But, then, of what nature could be this mysterious authority which

Gerald possessed over her? That which he possessed over the sire,

political schemes might account for; but these, surely, could not have

much weight for the daughter. This, indeed, must still remain doubtful

and unaccounted for. One presumption, that Gerald was either no favoured

lover or that he was unacquainted with her retreat, might be drawn from

his continued residence at Devereux Court. If he loved Isora, and knew

her present abode, would he not have sought her? Could he, I thought,

live away from that bright face, if once allowed to behold it? unless,

indeed (terrible thought!) there hung over it the dimness of guilty

familiarity, and indifference had been the offspring of possession.

But was that delicate and virgin face, where changes with every moment

coursed each other, harmonious to the changes of the mind, as shadows in

a valley reflect the clouds of heaven!--was that face, so ingenuous, so

girlishly revelant of all,--even of the slightest, the most transitory,

emotion,--the face of one hardened in deceit and inured to shame? The

countenance is, it is true, but a faithless mirror; but what man that

has studied women will not own that there is, at least while the down

of first youth is not brushed away, in the eye and cheek of zoned and

untainted Innocence, that which survives not even the fruition of

a lawful love, and has no (nay, not even a shadowed and imperfect)

likeness in the face of guilt? Then, too, had any worldlier or mercenary

sentiment entered her breast respecting me, would Isora have flown from

the suit of the eldest scion of the rich house of Devereux? and would

she, poor and destitute, the daughter of an alien and an exile, would

she have spontaneously relinquished any hope of obtaining that alliance

which maidens of the loftiest houses of England had not disdained to

desire? Thus confused and incoherent, but thus yearning fondly towards

her image and its imagined purity, did my thoughts daily and hourly

array themselves; and, in proportion as I suffered common ties to drop

from me one by one, those thoughts clung the more tenderly to that

which, though severed from the rich argosy of former love, was still

indissolubly attached to the anchor of its hope.

It was during this period of revived affection that I received the

following letter from my uncle:--

I thank thee for thy long letter, my dear boy; I read it over three

times with great delight. Ods fish, Morton, you are a sad Pickle, I

fear, and seem to know all the ways of the town as well as your old

uncle did some thirty years ago! ‘Tis a very pretty acquaintance with

human nature that your letters display. You put me in mind of little

Sid, who was just about your height, and who had just such a pretty,

shrewd way of expressing himself in simile and point. Ah, it is easy to

see that you have profited by your old uncle’s conversation, and that

Farquhar and Etherege were not studied for nothing.

But I have sad news for thee, my child, or rather it is sad for me to

tell thee my tidings. It is sad for the old birds to linger in their

nest when the young ones take wing and leave them; but it is merry for

the young birds to get away from the dull old tree, and frisk it in the

sunshine,--merry for them to get mates, and have young themselves. Now,

do not think, Morton, that by speaking of mates and young I am going to

tell thee thy brothers are already married; nay, there is time enough

for those things, and I am not friendly to early weddings, nor to speak

truly, a marvellous great admirer of that holy ceremony at any age; for

the which there may be private reasons too long to relate to thee now.

Moreover, I fear my young day was a wicked time,--a heinous wicked time,

and we were wont to laugh at the wedded state, until, body of me, some

of us found it no laughing matter.

But to return, Morton,--to return to thy brothers: they have both left

me; and the house seems to me not the good old house it did when ye

were all about me; and, somehow or other, I look now oftener at the

churchyard than I was wont to do. You are all gone now,--all shot up

and become men; and when your old uncle sees you no more, and recollects

that all his own contemporaries are out of the world, he cannot help

saying, as William Temple, poor fellow, once prettily enough said,

“Methinks it seems an impertinence in me to be still alive.” You went

first, Morton; and I missed you more than I cared to say: but you were

always a kind boy to those you loved, and you wrote the old knight merry

letters, that made him laugh, and think he was grown young again (faith,

boy, that was a jolly story of the three Squires at Button’s!), and once

a week comes your packet, well filled, as if you did not think it a task

to make me happy, which your handwriting always does; nor a shame to my

gray hairs that I take pleasure in the same things that please thee! So,

thou seest, my child, that I have got through thy absence pretty well,

save that I have had no one to read thy letters to; for Gerald and thou

are still jealous of each other,--a great sin in thee, Morton, which

I prithee to reform. And Aubrey, poor lad, is a little too rigid,

considering his years, and it looks not well in the dear boy to shake

his head at the follies of his uncle. And as to thy mother, Morton,

I read her one of thy letters, and she said thou wert a graceless

reprobate to think so much of this wicked world, and to write so

familiarly to thine aged relative. Now, I am not a young man, Morton;

but the word aged has a sharp sound with it when it comes from a lady’s

mouth.

Well, after thou hadst been gone a month, Aubrey and Gerald, as I wrote

thee word long since, in the last letter I wrote thee with my own hand,

made a tour together for a little while, and that was a hard stroke on

me. But after a week or two Gerald returned; and I went out in my chair

to see the dear boy shoot,--‘sdeath, Morton, he handles the gun well.

And then Aubrey returned alone: but he looked pined and moping, and shut

himself up, and as thou dost love him so, I did not like to tell thee

till now, when he is quite well, that he alarmed me much for him; he is

too much addicted to his devotions, poor child, and seems to forget that

the hope of the next world ought to make us happy in this. Well, Morton,

at last, two months ago, Aubrey left us again, and Gerald last week set

off on a tour through the sister kingdom, as it is called. Faith, boy,

if Scotland and England are sister kingdoms, ‘tis a thousand pities for

Scotland that they are not co-heiresses!

I should have told thee of this news before, but I have had, as thou

knowest, the gout so villanously in my hand that, till t’ other day,

I have not held a pen, and old Nicholls, my amanuensis, is but a poor

scribe; and I did not love to let the dog write to thee on all our

family affairs, especially as I have a secret to tell thee which makes

me plaguy uneasy. Thou must know, Morton, that after thy departure

Gerald asked me for thy rooms; and though I did not like that any one

else should have what belonged to thee, yet I have always had a foolish

antipathy to say “No!” so thy brother had them, on condition to leave

them exactly as they were, and to yield them to thee whenever thou

shouldst return to claim them. Well, Morton, when Gerald went on his

tour with thy youngest brother, old Nicholls--you know ‘tis a garrulous

fellow--told me one night that his son Hugh--you remember Hugh, a thin

youth and a tall--lingering by the beach one evening, saw a man, wrapped

in a cloak, come out of the castle cave, unmoor one of the boats, and

push off to the little island opposite. Hugh swears by more than yea and

nay that the man was Father Montreuil. Now, Morton, this made me

very uneasy, and I saw why thy brother Gerald wanted thy rooms, which

communicate so snugly with the sea. So I told Nicholls, slyly, to have

the great iron gate at the mouth of the passage carefully locked; and

when it was locked, I had an iron plate put over the whole lock, that

the lean Jesuit might not creep even through the keyhole. Thy brother

returned, and I told him a tale of the smugglers, who have really

been too daring of late, and insisted on the door being left as I had

ordered; and I told him, moreover, though not as if I had suspected his

communication with the priest, that I interdicted all further converse

with that limb of the Church. Thy brother heard me with an indifferently

bad grace; but I was peremptory, and the thing was agreed on.

Well, child, the day before Gerald last left us, I went to take leave

of him in his own room,--to tell thee the truth, I had forgotten his

travelling expenses; when I was on the stairs of the tower I heard--by

the Lord I did--Montreuil’s voice in the outer room, as plainly as ever

I heard it at prayers. Ods fish, Morton, I was an angered, and I made

so much haste to the door that my foot slipped by the way: thy brother

heard me fall, and came out; but I looked at him as I never looked at

thee, Morton, and entered the room. Lo, the priest was not there:

I searched both chambers in vain; so I made thy brother lift up the

trapdoor, and kindle a lamp, and I searched the room below, and the

passage. The priest was invisible. Thou knowest, Morton, that there

is only one egress in the passage, and that was locked, as I have said

before, so where the devil--the devil indeed--could thy tutor have

escaped? He could not have passed me on the stairs without my seeing

him; he could not have leaped the window without breaking his neck; he

could not have got out of the passage without making himself a current

of air. Ods fish, Morton, this thing might puzzle a wiser man, than

thine uncle. Gerald affected to be mighty indignant at my suspicions;

but, God forgive him, I saw he was playing a part. A man does not write

plays, my child, without being keen-sighted in these little intrigues;

and, moreover, it is impossible I could have mistaken thy tutor’s voice,

which, to do it justice, is musical enough, and is the most singular

voice I ever heard,--unless little Sid’s be excepted.

_A propos_ of little Sid. I remember that in the Mall, when I was

walking there alone, three weeks after my marriage, De Grammont and Sid

joined me. I was in a melancholic mood [‘sdeath, Morton, marriage tames

a man as water tames mice!)--“Aha, Sir William,” cried Sedley, “thou

hast a cloud on thee; prithee now brighten it away: see, thy wife shines

on thee from the other end of the Mall.” “Ah, talk not to a dying man of

his physic!” said Grammont (that Grammont was a shocking rogue, Morton!)

