What doth ensue
But moody and dull melancholy,
Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair,
And at her heel, a huge infectious troop
Of pale distemperatures, and foes to life?
Comedy of Errors.
As some vindication of the ease with which Bucklaw (who otherwise, as
he termed himself, was really a very good-humoured fellow) resigned his
judgment to the management of Lady Ashton, while paying his addresses
to her daughter, the reader must call to mind the strict domestic
discipline which, at this period, was exercised over the females of a
Scottish family.
The manners of the country in this, as in many other respects,
coincided with those of France before the Revolution. Young women of
the higher rank seldom mingled in society until after marriage, and,
both in law and fact, were held to be under the strict tutelage of
their parents, who were too apt to enforce the views for their
settlement in life without paying any regard to the inclination of the
parties chiefly interested. On such occasions, the suitor expected
little more from his bride than a silent acquiescence in the will of
her parents; and as few opportunities of acquaintance, far less of
intimacy, occurred, he made his choice by the outside, as the lovers in
the Merchant of Venice select the casket, contented to trust to chance
the issue of the lottery in which he had hazarded a venture.
It was not therefore surprising, such being the general manners of the
age, that Mr. Hayston of Bucklaw, whom dissipated habits had detached
in some degree from the best society, should not attend particularly to
those feelings in his elected bride to which many men of more
sentiment, experience, and reflection would, in all probability, have
been equally indifferent. He knew what all accounted the principal
point, that her parents and friends, namely, were decidedly in his
favour, and that there existed most powerful reasons for their
predilection.
In truth, the conduct of the Marquis of A——, since Ravenswood’s
departure, had been such as almost to bar the possibility of his
kinsman’s union with Lucy Ashton. The Marquis was Ravenswood’s sincere
but misjudging friend; or rather, like many friends and patrons, he
consulted what he considered to be his relation’s true interest,
although he knew that in doing so he ran counter to his inclinations.
The Marquis drove on, therefore, with the plentitude of ministerial
authority, an appeal to the British House of Peers against those
judgments of the courts of law by which Sir William became possessed of
Ravenswood’s hereditary property. As this measure, enforced with all
the authority of power, was new in Scottish judicial proceedings,
though now so frequently resorted to, it was exclaimed against by the
lawyers on the opposite side of politics, as an interference with the
civil judicature of the country, equally new, arbitrary, and
tyrannical. And if it thus affected even strangers connected with them
only by political party, it may be guessed what the Ashton family
themselves said and thought under so gross a dispensation. Sir William,
still more worldly-minded than he was timid, was reduced to despair by
the loss by which he was threatened. His son’s haughtier spirit was
exalted into rage at the idea of being deprived of his expected
patrimony. But to Lady Ashton’s yet more vindictive temper the conduct
of Ravenswood, or rather of his patron, appeared to be an offence
challenging the deepest and most immortal revenge. Even the quiet and
confiding temper of Lucy herself, swayed by the opinions expressed by
all around her, could not but consider the conduct of Ravenswood as
precipitate, and even unkind. “It was my father,” she repeated with a
sigh, “who welcomed him to this place, and encouraged, or at least
allowed, the intimacy between us. Should he not have remembered this,
and requited it with at least some moderate degree of procrastination
in the assertion of his own alleged rights? I would have forfeited for
him double the value of these lands, which he pursues with an ardour
that shows he has forgotten how much I am implicated in the matter.”
Lucy, however, could only murmur these things to herself, unwilling to
increase the prejudices against her lover entertained by all around
her, who exclaimed against the steps pursued on his account as illegal,
vexatious, and tyrannical, resembling the worst measures in the worst
times of the worst Stuarts, and a degradation of Scotland, the
decisions of whose learned judges were thus subjected to the review of
a court composed indeed of men of the highest rank, and who were not
trained to the study of any municipal law, and might be supposed
specially to hold in contempt that of Scotland. As a natural
consequence of the alleged injustice meditated towards her father,
every means was restored to, and every argument urged to induce Miss
Ashton to break off her engagement with Ravenswood, as being
scandalous, shameful, and sinful, formed with the mortal enemy of her
family, and calculated to add bitterness to the distress of her
parents.
