
resemblance of Gertrude in the blood of her betrayer. Scarcely had I
done so, before my ear caught the sound of steps; hastily I thrust, as I
thought, the miniature in my bosom, remounted, and rode hurriedly away.
At that hour, and for many which succeeded to it, I believe that all
sense was suspended. I was like a man haunted by a dream, and wandering
under its influence! or as one whom a spectre pursues, and for whose
eye the breathing and busy world is but as a land of unreal forms and
flitting shadows, teeming with the monsters of darkness and the terrors
of the tomb.
“It was not till the next day that I missed the picture. I returned to
the spot; searched it carefully, but in vain; the miniature could not
be found: I returned to town, and shortly afterwards the newspapers
informed me of what had subsequently occurred. I saw, with dismay, that
all appearances pointed to me as the criminal, and that the officers
of justice were at that moment tracing the clew which my cloak and the
color of my horse afforded them. My mysterious pursuit of Tyrrell, the
disguise I had assumed, the circumstance of my passing you on the road
and of my flight when you approached, all spoke volumes against me.
A stronger evidence yet remained, and it was reserved for Thornton to
indicate it; at this moment my life is in his hands. Shortly after my
return to town, he forced his way into my room, shut the door, bolted
it, and, the moment we were alone, said, with a savage and fiendish grin
of exultation and defiance, ‘Sir Reginald Glanville, you have many a
time and oft insulted me with your pride, and more with your gifts: now
it is my time to insult and triumph over you; know that one word of mine
could sentence you to the gibbet.’
“He then minutely summed up the evidence against me, and drew from
his pocket the threatening letter I had last written to Tyrrell. You
remember that therein I said my vengeance was sworn against him, and
that, sooner or later, it should overtake him. ‘Couple,’ said Thornton,
coldly, as he replaced the letter in his pocket,--‘couple these words
with the evidence already against you, and I would not buy your life at
a farthing’s value.’
“How Thornton came by this paper, so important to my safety, I know not:
but when he read it I was startled by the danger it brought upon me;
one glance sufficed to show me that I was utterly at the mercy of the
villain who stood before me; he saw and enjoyed my struggles.
“‘Now,’ said he, ‘we know each other: at present I want a thousand
pounds; you will not refuse it me, I am sure; when it is gone, I shall
call again; till then you can do without me.’ I flung him a check for
the money, and he departed.
“You may conceive the mortification I endured in this sacrifice of pride
to prudence; but those were no ordinary motives which induced me to
submit to it. Fast approaching to the grave, it mattered to me but
little whether a violent death should shorten a life to which a limit
was already set, and which I was far from being anxious to retain: but
I could not endure the thought of bringing upon my mother and my sister
the wretchedness and shame which the mere suspicion of a crime
so enormous would occasion them; and when my eye caught all the
circumstances arrayed against me, my pride seemed to suffer a less
mortification even in the course I adopted than in the thought of the
felon’s gaol and the criminal’s trial,--the hoots and execrations of the
mob, and the death and ignominious remembrance of the murderer.
“Stronger than either of these motives was my shrinking and loathing
aversion to whatever seemed likely to unrip the secret history of the
past. I sickened at the thought of Gertrude’s name and fate being bared
to the vulgar eye, and exposed to the comment, the strictures, the
ridicule of the gaping and curious public. It seemed to me, therefore,
but a very poor exertion of philosophy to conquer my feelings of
humiliation at Thornton’s insolence and triumph, and to console myself
with the reflection that a few months must rid me alike of his exactions
and my life.
“But, of late, Thornton’s persecutions and demands have risen to such
a height that I have been scarcely able to restrain my indignation and
control myself into compliance. The struggle is too powerful for my
frame: it is rapidly bringing on the fiercest and the last contest I
shall suffer, before ‘the wicked shall cease from troubling, and the
weary be at rest.’ Some days since I came to a resolution, which I am
now about to execute: it is to leave this country and take refuge on the
Continent. There I shall screen myself from Thornton’s pursuit and the
danger which it entails upon me; and there, unknown and undisturbed, I
shall await the termination of my disease.
“But two duties remained to me to fulfil before I departed; I have now
discharged them both. One was due to the warmhearted and noble being who
honoured me with her interest and affection,--the other to you. I went
yesterday to the former; I sketched the outline of that history which
I have detailed to you. I showed her the waste of my barren heart, and
spoke to her of the disease which was wearing me away. How beautiful is
the love of woman! She would have followed me over the world,--received
my last sigh, and seen me to the rest I shall find at length; and this
without a hope, or thought of recompense, even from the worthlessness of
my love.
“But enough!--of her my farewell has been taken. Your suspicions I have
seen and forgiven; for they were natural: it was due to me to remove
them; the pressure of your hand tells me that I have done so; but I had
another reason for my confessions. I have worn away the romance of my
heart, and I have now no indulgence for the little delicacies and petty
scruples which often stand in the way of our real happiness. I have
marked your former addresses to Ellen, and, I confess, with great
joy; for I know, amidst all your worldly ambition and the encrusted
artificiality of your exterior, how warm and generous is your real
heart,--how noble and intellectual is your real mind: and were my sister
tenfold more perfect than I believe her, I do not desire to find on
earth one more deserving of her than yourself. I have remarked your
late estrangement from Ellen; and while I guessed, I felt that, however
painful to me, I ought to remove, the cause: she loves you--though
perhaps you know it not--much and truly; and since my earlier life has
been passed in a selfish inactivity, I would fain let it close with the
reflection of having served two beings whom I prize so dearly, and the
hope that their happiness will commence with my death.
“And now, Pelham, I have done; I am weak and exhausted, and cannot bear
more--even of your society, now. Think over what I have last said,
and let me see you again to-morrow: on the day after, I leave England
forever.”