“Prithee, Sir William, what is the chief characteristic of wedlock? is

it a state of war or of peace?” “Oh, peace to be sure!” cried Sedley,

“and Sir William and his lady carry with them the emblem.” “How!” cried

I; for I do assure thee, Morton, I was of a different turn of mind.

“How!” said Sid, gravely, “why, the emblem of peace is the _cornucopia_,

which your lady and you equitably divide: she carries the _copia_, and

you the _cor_--.” Nay, Morton, nay, I cannot finish the jest; for, after

all, it was a sorry thing in little Sid, whom I had befriended like a

brother, with heart and purse, to wound me so cuttingly; but ‘tis the

way with your jesters.

Ods fish, now how I have got out of my story! Well, I did not go back to

my room, Morton, till I had looked to the outside of the iron door, and

seen that the plate was as firm as ever: so now you have the whole of

the matter. Gerald went the next day, and I fear me much lest he should

already be caught in some Jacobite trap. Write me thy advice on the

subject. Meanwhile, I have taken the precaution to have the trap-door

removed, and the aperture strongly boarded over.

But ‘tis time for me to give over. I have been four days on this letter,

for the gout comes now to me oftener than it did, and I do not know when

I may again write to thee with my own hand; so I resolved I would e’en

empty my whole budget at once. Thy mother is well and blooming; she is,

at the present, abstractedly employed in a prodigious piece of tapestry

which old Nicholls informs me is the wonder of all the women.

Heaven bless thee, my child! Take care of thyself, and drink moderately.

It is hurtful, at thy age, to drink above a gallon or so at a sitting.

Heaven bless thee again, and when the weather gets warmer, thou must

come with thy kind looks, to make me feel at home again. At present the

country wears a cheerless face, and everything about us is harsh and

frosty, except the blunt, good-for-nothing heart of thine uncle, and

that, winter or summer, is always warm to thee.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX.

P. S. I thank thee heartily for the little spaniel of the new breed thou

gottest me from the Duchess of Marlborough. It has the prettiest red and

white, and the blackest eyes possible. But poor Ponto is as jealous as

a wife three years married, and I cannot bear the old hound to be vexed,

so I shall transfer the little creature, its rival, to thy mother.

This letter, tolerably characteristic of the blended simplicity,

penetration, and overflowing kindness of the writer, occasioned me

much anxious thought. There was no doubt in my mind but that Gerald

and Montreuil were engaged in some intrigue for the exiled family.

The disguised name which the former assumed, the state reasons which

D’Alvarez confessed that Barnard, or rather Gerald, had for concealment,

and which proved, at least, that some state plot in which Gerald was

engaged was known to the Spaniard, joined to those expressions of

Montreuil, which did all but own a design for the restoration of the

deposed line, and the power which I knew he possessed over Gerald, whose

mind, at once bold and facile, would love the adventure of the intrigue,

and yield to Montreuil’s suggestions on its nature,--these combined

circumstances left me in no doubt upon a subject deeply interesting

to the honour of our house, and the very life of one of its members.

Nothing, however, for me to do, calculated to prevent or impede the

designs of Montreuil and the danger of Gerald, occurred to me. Eager

alike in my hatred and my love, I said, inly, “What matters it whether

one whom the ties of blood never softened towards me, with whom, from

my childhood upwards, I have wrestled as with an enemy, what matters it

whether he win fame or death in the perilous game he has engaged in?”

And turning from this most generous and most brotherly view of the

subject, I began only to think whether the search or the society of

Isora also influenced Gerald in his absence from home. After a fruitless

and inconclusive meditation on that head, my thoughts took a less

selfish turn, and dwelt with all the softness of pity, and the anxiety

of love, upon the morbid temperament and ascetic devotions of Aubrey.

What, for one already so abstracted from the enjoyments of earth, so

darkened by superstitious misconceptions of the true nature of God and

the true objects of His creatures,--what could be anticipated but wasted

powers and a perverted life? Alas! when will men perceive the difference

between religion and priestcraft? When will they perceive that reason,

so far from extinguishing religion by a more gaudy light, sheds on it

all its lustre? It is fabled that the first legislator of the Peruvians

received from the Deity a golden rod, with which in his wanderings he

was to strike the earth, until in some destined spot the earth entirely

absorbed it, and there--and there alone--was he to erect a temple to the

Divinity. What is this fable but the cloak of an inestimable moral? Our

reason is the rod of gold; the vast world of truth gives the soil, which

it is perpetually to sound; and only where without resistance the soil

receives the rod which guided and supported us will our altar be sacred

and our worship be accepted.

CHAPTER X.

BEING A SHORT CHAPTER, CONTAINING A MOST IMPORTANT EVENT.

SIR WILLIAM’S letter was still fresh in my mind, when, for want of some

less noble quarter wherein to bestow my tediousness, I repaired to St.

John. As I crossed the hall to his apartment, two men, just dismissed

from his presence, passed me rapidly; one was unknown to me, but there

was no mistaking the other,--it was Montreuil. I was greatly startled;

the priest, not appearing to notice me, and conversing in a whispered

yet seemingly vehement tone with his companion, hurried on and vanished

through the street door. I entered St. John’s room: he was alone, and

received me with his usual gayety.

“Pardon me, Mr. Secretary,” said I; “but if not a question of state, do

inform me what you know respecting the taller one of those two gentlemen

who have just quitted you.”

“It is a question of state, my dear Devereux, so my answer must be

brief,--very little.”

“You know who he is?”

“Yes, a Jesuit, and a marvellously shrewd one: the Abbe Montreuil.”

“He was my tutor.”

“Ah, so I have heard.”

“And your acquaintance with him is positively and _bona fide_ of a state

nature?”

“Positively and _bona fide_.”

“I could tell you something of him; he is certainly in the service

of the Court at St. Germains, and a terrible plotter on this side the

Channel.”

“Possibly; but I wish to receive no information respecting him.”

One great virtue of business did St. John possess, and I have never

known any statesman who possessed it so eminently: it was the discreet

distinction between friends of the statesman and friends of the man.

Much and intimately as I knew St. John, I could never glean from him

a single secret of a state nature, until, indeed, at a later period, I

leagued myself to a portion of his public schemes. Accordingly I found

him, at the present moment, perfectly impregnable to my inquiries;

and it was not till I knew Montreuil’s companion was that celebrated

intriguant, the Abbe Gaultier, that I ascertained the exact nature

of the priest’s business with St. John, and the exact motive of the

civilities he had received from Abigail Masham.* Being at last forced,

despairingly, to give over the attempt on his discretion, I suffered St.

John to turn the conversation upon other topics, and as these were not

much to the existent humour of my mind, I soon rose to depart.

* Namely, that Count Devereux ascertained the priest’s communications

and overtures from the Chevalier. The precise extent of Bolingbroke’s

secret negotiations with the exiled Prince is still one of the darkest

portions of the history of that time. That negotiations _were_ carried

on, both by Harley and by St. John, very largely, and very closely, I

need not say that there is no doubt.

“Stay, Count,” said St. John; “shall you ride to-day?”

“If you will bear me company.”

“_Volontiers_,--to say the truth, I was about to ask you to canter your

bay horse with me first to Spring Gardens,* where I have a promise to

make to the director; and, secondly, on a mission of charity to a poor

foreigner of rank and birth, who, in his profound ignorance of this

country, thought it right to enter into a plot with some wise heads, and

to reveal it to some foolish tongues, who brought it to us with as much

clatter as if it were a second gunpowder project. I easily brought

him off that scrape, and I am now going to give him a caution for the

future. Poor gentleman, I hear that he is grievously distressed in

pecuniary matters, and I always had a kindness for exiles. Who knows but

that a state of exile may be our own fate! and this alien is sprung from

a race as haughty as that of St. John or of Devereux. The _res angusta

domi_ must gall him sorely!”

* Vauxhall.

“True,” said I, slowly. “What may be the name of the foreigner?”

“Why--complain not hereafter that I do not trust you in state matters--I

will indulge--D’Alvarez--Don Diego,--a hidalgo of the best blood of

Andalusia; and not unworthy of it, I fancy, in the virtues of fighting,

though he may be in those of council. But--Heavens! Devereux--you seem

ill!”

“No, no! Have you ever seen this man?”

“Never.”

At this word a thrill of joy shot across me, for I knew St. John’s fame

for gallantry, and I was suspicious of the motives of his visit.

“St. John, I know this Spaniard; I know him well, and intimately. Could

you not commission me to do your errand, and deliver your caution?

Relief from me he might accept; from you, as a stranger, pride might

forbid it; and you would really confer on me a personal and essential

kindness, if you would give me so fair an opportunity to confer kindness

upon him.”

“Very well, I am delighted to oblige you in any way. Take his direction;

you see his abode is in a very pitiful suburb. Tell him from me that he

is quite safe at present; but tell him also to avoid, henceforth,

all imprudence, all connection with priests, plotters, _et tous ces

gens-la_, as he values his personal safety, or at least his continuance

in this most hospitable country. It is not from every wood that we make

a Mercury, nor from every brain that we can carve a Mercury’s genius of

intrigue.”