Lucy’s spirit, however, was high, and, although unaided and alone, she
could have borne much: she could have endured the repinings of her
father; his murmurs against what he called the tyrannical usage of the
ruling party; his ceaseless charges of ingratitude against Ravenswood;
his endless lectures on the various means by which contracts may be
voided and annulled; his quotations from the civil, municipal, and the
canon law; and his prelections upon the _patria potestas_.
She might have borne also in patience, or repelled with scorn, the
bitter taunts and occasional violence of her brother, Colonel Douglas
Ashton, and the impertinent and intrusive interference of other friends
and relations. But it was beyond her power effectually to withstand or
elude the constant and unceasing persecution of Lady Ashton, who,
laying every other wish aside, had bent the whole efforts of her
powerful mind to break her daughter’s contract with Ravenswood, and to
place a perpetual bar between the lovers, by effecting Lucy’s union
with Bucklaw. Far more deeply skilled than her husband in the recesses
of the human heart, she was aware that in this way she might strike a
blow of deep and decisive vengeance upon one whom she esteemed as her
mortal enemy; nor did she hesitate at raising her arm, although she
knew that the wound must be dealt through the bosom of her daughter.
With this stern and fixed purpose, she sounded every deep and shallow
of her daughter’s soul, assumed alternately every disguise of manner
which could serve her object, and prepared at leisure every species of
dire machinery by which the human mind can be wrenched from its settled
determination. Some of these were of an obvious description, and
require only to be cursorily mentioned; others were characteristic of
the time, the country, and the persons engaged in this singular drama.
It was of the last consequence that all intercourse betwixt the lovers
should be stopped, and, by dint of gold and authority, Lady Ashton
contrived to possess herself of such a complete command of all who were
placed around her daughter, that, if fact, no leaguered fortress was
ever more completely blockaded; while, at the same time, to all outward
appearance Miss Ashton lay under no restriction. The verge of her
parents’ domains became, in respect to her, like the viewless and
enchanted line drawn around a fairy castle, where nothing unpermitted
can either enter from without or escape from within. Thus every letter,
in which Ravenswood conveyed to Lucy Ashton the indispensable reasons
which detained him abroad, and more than one note which poor Lucy had
addressed to him through what she thought a secure channel, fell into
the hands of her mother. It could not be but that the tenor of these
intercepted letters, especially those of Ravenswood, should contain
something to irritate the passions and fortify the obstinacy of her
into whose hands they fell; but Lady Ashton’s passions were too
deep-rooted to require this fresh food. She burnt the papers as
regularly as she perused them; and as they consumed into vapour and
tinder, regarded them with a smile upon her compressed lips, and an
exultation in her steady eye, which showed her confidence that the
hopes of the writers should soon be rendered equally unsubstantial.
It usually happens that fortune aids the machinations of those who are
prompt to avail themselves of every chance that offers. A report was
wafted from the continent, founded, like others of the same sort, upon
many plausible circumstances, but without any real basis, stating the
Master of Ravenswood to be on the eve of marriage with a foreign lady
of fortune and distinction. This was greedily caught up by both the
political parties, who were at once struggling for power and for
popular favour, and who seized, as usual, upon the most private
circumstances in the lives of each other’s partisans to convert them
into subjects of political discussion.
The Marquis of A—— gave his opinion aloud and publicly, not indeed in
the coarse terms ascribed to him by Captain Craigengelt, but in a
manner sufficiently offensive to the Ashtons. “He thought the report,”
he said, “highly probable, and heartily wished it might be true. Such a
match was fitter and far more creditable for a spirited young fellow
than a marriage with the daughter of an old Whig lawyer, whose
chicanery had so nearly ruined his father.”
The other party, of course, laying out of view the opposition which the
Master of Ravenswood received from Miss Ashton’s family, cried shame
upon his fickleness and perfidy, as if he had seduced the young lady
into an engagement, and wilfully and causelessly abandoned her for
another.