“Nobody ought to be better skilled in the materials requisite for such

productions than Mr. Secretary St. John!” said I; “and now, adieu.”

“Adieu, if you will not ride with me. We meet at Sir William Wyndham’s

to-morrow.”

Masking my agitation till I was alone, I rejoiced when I found myself

in the open streets. I summoned a hackney-coach, and drove as rapidly

as the vehicle would permit to the petty and obscure suburb to which St.

John had directed me. The coach stopped at the door of a very humble but

not absolutely wretched abode. I knocked at the door. A woman opened it,

and, in answer to my inquiries, told me that the poor foreign gentleman

was very ill,--very ill indeed,--had suffered a paralytic stroke,--not

expected to live. His daughter was with him now,--would see no

one,--even Mr. Barnard had been denied admission.

At that name my feelings, shocked and stunned at first by the unexpected

intelligence of the poor Spaniard’s danger, felt a sudden and fierce

revulsion. I combated it. “This is no time,” I thought, “for any

jealous, for any selfish, emotion. If I can serve her, if I can relieve

her father, let me be contented.”--“She will see me,” I said aloud, and

I slipped some money in the woman’s hand. “I am an old friend of the

family, and I shall not be an unwelcome intruder on the sickroom of the

sufferer.”

“Intruder, sir,--bless you, the poor gentleman is quite speechless and

insensible.”

At hearing this I could refrain no longer. Isora’s disconsolate,

solitary, destitute condition broke irresistibly upon me, and all

scruple of more delicate and formal nature vanished at once. I ascended

the stairs, followed by the old woman--she stopped me by the threshold

of a room on the second floor, and whispered “_There_!” I paused an

instant,--collected breath and courage, and entered. The room was

partially darkened. The curtains were drawn closely around the bed. By

a table, on which stood two or three phials of medicine, I beheld Isora,

listening with an eager, a _most_ eager and intent face to a man whose

garb betrayed his healing profession, and who, laying a finger on

the outstretched palm of his other hand, appeared giving his precise

instructions, and uttering that oracular breath which--mere human words

to him--was a message of fate itself,--a fiat on which hung all that

makes life life to his trembling and devout listener. Monarchs of earth,

ye have not so supreme a power over woe and happiness as one village

leech! As he turned to leave her, she drew from a most slender purse a

few petty coins, and I saw that she muttered some words indicative of

the shame of poverty, as she tremblingly tended them to the outstretched

palm. Twice did that palm close and open on the paltry sum; and the

third time the native instinct of the heart overcame the later impulse

of the profession. The limb of Galen drew back, and shaking with a

gentle oscillation his capitalian honours, he laid the money softly on

the table, and buttoning up the pouch of his nether garment, as if to

resist temptation, he pressed the poor hand still extended towards him,

and bowing over it with a kind respect for which I did long to approach

and kiss his most withered and undainty cheek, he turned quickly round,

and almost fell against me in the abstracted hurry of his exit.

“Hush!” said I, softly. “What hope of your patient?”

The leech glanced at me meaningly, and I whispered to him to wait for

me below. Isora had not yet seen me. It is a notable distinction in the

feelings, that all but the solitary one of grief sharpen into exquisite

edge the keenness of the senses, but grief blunts them to a most dull

obtuseness. I hesitated now to come forward; and so I stood, hat in

hand, by the door, and not knowing that the tears streamed down my

cheeks as I fixed my gaze upon Isora. She too stood still, just where

the leech had left her, with her eyes fixed upon the ground, and her

head drooping. The right hand, which the man had pressed, had sunk

slowly and heavily by her side, with the small snowy fingers half closed

over the palm. There is no describing the despondency which the listless

position of that hand spoke, and the left hand lay with a like indolence

of sorrow on the table, with one finger outstretched and pointing

towards the phials, just as it bad, some moments before, seconded

the injunctions of the prim physician. Well, for my part, if I were a

painter I would come now and then to a sick chamber for a study.

At last Isora, with a very quiet gesture of self-recovery, moved towards

the bed, and the next moment I was by her side. If my life depended on

it, I could not write one, no, not _one_ syllable more of this scene.

CHAPTER XI.

CONTAINING MORE THAN ANY OTHER CHAPTER IN THE SECOND BOOK OF THIS

HISTORY.

MY first proposal was to remove the patient, with all due care and

gentleness, to a better lodging, and a district more convenient for the

visits of the most eminent physicians. When I expressed this wish to

Isora, she looked at me long and wistfully, and then burst into tears.

“_You_ will not deceive us,” said she, “and I accept your kindness at

once,--from _him_ I rejected the same offer.”

“Him?--of whom speak you?--this Barnard, or rather--but I know him!” A

startling expression passed over Isora’s speaking face.

“Know him!” she cried, interrupting me, “you do not,--you cannot!”

“Take courage, dearest Isora,--if I may so dare to call you,--take

courage: it is fearful to have a rival in that quarter; but I am

prepared for it. This Barnard, tell me again, do you love him?”

“Love--O God, no!”

“What then? do you still fear him?--fear him, too, protected by the

unsleeping eye and the vigilant hand of a love like mine?”

“Yes!” she said falteringly, “I fear for _you_!”

“Me!” I cried, laughing scornfully, “me! nay, dearest, there breathes

not that man whom you need fear on _my_ account. But, answer me; is

not--”

“For Heaven’s sake, for mercy’s sake!” cried Isora, eagerly, “do not

question me; I may not tell you who, or what this man is; I am bound, by

a most solemn oath, never to divulge that secret.”

“I care not,” said I, calmly, “I want no confirmation of my knowledge:

this masked rival is my own brother!”

I fixed my eyes full on Isora while I said this, and she quailed beneath

my gaze: her cheek, her lips, were utterly without colour, and an

expression of sickening and keen anguish was graven upon her face. She

made no answer.

“Yes!” resumed I, bitterly, “it is my brother,--be it so,--I am

prepared; but if you can, Isora, say one word to deny it.”

Isora’s tongue seemed literally to cleave to her mouth; at last with a

violent effort, she muttered, “I have told you, Morton, that I am bound

by oath not to divulge this secret; nor may I breathe a single syllable

calculated to do so,--if I deny one name, you may question me on

more,--and, therefore, to deny one is a breach of my oath. But, beware!”

she added vehemently, “oh! beware how your suspicions--mere vague,

baseless suspicions--criminate a brother; and, above all, whomsoever

you believe to be the real being under this disguised name, as you value

your life, and therefore mine,--breathe not to him a syllable of your

belief.”

I was so struck with the energy with which this was said, that, after a

short pause, I rejoined, in an altered tone,--

“I cannot believe that I have aught against life to fear from a

brother’s hand; but I will promise you to guard against latent danger.

But is your oath so peremptory that you cannot deny even one name?--if

not, and you _can_ deny this, I swear to you that I will never question

you upon another.”

Again a fierce convulsion wrung the lip and distorted the perfect

features of Isora. She remained silent for some moments, and then

murmured, “My oath forbids me even that single answer: tempt me no more;

now, and forever, I am mute upon this subject.”

Perhaps some slight and momentary anger, or doubt, or suspicion,

betrayed itself upon my countenance; for Isora, after looking upon me

long and mournfully, said, in a quiet but melancholy tone, “I see your

thoughts, and I do not reproach you for them--it is natural that you

should think ill of one whom this mystery surrounds,--one too placed

under such circumstances of humiliation and distrust. I have lived

long in your country: I have seen, for the last few months, much of its

inhabitants; I have studied too the works which profess to unfold its

national and peculiar character: I know that you have a distrust of

the people of other climates; I know that you are cautious and full of

suspicious vigilance, even in your commerce with each other; I know, too

[and Isora’s heart swelled visibly as she spoke], that poverty itself,

in the eyes of your commercial countrymen, is a crime, and that they

rarely feel confidence or place faith in those who are unhappy;--why,

Count Devereux, why should I require more of you than of the rest of

your nation? Why should you think better of the penniless and friendless

girl, the degraded exile, the victim of doubt,--which is so often the

disguise of guilt,--than any other, any one even among my own people,

would think of one so mercilessly deprived of all the decent and

appropriate barriers by which a maiden should be surrounded? No--no:

leave me as you found me; leave my poor father where you see him; any

place will do for us to die in.”

“Isora!” I said, clasping her in my arms, “you do not know me yet: had

I found you in prosperity, and in the world’s honour; had I wooed you

in your father’s halls, and girt around with the friends and kinsmen of

your race,--I might have pressed for more than you will now tell me; I

might have indulged suspicion where I perceived mystery, and I might not

have loved as I love you now! Now, Isora, in misfortune, in destitution,

I place without reserve my whole heart--its trust, its zeal, its

devotion--in your keeping; come evil or good, storm or sunshine, I am

yours, wholly and forever. Reject me if you will, I will return to you

again; and never, never--save from my own eyes or your own lips--will I

receive a single evidence detracting from your purity, or, Isora,--mine

own, own Isora,--may I not add also--from your love?”

“Too, too generous!” murmured Isora, struggling passionately with her

tears, “may Heaven forsake me if ever I am ungrateful to thee; and

believe--believe, that if love more fond, more true, more devoted than

woman ever felt before can repay you, you shall be repaid!”

Why, at that moment, did my heart leap so joyously within me?--why did I

say inly,--“The treasure I have so long yearned for is found at last:

we have met, and through the waste of years, we will work together, and

never part again”? Why, at that moment of bliss, did I not rather feel

a foretaste of the coming woe? Oh, blind and capricious Fate, that gives

us a presentiment at one while and withholds it at an other! Knowledge,

and Prudence, and calculating Foresight, what are ye?--warnings unto

others, not ourselves. Reason is a lamp which sheddeth afar a glorious

and general light, but leaveth all that is around it in darkness and in

gloom. We foresee and foretell the destiny of others: we march credulous

and benighted to our own; and like Laocoon, from the very altars

by which we stand as the soothsayer and the priest, creep forth,

unsuspected and undreamt of, the serpents which are fated to destroy us!

That very day, then, Alvarez was removed to a lodging more worthy of his

birth, and more calculated to afford hope of his recovery. He bore the

removal without any evident signs of fatigue; but his dreadful malady

had taken away both speech and sense, and he was already more than half

the property of the grave. I sent, however, for the best medical advice

which London could afford. They met, prescribed, and left the patient

just as they found him. I know not, in the progress of science, what

physicians may be to posterity, but in my time they are false witnesses

subpoenaed against death, whose testimony always tells less in favour of

the plaintiff than the defendant.

Before we left the poor Spaniard’s former lodging, and when I was on the

point of giving some instructions to the landlady respecting the place

to which the few articles of property belonging to Don Diego and Isora

were to be moved, Isora made me a sign to be silent, which I obeyed.

“Pardon me,” said she afterwards; “but I confess that I am anxious

our next residence should not be known,--should not be subject to the

intrusion of--of this--”

“Barnard, as you call him. I understand you; be it so!” and accordingly

I enjoined the goods to be sent to my own house, whence they were

removed to Don Diego’s new abode and I took especial care to leave with

the good lady no clew to discover Alvarez and his daughter, otherwise

than _through me_. The pleasure afforded me of directing Gerald’s

attention to myself, I could not resist. “Tell Mr. Barnard, when he

calls,” said I, “that only through Count Morton Devereux will he hear of

Don Diego d’Alvarez and the lady his daughter.”

“I will, your honour,” said the landlady; and then looking at me more

attentively, she added: “Bless me! now when you speak, there is a very

strong likeness between yourself and Mr. Barnard.”

I recoiled as if an adder had stung me, and hurried into the coach to

support the patient, who was already placed there.

Now then my daily post was by the bed of disease and suffering: in the

chamber of death was my vow of love ratified; and in sadness and in

sorrow was it returned. But it is in such scenes that the deepest, the

most endearing, and the most holy species of the passion is engendered.

As I heard Isora’s low voice tremble with the suspense of one who

watches over the hourly severing of the affection of Nature and of

early years; and as I saw her light step flit by the pillow which she

smoothed, and her cheek alternately flush and fade, in watching

the wants which she relieved; as I marked her mute, her unwearying

tenderness, breaking into a thousand nameless but mighty cares, and

pervading like an angel’s vigilance every--yea, the minutest--course

into which it flowed,--did I not behold her in that sphere in which

woman is most lovely, and in which love itself consecrates its

admiration and purifies its most ardent desires? That was not a time for

our hearts to speak audibly to each other; but we felt that they grew

closer and closer, and we asked not for the poor eloquence of words. But

over this scene let me not linger.

One morning, as I was proceeding on foot to Isora’s, I perceived on

the opposite side of the way Montreuil and Gerald: they were conversing

eagerly; they both saw me. Montreuil made a slight, quiet, and dignified

inclination of the head: Gerald coloured, and hesitated. I thought he

was about to leave his companion and address me; but, with a haughty and

severe air, I passed on, and Gerald, as if stung by my demeanour, bit

his lip vehemently and followed my example. A few minutes afterwards I

felt an inclination to regret that I had not afforded him an opportunity

of addressing me. “I might,” thought I, “have then taunted him with his

persecution of Isora, and defied him to execute those threats against

me, in which it is evident, from her apprehensions for my safety, that

he indulged.”

I had not, however, much leisure for these thoughts. When I arrived at

the lodgings of Alvarez, I found that a great change had taken place

in his condition; he had recovered speech, though imperfectly, and

testified a return to sense. I flew upstairs with a light step to

congratulate Isora: she met me at the door. “Hush!” she whispered:

“my father sleeps!” But she did not speak with the animation I had

anticipated.

“What is the matter, dearest?” said I, following her into another

apartment: “you seem sad, and your eyes are red with tears, which are

not, methinks, entirely the tears of joy at this happy change in your

father.”

“I am marked out for suffering,” returned Isora, more keenly than she

was wont to speak. I pressed her to explain her meaning; she hesitated

at first, but at length confessed that her father had always been

anxious for her marriage with this _soi-disant_ Barnard, and that his

first words on his recovery had been to press her to consent to his

wishes.

“My poor father,” said she, weepingly, “speaks and thinks only for my

fancied good; but his senses as yet are only recovered in part, and he

cannot even understand me when I speak of you. ‘I shall die,’ he

said, ‘I shall die, and you will be left on the wide world!’ I in vain

endeavoured to explain to him that I should have a protector: he fell

asleep muttering those words, and with tears in his eyes.”

“Does he know as much of this Barnard as you do?” said I.

“Heavens, no!--or he would never have pressed me to marry one so

wicked.”

“Does he know even who he is?”

“Yes!” said Isora, after a pause; “but he has not known it long.”

Here the physician joined us, and taking me aside, informed me that, as

he had foreboded, sleep had been the harbinger of death, and that Don

Diego was no more. I broke the news as gently as I could to Isora:

but her grief was far more violent than I could have anticipated; and

nothing seemed to cut her so deeply to the heart as the thought that his

last wish had been one with which she had not complied, and could never

comply.

I pass over the first days of mourning: I come to the one after Don

Diego’s funeral. I had been with Isora in the morning; I left her for a

few hours, and returned at the first dusk of evening with some books

and music, which I vainly hoped she might recur to for a momentary

abstraction from her grief. I dismissed my carriage, with the intention

of walking home, and addressing the woman-servant who admitted me,

inquired, as was my wont, after Isora. “She has been very ill,” replied

the woman, “ever since the strange gentleman left her.”

“The strange gentleman?”

Yes, he had forced his way upstairs, despite of the denial the servant

had been ordered to give to all strangers. He had entered Isora’s room;

and the woman, in answer to my urgent inquiries, added that she had

heard his voice raised to a loud and harsh key in the apartment; he

had stayed there about a quarter of an hour, and had then hurried out,

seemingly in great disorder and agitation.

“What description of man was he?” I asked.

The woman answered that he was mantled from head to foot in his cloak,

which was richly laced, and his hat was looped with diamonds, but

slouched over that part of his face which the collar of his cloak did

not hide, so that she could not further describe him than as one of a

haughty and abrupt bearing, and evidently belonging to the higher ranks.

Convinced that Gerald had been the intruder, I hastened up the stairs to

Isora. She received me with a sickly and faint smile, and endeavoured to

conceal the traces of her tears.

“So!” said I, “this insolent persecutor of yours has discovered your

abode, and again insulted or intimidated you. He shall do so no more! I

will seek him to-morrow; and no affinity of blood shall prevent--”

“Morton, dear Morton!” cried Isora, in great alarm, and yet with a

certain determination stamped upon her features, “hear me! It is true

this man has been here; it is true that, fearful and terrible as he is,

he has agitated and alarmed me: but it was only for you, Morton,--by the

Holy Virgin, it was only for you! ‘The moment,’ said he, and his voice

ran shiveringly through my heart like a dagger, ‘the moment Morton

Devereux discovers who is his rival, that moment his death-warrant is

irrevocably sealed!’”

“Arrogant boaster!” I cried, and my blood burned with the intense

rage which a much slighter cause would have kindled from the natural

fierceness of my temper. “Does he think my life is at his bidding, to

allow or to withhold? Unhand me, Isora, unhand me! I tell you I will

seek him this moment, and dare him to do his worst!”

“Do so,” said Isora, calmly, and releasing her hold; “do so; but hear

me first: the moment you breathe to him your suspicions you place an

eternal barrier betwixt yourself and me! Pledge me your faith that you

will never, while I live at least, reveal to him--to any one whom you

suspect--your reproach, your defiance, your knowledge--nay, not even

your lightest suspicion--of his identity with my persecutor; promise

me this, Morton Devereux, or I, in my turn, before that crucifix,

whose sanctity we both acknowledge and adore,--that crucifix which

has descended to my race for three unbroken centuries,--which, for my

departed father, in the solemn vow, and in the death-agony, has still

been a witness, a consolation, and a pledge, between the soul and its

Creator,--by that crucifix which my dying mother clasped to her bosom

when she committed me, an infant, to the care of that Heaven which hears

and records forever our lightest word,--I swear that I will never be

yours!”