Sufficient care was taken that this report should find its way to
Ravenswood Castle through every various channel, Lady Ashton being well
aware that the very reiteration of the same rumour, from so many
quarters, could not but give it a semblance of truth. By some it was
told as a piece of ordinary news, by some communicated as serious
intelligence; now it was whispered to Lucy Ashton’s ear in the tone of
malignant pleasantry, and now transmitted to her as a matter of grave
and serious warning.
Even the boy Henry was made the instrument of adding to his sister’s
torments. One morning he rushed into the room with a willow branch in
his hand, which he told her had arrived that instant from Germany for
her special wearing. Lucy, as we have seen, was remarkably fond of her
younger brother, and at that moment his wanton and thoughtless
unkindness seemed more keenly injurious than even the studied insults
of her elder brother. Her grief, however, had no shade of resentment;
she folded her arms about the boy’s neck, and saying faintly, “Poor
Henry! you speak but what they tell you” she burst into a flood of
unrestrained tears. The boy was moved, notwithstanding the
thoughtlessness of his age and character. “The devil take me,” said he,
“Lucy, if I fetch you any more of these tormenting messages again; for
I like you better,” said he, kissing away the tears, “than the whole
pack of them; and you shall have my grey pony to ride on, and you shall
canter him if you like—ay, and ride beyond the village, too, if you
have a mind.”
“Who told you,” said Lucy, “that I am not permitted to ride where I
please?”
“That’s a secret,” said the boy; “but you will find you can never ride
beyond the village but your horse will cast a shoe, or fall lame, or
the cattle bell will ring, or something will happen to bring you back.
But if I tell you more of these things, Douglas will not get me the
pair of colours they have promised me, and so good-morrow to you.”
This dialogue plunged Lucy in still deeper dejection, as it tended to
show her plainly what she had for some time suspected, that she was
little better than a prisoner at large in her father’s house. We have
described her in the outset of our story as of a romantic disposition,
delighting in tales of love and wonder, and readily identifying herself
with the situation of those legendary heroines with whose adventures,
for want of better reading, her memory had become stocked. The fairy
wand, with which in her solitude she had delighted to raise visions of
enchantment, became now the rod of a magician, the bond slave of evil
_genii_, serving only to invoke spectres at which the exorcist
trembled. She felt herself the object of suspicion, of scorn, of
dislike at least, if not of hatred, to her own family; and it seemed to
her that she was abandoned by the very person on whose account she was
exposed to the enmity of all around her. Indeed, the evidence of
Ravenswood’s infidelity began to assume every day a more determined
character. A soldier of fortune, of the name of Westenho, an old
familiar of Craigengelt’s, chanced to arrive from abroad about this
time. The worthy Captain, though without any precise communication with
Lady Ashton, always acted most regularly and sedulously in support of
her plans, and easily prevailed upon his friend, by dint of
exaggeration of real circumstances and coming of others, to give
explicit testimony to the truth of Ravenswood’s approaching marriage.
Thus beset on all hands, and in a manner reduced to despair, Lucy’s
temper gave way under the pressure of constant affliction and
persecution. She became gloomy and abstracted, and, contrary to her
natural and ordinary habit of mind, sometimes turned with spirit, and
even fierceness, on those by whom she was long and closely annoyed. Her
health also began to be shaken, and her hectic cheek and wandering eye
gave symptoms of what is called a fever upon the spirits. In most
mothers this would have moved compassion; but Lady Ashton, compact and
firm of purpose, saw these waverings of health and intellect with no
greater sympathy than that with which the hostile engineer regards the
towers of a beleaguered city as they reel under the discharge of his
artillery; or rather, she considered these starts and inequalities of
temper as symptoms of Lucy’s expiring resolution; as the angler, by the
throes and convulsive exertions of the fish which he has hooked,
becomes aware that he soon will be able to land him. To accelerate the
catastrophe in the present case, Lady Ashton had recourse to an
expedient very consistent with the temper and credulity of those times,
but which the reader will probably pronounce truly detestable and
diabolical.