“Isora!” said I, awed and startled, yet struggling against the

impression her energy had made upon me, “you know not to what you pledge

yourself, nor what you require of me. If I do not seek out this man,

if I do not expose to him my knowledge of his pursuit and unhallowed

persecution of you, if I do not effectually prohibit and prevent their

continuance, think well, what security have I for your future peace of

mind,--nay, even for the safety of your honour or your life? A man thus

bold, daring and unbaffled in his pursuit, thus vigilant and skilful in

his selection of time and occasion,--so that, despite my constant and

anxious endeavour to meet him in your presence, I have never been able

to do so,--from a man, I say, thus pertinacious in resolution, thus

crafty in disguise, what may you not dread when you leave him utterly

fearless by the license of impunity? Think too, again, Isora, that the

mystery dishonours as much as the danger menaces. Is it meet that my

betrothed and my future bride should be subjected to these secret and

terrible visitations,--visitations of a man professing himself her

lover, and evincing the vehemence of his passion by that of his pursuit?

Isora--Isora--you have not weighed these things; you know not what you

demand of me.”

“I do!” answered Isora; “I do know all that I demand of you; I demand of

you only to preserve your life.”

“How,” said I, impatiently, “cannot my hand preserve my life? and is it

for you, the daughter of a line of warriors, to ask your lover and your

husband to shrink from a single foe?”

“No, Morton,” answered Isora. “Were you going to battle, I would gird

on your sword myself; were, too, this man other than he is, and you were

about to meet him in open contest, I would not wrong you, nor degrade

your betrothed, by a fear. But I know my persecutor well,--fierce,

unrelenting,--dreadful in his dark and ungovernable passions as he is,

he has not the courage to confront you: I fear not the open foe, but

the lurking and sure assassin. His very earnestness to avoid you, the

precautions he has taken, are alone sufficient to convince you that he

dreads personally to oppose your claim or to vindicate himself.”

“Then what have I to fear?”

“Everything! Do you not know that from men, at once fierce, crafty, and

shrinking from bold violence, the stuff for assassins is always made?

And if I wanted surer proof of his designs than inference, his oath--it

rings in my ears now--is sufficient. ‘The moment Morton Devereux

discovers who is his rival, that moment his death-warrant is irrevocably

sealed.’ Morton, I demand your promise; or, though my heart break, I

will record my own vow.”

“Stay--stay,” I said, in anger, and in sorrow: “were I to promise this,

and for my own safety hazard yours, what could you deem me?”

“Fear not for me, Morton,” answered Isora; “you have no cause. I tell

you that this man, villain as he is, ever leaves me humbled and abased.

Do not think that in all times, and all scenes, I am the foolish and

weak creature you behold me now. Remember that you said rightly I was

the daughter of a line of warriors; and I have that within me which will

not shame my descent.”

“But, dearest, your resolution may avail you for a time; but it cannot

forever baffle the hardened nature of a man. I know my own sex, and I

know my own ferocity, were it once aroused.”

“But, Morton, you do not know me,” said Isora, proudly, and her face, as

she spoke, was set, and even stern: “I am only the coward when I think

of you; a word--a look of mine--can abash this man; or, if it could not,

I am never without a weapon to defend myself, or--or--” Isora’s voice,

before firm and collected, now faltered, and a deep blush flowed over

the marble paleness of her face.

“Or what?” said I, anxiously.

“Or thee, Morton!” murmured Isora, tenderly, and withdrawing her eyes

from mine.

The tone, the look that accompanied these words, melted me at once. I

rose,--I clasped Isora to my heart.

“You are a strange compound, my own fairy queen; but these lips, this

cheek, those eyes, are not fit features for a heroine.”

“Morton, if I had less determination in my heart, I could not love you

so well.”

“But tell me,” I whispered, with a smile, “where is this weapon on which

you rely so strongly?”

“Here!” answered Isora, blushingly; and, extricating herself from

me, she showed me a small two-edged dagger, which she wore carefully

concealed between the folds of her dress. I looked over the bright, keen

blade, with surprise, and yet with pleasure, at the latent resolution of

a character seemingly so soft. I say with pleasure, for it suited well

with my own fierce and wild temper. I returned the weapon to her, with a

smile and a jest.

“Ah!” said Isora, shrinking from my kiss, “I should not have been so

bold, if I only feared danger for myself.”

But if, for a moment, we forgot, in the gushings of our affection, the

object of our converse and dispute, we soon returned to it again.

Isora was the first to recur to it. She reminded me of the promise she

required; and she spoke with a seriousness and a solemnity which I found

myself scarcely able to resist.

“But,” I said, “if he ever molest you hereafter; if again I find that

bright cheek blanched, and those dear eyes dimmed with tears; and I know

that, in my own house, some one has dared thus to insult its queen,--am

I to be still torpid and inactive, lest a dastard and craven hand should

avenge my assertion of your honour and mine?”

“No, Morton; after our marriage, whenever that be, you will have nothing

to apprehend from him on the same ground as before; my fear for you,

too, will not be what it is now; your honour will be bound in mine, and

nothing shall induce me to hazard it,--no, not even your safety. I have

every reason to believe that, after that event, he will subject me

no longer to his insults: how, indeed, can he, under your perpetual

protection? or, for what cause should he attempt it, if he could? I

shall be then yours,--only and ever yours; what hope could, therefore,

then nerve his hardihood or instigate his intrusions? Trust to me at

that time, and suffer me to--nay, I repeat, promise me that I may--trust

in you now!”

What could I do? I still combated her wish and her request; but her

steadiness and rigidity of purpose made me, though reluctantly, yield to

them at last. So sincere, and so stern, indeed, appeared her resolution,

that I feared, by refusal, that she would take the rash oath that would

separate us forever. Added to this, I felt in her that confidence which,

I am apt to believe, is far more akin to the latter stages of real love

than jealousy and mistrust; and I could not believe that either now, or,

still less after our nuptials, she would risk aught of honour, or the

seemings of honour, from a visionary and superstitious fear. In spite,

therefore, of my deep and keen interest in the thorough discovery of

this mysterious persecution; and, still more, in the prevention of all

future designs from his audacity, I constrained myself to promise her

that I would on no account seek out the person I suspected, or wilfully

betray to him by word or deed my belief of his identity with Barnard.

Though greatly dissatisfied with my self-compulsion, I strove to

reconcile myself to its idea. Indeed, there was much in the peculiar

circumstances of Isora, much in the freshness of her present affliction,

much in the unfriended and utter destitution of her situation, that,

while on the one hand, it called forth her pride, and made stubborn that

temper which was naturally so gentle and so soft; on the other hand,

made me yield even to wishes that I thought unreasonable, and consider

rather the delicacy and deference due to her condition, than insist

upon the sacrifices which, in more fortunate circumstances, I might have

imagined due to myself. Still more indisposed to resist her wish and

expose myself to its penalty was I, when I considered her desire was

the mere excess and caution of her love, and when I felt that she spoke

sincerely when she declared that it was only for me that she was the

coward. Nevertheless, and despite all these considerations, it was with

a secret discontent that I took my leave of her, and departed homeward.

I had just reached the end of the street where the house was situated,

when I saw there, very imperfectly, for the night was extremely dark,

the figure of a man entirely enveloped in a long cloak, such as was

commonly worn by gallants in affairs of secrecy or intrigue; and, in

the pale light of a single lamp near which he stood, something like the

brilliance of gems glittered on the large Spanish hat which overhung his

brow. I immediately recalled the description the woman had given me of

Barnard’s dress, and the thought flashed across me that it was he whom

I beheld. “At all events,” thought I, “I may confirm my doubts, if I

may not communicate them, and I may watch over her safety if I may not

avenge her injuries.” I therefore took advantage of my knowledge of the

neighbourhood, passed the stranger with a quick step, and then, running

rapidly, returned by a circuitous route to the mouth of a narrow

and dark street, which was exactly opposite to Isora’s house. Here I

concealed myself by a projecting porch, and I had not waited long before

I saw the dim form of the stranger walk slowly by the house. He passed

it three or four times, and each time I thought--though the darkness

might deceive me--that he looked up to the windows. He made, however,

no attempt at admission, and appeared as if he had no other object than

that of watching by the house. Wearied and impatient at last, I came

from my concealment. “I may _confirm_ my suspicions,” I repeated,

recurring to my oath, and I walked straight towards the stranger.

“Sir,” I said very calmly, “I am the last person in the world to

interfere with the amusements of any other gentleman; but I humbly opine

that no man can parade by this house upon so very cold a night, without

giving just ground for suspicion to the friends of its inhabitants.

I happen to be among that happy number; and I therefore, with all due

humility and respect, venture to request you to seek some other spot for

your nocturnal perambulations.”

I made this speech purposely prolix, in order to have time fully to

reconnoitre the person of the one I addressed. The dusk of the night,

and the loose garb of the stranger, certainly forbade any decided

success to this scrutiny; but methought the figure seemed, despite of

my prepossessions, to want the stately height and grand proportions of

Gerald Devereux. I must own, however, that the necessary inexactitude of

my survey rendered this idea without just foundation, and did not by

any means diminish my firm impression that it was Gerald whom I beheld.

While I spoke, he retreated with a quick step, but made no answer. I

pressed upon him: he backed with a still quicker step; and when I had

ended, he fairly turned round, and made at full speed along the dark

street in which I had fixed my previous post of watch. I fled after

him, with a step as fleet as his own: his cloak encumbered his flight;

I gained upon him sensibly; he turned a sharp corner, threw me out, and

entered into a broad thoroughfare. As I sped after him, Bacchanalian

voices burst upon my ear, and presently a large band of those young men

who, under the name of Mohawks, were wont to scour the town nightly,

and, sword in hand, to exercise their love of riot under the disguise of

party zeal, became visible in the middle of the street. Through them

my fugitive dashed headlong, and, profiting by their surprise, escaped

unmolested. I attempted to follow with equal speed, but was less

successful. “Hallo!” cried the foremost of the group, placing himself in

my way.

“No such haste! Art Whig or Tory? Under which king, Bezonian? speak or

die!”

“Have a care, Sir,” said I, fiercely, drawing my sword.

“Treason, treason!” cried the speaker, confronting me with equal

readiness. “Have a care, indeed! have _at thee_.”

“Ha!” cried another, “‘tis a Tory; ‘tis the Secretary’s popish friend,

Devereux: pike him, pike him.”

I had already run my opponent through the sword arm, and was in hopes

that this act would intimidate the rest, and allow my escape; but at

the sound of my name and political bias, coupled with the drawn blood

of their confederate, the patriots rushed upon me with that amiable fury

generally characteristic of all true lovers of their country. Two

swords passed through my body simultaneously, and I fell bleeding and

insensible to the ground. When I recovered I was in my own apartments,

whither two of the gentler Mohawks had conveyed me: the surgeons were

by my bedside; I groaned audibly when I saw them. If there is a thing

in the world I hate, it is in any shape the disciples of Hermes; they

always remind me of that Indian people (the Padaei, I think) mentioned

by Herodotus, who sustained themselves by devouring the sick. “All

is well,” said one, when my groan was heard. “He will not die,” said

another. “At least not till we have had more fees,” said a third, more

candid than the rest. And thereupon they seized me and began torturing

my wounds anew, till I fainted away with the pain. However, the next day

I was declared out of immediate danger; and the first proof I gave of my

convalescence was to make Desmarais discharge four surgeons out of five:

the remaining one I thought my youth and constitution might enable me to

endure.

That very evening, as I was turning restlessly in my bed, and muttering

with parched lips the name of “Isora,” I saw by my side a figure covered

from head to foot in a long veil, and a voice, low, soft, but thrilling

through my heart like a new existence, murmured, “She is here!”

I forgot my wounds; I forgot my pain and my debility; I sprang upwards:

the stranger drew aside the veil from her countenance, and I beheld

Isora!

“Yes!” said she, in her own liquid and honeyed accents, which fell like

balm upon my wound and my spirit, “yes, she whom _you_ have hitherto

tended is come, in her turn, to render some slight but woman’s services

to you. She has come to nurse, and to soothe, and to pray for you, and

to be, till you yourself discard her, your hand-maid and your slave!”

I would have answered, but raising her finger to her lips, she arose

and vanished; but from that hour my wound healed, my fever slaked, and

whenever I beheld her flitting round my bed, or watching over me, or

felt her cool fingers wiping the dew from my brow, or took from her hand

my medicine or my food, in those moments, the blood seemed to make a

new struggle through my veins, and I felt palpably within me a fresh and

delicious life--a life full of youth and passion and hope--replace the

vaguer and duller being which I had hitherto borne.

There are some extraordinary incongruities in that very mysterious thing

_sympathy_. One would imagine that, in a description of things most

generally interesting to all men, the most general interest would be

found; nevertheless, I believe few persons would hang breathless over

the progressive history of a sick-bed. Yet those gradual stages from

danger to recovery, how delightfully interesting they are to all who

have crawled from one to the other! and who, at some time or other in

his journey through that land of diseases--civilized life--has not

taken that gentle excursion? “I would be ill any day for the pleasure

of getting well,” said Fontenelle to me one morning with his usual

_naivete_; but who would not be ill for the more pleasure of being ill,

if he could be tended by her whom he most loves?

I shall not therefore dwell upon that most delicious period of my

life,--my sick bed, and my recovery from it. I pass on to a certain

evening in which I heard from Isora’s lips the whole of her history,

save what related to her knowledge of the real name of one whose

persecution constituted the little of romance which had yet mingled with

her innocent and pure life. That evening--how well I remember it!--we

were alone; still weak and reduced, I lay upon the sofa beside the

window, which was partially open, and the still air of an evening in

the first infancy of spring came fresh, and fraught as it were with a

prediction of the glowing woods and the reviving verdure, to my cheek.

The stars, one by one, kindled, as if born of Heaven and Twilight, into

their nightly being; and, through the vapour and thick ether of the

dense city, streamed their most silent light, holy and pure, and

resembling that which the Divine Mercy sheds upon the gross nature of

mankind. But, shadowy and calm, their rays fell full upon the face

of Isora, as she lay on the ground beside my couch, and with one hand

surrendered to my clasp, looked upward till, as she felt my gaze, she

turned her cheek blushingly away. There was quiet around and above us;

but beneath the window we heard at times the sounds of the common earth,

and then insensibly our hands knit into a closer clasp, and we felt them

thrill more palpably to our hearts; for those sounds reminded us both of

our existence and of our separation from the great herd of our race!

What is love but a division from the world, and a blending of two souls,

two immortalities divested of clay and ashes, into one? it is a severing

of a thousand ties from whatever is harsh and selfish, in order to

knit them into a single and sacred bond! Who loves hath attained the

anchorite’s secret; and the hermitage has become dearer than the world.

O respite from the toil and the curse of our social and banded state,

a little interval art thou, suspended between two eternities,--the Past

and the Future,--a star that hovers between the morning and the night,

sending through the vast abyss one solitary ray from heaven, but too far

and faint to illumine, while it hallows the earth!

There was nothing in Isora’s tale which the reader has not already

learned or conjectured. She had left her Andalusian home in her early

childhood, but she remembered it well, and lingeringly dwelt over it in

description. It was evident that little, in our colder and less genial

isle, had attracted her sympathy, or wound itself into her affection.

Nevertheless, I conceive that her naturally dreamy and abstracted

character had received from her residence and her trials here much of

the vigour and the heroism which it now possessed. Brought up alone,

music, and books--few, though not ill-chosen, for Shakspeare was one,

and the one which had made upon her the most permanent impression, and

perhaps had coloured her temperament with its latent but rich hues of

poetry--constituted her amusement and her studies.

But who knows not that a woman’s heart finds its fullest occupation

within itself? There lies its real study, and within that narrow orbit,

the mirror of enchanted thought reflects the whole range of earth.

Loneliness and meditation nursed the mood which afterwards, with Isora,

became love itself. But I do not wish now so much to describe her

character as to abridge her brief history. The first English stranger of

the male sex whom her father admitted to her acquaintance was Barnard.

This man was, as I had surmised, connected with him in certain political

intrigues, the exact nature of which she did not know. I continue to

call him by a name which Isora acknowledged was fictitious. He had not,

at first, by actual declaration, betrayed to her his affections: though,

accompanied by a sort of fierceness which early revolted her, they

soon became visible. On the evening in which I had found her stretched

insensible in the garden, and had myself made my first confession of

love, I learned that he had divulged to her his passion and real name;

that her rejection had thrown him into a fierce despair; that he had

accompanied his disclosure with the most terrible threats against me,

for whom he supposed himself rejected, and against the safety of her

father, whom he said a word of his could betray; and her knowledge

of his power to injure us--_us_--yes, Isora then loved me, and then

trembled for my safety! had terrified and overcome her; and that in the

very moment in which my horse’s hoofs were heard, and as the alternative

of her non-compliance, the rude suitor swore deadly and sore vengeance

against Alvarez and myself, she yielded to the oath he prescribed to

her,--an oath that she would never reveal the secret he had betrayed to

her, or suffer me to know who was my real rival.

This was all that I could gather from her guarded confidence; he heard

the oath and vanished, and she felt no more till she was in my arms;

then it was that she saw in the love and vengeance of my rival a

barrier against our union; and then it was that her generous fear for me

conquered her attachment, and she renounced me. Their departure from

the cottage so shortly afterwards was at her father’s choice and at the

instigation of Barnard, for the furtherance of their political projects;

and it was from Barnard that the money came which repaid my loan to

Alvarez. The same person, no doubt, poisoned her father against me,

for henceforth Alvarez never spoke of me with that partiality he had

previously felt. They repaired to London: her father was often absent,

and often engaged with men whom she had never seen before; he was

absorbed and uncommunicative, and she was still ignorant of the nature

of his schemings and designs.

At length, after an absence of several weeks, Barnard reappeared, and

his visits became constant; he renewed his suit to her father as well

as herself. Then commenced that domestic persecution, so common in this

very tyrannical world, which makes us sicken to bear, and which, had

Isora been wholly a Spanish girl, she, in all probability, would never

have resisted: so much of custom is there in the very air of a climate.

But she did resist it, partly because she loved me,--and loved me

more and more for our separation,--and partly because she dreaded and

abhorred the ferocious and malignant passions of my rival, far beyond

any other misery with which fortune could threaten her. “Your father

then shall hang or starve!” said Barnard, one day in uncontrollable

frenzy, and left her. He did not appear again at the house. The

Spaniard’s resources, fed, probably, alone by Barnard, failed. From

house to house they removed, till they were reduced to that humble one

in which I had found them. There, Barnard again sought them; there,

backed by the powerful advocate of want, he again pressed his suit, and

at that exact moment her father was struck with the numbing curse of his

disease. “There and then,” said Isora, candidly, “I might have yielded

at last, for my poor father’s sake, if you had not saved me.”

Once only (I have before recorded the time) did Barnard visit her in the

new abode I had provided for her, and the day after our conversation on

that event Isora watched and watched for me, and I did not come. From

the woman of the house she at last learned the cause. “I forgot,” she

said timidly,--and in conclusion, “I forgot womanhood, and modesty, and

reserve; I forgot the customs of your country, the decencies of my

own; I forgot everything in this world, but you,--you suffering and in

danger; my very sense of existence seemed to pass from me, and to be

supplied by a breathless, confused, and overwhelming sense of impatient

agony, which ceased not till I was in your chamber, and by your side!

And--now, Morton, do not despise me for not having considered more, and

loved you less.”

“Despise you!” I murmured, and I threw my arms around her, and drew her

to my breast. I felt her heart beat against my own: those hearts spoke,

though our lips were silent, and in their language seemed to say, “We

are united now, and we will not part.”

The starlight, shining with a mellow and deep stillness, was the only

light by which we beheld each other: it shone, the witness and the

sanction of that internal voice, which we owned, but heard not. Our lips

drew closer and closer together, till they met! and in that kiss was the

type and promise of the after ritual which knit two spirits into one.

Silence fell around us like a curtain, and the eternal Night, with her

fresh dews and unclouded stars, looked alone upon the compact of our

hearts,--an emblem of the eternity, the freshness, and the unearthly

though awful brightness of the love which it hallowed and beheld!

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

WHEREIN THE HISTORY MAKES GREAT PROGRESS AND IS MARKED BY ONE IMPORTANT

EVENT IN HUMAN LIFE.

SPINOZA is said to have loved, above all other amusements, to put flies

into a spider’s web; and the struggles of the imprisoned insects were

wont to bear, in the eyes of this grave philosopher, so facetious and

hilarious an appearance, that he would stand and laugh thereat until the

tears “coursed one another down his innocent nose.” Now it so happened

that Spinoza, despite the general (and, in my most meek opinion, the

just) condemnation of his theoretical tenets,* was, in character and

in nature, according to the voices of all who knew him, an exceedingly

kind, humane, and benevolent biped; and it doth, therefore, seem a

little strange unto us grave, sober members of the unphilosophical Many,

that the struggles and terrors of these little winged creatures should

strike the good subtleist in a point of view so irresistibly ludicrous

and delightful. But, for my part, I believe that that most imaginative

and wild speculator beheld in the entangled flies nothing more than a

living simile--an animated illustration--of his own beloved vision

of Necessity; and that he is no more to be considered cruel for the

complacency with which he gazed upon those agonized types of his

system than is Lucan for dwelling with a poet’s pleasure upon the many

ingenious ways with which that Grand Inquisitor of Verse has contrived

to vary the simple operation of dying. To the bard, the butchered

soldier was only an epic ornament; to the philosopher, the murdered fly

was only a metaphysical illustration. For, without being a fatalist, or

a disciple of Baruch de Spinoza, I must confess that I cannot conceive

a greater resemblance to our human and earthly state than the penal

predicament of the devoted flies. Suddenly do we find ourselves plunged

into that Vast Web,--the World; and even as the insect, when he first

undergoeth a similar accident of necessity, standeth amazed and

still, and only by little and little awakeneth to a full sense of his

situation; so also at the first abashed and confounded, we remain on the

mesh we are urged upon, ignorant, as yet, of the toils around us,

and the sly, dark, immitigable foe that lieth in yonder nook, already

feasting her imagination upon our destruction. Presently we revive, we

stir, we flutter; and Fate, that foe--the old arch-spider, that hath

no moderation in her maw--now fixeth one of her many eyes upon us, and

giveth us a partial glimpse of her laidly and grim aspect. We pause in

mute terror; we gaze upon the ugly spectre, so imperfectly beheld; the

net ceases to tremble, and the wily enemy draws gently back into her

nook. Now we begin to breathe again; we sound the strange footing on

which we tread; we move tenderly along it, and again the grisly monster

advances on us; again we pause; the foe retires not, but remains still,

and surveyeth us; we see every step is accompanied with danger; we look

round and above in despair; suddenly we feel within us a new impulse and

a new power! we feel a vague sympathy with _that_ unknown region which

spreads beyond this great net,--_that limitless beyond_ hath a mystic

affinity with a part of our own frame; we unconsciously extend our

wings (for the soul to us is as the wings to the fly!); we attempt to

rise,--to soar above this perilous snare, from which we are unable to

crawl. The old spider watcheth us in self-hugging quiet, and, looking

up to our native air, we think,--now shall we escape thee. Out on it!

We rise not a hair’s breadth: we have the _wings_, it is true, but the

_feet_ are fettered. We strive desperately again: the whole web vibrates

with the effort; it will break beneath our strength. Not a jot of it!

we cease; we are more entangled than ever! wings, feet, frame, the foul

slime is over all! where shall we turn? every line of the web leads to

the one den,--we know not,--we care not,--we grow blind, confused, lost.

The eyes of our hideous foe gloat upon us; she whetteth her insatiate

maw; she leapeth towards us; she fixeth her fangs upon us; and so endeth

my parallel!

* One ought, however, to be very cautious before one condemns a

philosopher. The master’s opinions are generally pure: it is the

conclusions and corollaries of his disciples that “draw the honey forth

that drives men mad.” Schlegel seems to have studied Spinoza _de fonte_,

and vindicates him very earnestly from the charges brought against

him,--atheism, etc.--ED.

But what has this to do with my tale? Ay, Reader, that is thy question;

and I will answer it by one of mine. When thou hearest a man moralize

and preach of Fate, art thou not sure that he is going to tell thee of

some one of his peculiar misfortunes? Sorrow loves a parable as much as

mirth loves a jest. And thus already and from afar, I prepare thee, at

the commencement of this, the third of these portions into which the

history of my various and wild life will be divided, for that event with

which I purpose that the said portion shall be concluded.

It is now three months after my entire recovery from my wounds, and I

am married to Isora!--married,--yes, but _privately_ married, and the

ceremony is as yet closely concealed. I will explain.

The moment Isora’s anxiety for me led her across the threshold of my

house it became necessary for her honour that our wedding should take

place immediately on my recovery: so far I was decided on the measure;

now for the method. During my illness, I received a long and most

affectionate letter from Aubrey, who was then at Devereux Court: _so_

affectionate was the heart-breathing spirit of that letter, so steeped

in all our old household remembrances and boyish feelings, that coupled

as it was with a certain gloom when he spoke of himself and of worldly

sins and trials, it brought tears to my eyes whenever I recurred to

it; and many and many a time afterwards, when I thought his affections

seemed estranged from me, I did recur to it to convince myself that I

was mistaken. Shortly afterwards I received also a brief epistle from

my uncle; it was as kind as usual, and it mentioned Aubrey’s return to

Devereux Court. “That unhappy boy,” said Sir William, “is more than ever

devoted to his religious duties; nor do I believe that any priest-ridden

poor devil in the dark ages ever made such use of the scourge and the

penance.”

Now, I have before stated that my uncle would, I knew, be averse to

my intended marriage; and on hearing that Aubrey was then with him, I

resolved, in replying to his letter, to entreat the former to sound

Sir William on the subject I had most at heart, and ascertain the exact

nature and extent of the opposition I should have to encounter in the

step I was resolved to take. By the same post I wrote to the good old

knight in as artful a strain as I was able, dwelling at some length upon

my passion, upon the high birth, as well as the numerous good qualities

of the object, but mentioning not her name; and I added everything

that I thought likely to enlist my uncle’s kind and warm feelings on my

behalf. These letters produced the following ones:--

FROM SIR WILLIAM DEVEREUX.

‘Sdeath, nephew Morton,--but I won’t scold thee, though thou deservest

it. Let me see, thou art now scarce twenty, and thou talkest of

marriage, which is the exclusive business of middle age, as familiarly

as “girls of thirteen do of puppy-dogs.” Marry!--go hang thyself rather.

Marriage, my dear boy, is at the best a treacherous proceeding; and a

friend--a true friend--will never counsel another to adopt it rashly.

Look you: I have had experience in these matters; and, I think, the

moment a woman is wedded some terrible revolution happens in her system;

all her former good qualities vanish, _hey presto_! like eggs out of a

conjuror’s box; ‘tis true they appear on t’ other side of the box, the

side turned to other people, but for the poor husband they are gone

forever. Ods fish, Morton, go to! I tell thee again that I have had

experience in these matters which thou never hast had, clever as thou

thinkest thyself. If now it were a good marriage thou wert about

to make; if thou wert going to wed power, and money, and places at

court,--why, something might be said for thee. As it is, there is no

excuse--none. And I am astonished how a boy of thy sense could think of

such nonsense. Birth, Morton, what the devil does that signify so long

as it is birth in another country? A foreign damsel, and a Spanish girl,

too, above all others! ‘Sdeath, man, as if there was not quicksilver

enough in the English women for you, you must make a mercurial

exportation from Spain, must you! Why, Morton, Morton, the ladies in

that country are proverbial. I tremble at the very thought of it. But as

for my consent, I never will give it,--never; and though I threaten thee

not with disinheritance and such like, yet I do ask something in return

for the great affection I have always borne thee; and I make no doubt

that thou wilt readily oblige me in such a trifle as giving up a mere

Spanish donna. So think of her no more. If thou wantest to make love,

there are ladies in plenty whom thou needest not to marry. And for

my part, I thought that thou wert all in all with the Lady Hasselton:

Heaven bless her pretty face! Now don’t think I want to scold thee; and

don’t think thine old uncle harsh,--God knows he is not,--but my dear,

dear boy, this is quite out of the question, and thou must let me hear

no more about it. The gout cripples me so that I must leave off. Ever

thine old uncle,

WILLIAM DEVEREUX.

P. S. Upon consideration, I think, my dear boy, that thou must want

money, and thou art ever too sparing. Messrs. Child, or my goldsmiths

in Aldersgate, have my orders to pay to thy hand’s-writing whatever thou

mayst desire; and I do hope that thou wilt now want nothing to make

thee merry withal. Why dost thou not write a comedy? is it not the mode

still?

LETTER FROM AUBREY DEVEREUX.

I have sounded my uncle, dearest Morton, according to your wishes; and I

grieve to say that I have found him inexorable. He was very much hurt by

your letter to him, and declared he should write to you forthwith

upon the subject. I represented to him all that you have said upon the

virtues of your intended bride; and I also insisted upon your clear

judgment and strong sense upon most points being a sufficient surety

for your prudence upon this. But you know the libertine opinions and

the depreciating judgment of women entertained by my poor uncle; and he

would, I believe, have been less displeased with the heinous crime of an

illicit connection than the amiable weakness of an imprudent marriage--I

might say of any marriage--until it was time to provide heirs to the

estate.

Here Aubrey, in the most affectionate and earnest manner, broke off, to

point out to me the extreme danger to my interests that it would be to

disoblige my uncle; who, despite his general kindness, would, upon

a disagreement on so tender a matter as his sore point, and his most

cherished hobby, consider my disobedience as a personal affront. He also

recalled to me all that my uncle had felt and done for me; and insisted,

at all events, upon the absolute duty of my delaying, even though

I should not break off, the intended measure. Upon these points he

enlarged much and eloquently; and this part of his letter certainly left

no cheering or comfortable impression upon my mind.

Now my good uncle knew as much of love as L. Mummius did of the fine

arts,* and it was impossible to persuade him that if one wanted to

indulge the tender passion, one woman would not do exactly as well as

another, provided she were equally pretty. I knew therefore that he was

incapable, on the one hand, of understanding my love for Isora, or, on

the other, of acknowledging her claims upon me. I had not, of course,

mentioned to him the generous imprudence which, on the news of my wound,

had brought Isora to my house: for if I had done so, my uncle, with the

eye of a courtier of Charles II., would only have seen the advantage to

be derived from the impropriety, not the gratitude due to the devotion;

neither had I mentioned this circumstance to Aubrey,--it seemed to me

too delicate for any written communication; and therefore, in his advice

to delay my marriage, he was unaware of the necessity which rendered the

advice unavailing. Now then was I in this dilemma, either to marry, and

that _instanter_, and so, seemingly, with the most hasty and the most

insolent decorum, incense, wound, and in his interpretation of the act,

contemn one whom I loved as I loved my uncle; or, to delay the marriage,

to separate Isora, and to leave my future wife to the malignant

consequences that would necessarily be drawn from a sojourn of weeks

in my house. This fact there was no chance of concealing; servants

have more tongues than Argus had eyes, and my youthful extravagance had

filled my whole house with those pests of society. The latter measure

was impossible, the former was most painful. Was there no third

way?--there was that of a private marriage. This obviated not every

evil; but it removed many: it satisfied my impatient love; it placed

Isora under a sure protection; it secured and established her honour

the moment the ceremony should be declared; and it avoided the seeming

ingratitude and indelicacy of disobeying my uncle, without an effort

of patience to appease him. I should have time and occasion then, I

thought, for soothing and persuading him, and ultimately winning that

consent which I firmly trusted I should sooner or later extract from his

kindness of heart.

* A Roman consul, who, removing the most celebrated remains of Grecian

antiquity to Rome, assured the persons charged with conveying them that,

if they injured any, they should make others to replace them.

That some objections existed to this mediatory plan was true enough:

those objections related to Isora rather than to myself, and she was the

first, on my hinting at the proposal, to overcome its difficulties. The

leading feature in Isora’s character was generosity; and, in truth, I

know not a quality more dangerous either to man or woman. Herself was

invariably the last human being whom she seemed to consider; and no

sooner did she ascertain what measure was the most prudent for me to

adopt, than it immediately became that upon which she insisted. Would

it have been possible for me, man of pleasure and of the world as I was

thought to be,--no, my good uncle, though it went to my heart to wound

thee so secretly, it would _not_ have been possible for me, even if I

had not coined my whole nature into love, even if Isora had not been

to me what one smile of Isora’s really was,--it would not have been

possible to have sacrificed so noble and so divine a heart, and made

myself, in that sacrifice, a wretch forever. No, my good uncle. I could

not have made that surrender to thy reason, much less to thy prejudices.

But if I have not done great injustice to the knight’s character, I

doubt whether the youngest reader will not forgive him for a want of

sympathy with one feeling, when they consider how susceptible that

charming old man was to all others.

And herewith I could discourse most excellent wisdom upon that

mysterious passion of love. I could show, by tracing its causes, and its

inseparable connection with the imagination, that it is only in

certain states of society, as well as in certain periods of life, that

love--real, pure, high love--can be born. Yea, I could prove, to the

nicety of a very problem, that, in the court of Charles II., it would

have been as impossible for such a feeling to find root, as it would be

for myrtle trees to effloresce from a Duvillier periwig. And we are

not to expect a man, however tender and affectionate he may be, to

sympathize with that sentiment in another, which, from the accidents of

birth and position, nothing short of a miracle could have ever produced

in himself.

We were married then in private by a Catholic priest. St. John, and one

old lady who had been my father’s godmother--for I wished for a female

assistant in the ceremony, and this old lady could tell no secrets,

for, being excessively deaf, nobody ever talked to her, and indeed she

scarcely ever went abroad--were the sole witnesses. I took a small house

in the immediate neighbourhood of London; it was surrounded on all sides

with a high wall which defied alike curiosity and attack. This was,

indeed, the sole reason which had induced me to prefer it to many more

gaudy or more graceful dwellings. But within I had furnished it with

every luxury that wealth, the most lavish and unsparing, could procure.

Thither, under an assumed name, I brought my bride, and there was the

greater part of my time spent. The people I had placed in the house

believed I was a rich merchant, and this accounted for my frequent

absences (absences which Prudence rendered necessary), for the wealth

which I lavished, and for the precautions of bolt, bar, and wall, which

they imagined the result of commercial caution.

Oh the intoxication of that sweet Elysium, that Tadmor in life’s

desert,--the possession of the one whom we have first loved! It is as if

poetry, and music, and light, and the fresh breath of flowers, were all

blended into one being, and from that being rose our existence! It is

content made rapture,--nothing to wish for, yet everything to feel! Was

that air the air which I had breathed hitherto? that earth the earth

which I had hitherto beheld? No, my heart dwelt in a new world, and

all these motley and restless senses were melted into one sense,--deep,

silent, fathomless delight!

Well, too much of this species of love is not fit for a worldly tale,

and I will turn, for the reader’s relief, to worldly affections. From

my first reunion with Isora, I had avoided all the former objects and

acquaintances in which my time had been so charmingly employed. Tarleton

was the first to suffer by my new pursuit. “What has altered you?” said

he; “you drink not, neither do you play. The women say you are grown

duller than a Norfolk parson, and neither the Puppet Show nor the Water

Theatre, the Spring Gardens nor the Ring, Wills’s nor the Kit Cat, the

Mulberry Garden nor the New Exchange, witness any longer your homage and

devotion. What has come over you?--speak!”

“Apathy!”

“Ah! I understand,--you are tired of these things; pish, man!--go down

into the country, the green fields will revive thee, and send thee back

to London a new man! One would indeed find the town intolerably dull,

if the country were not, happily, a thousand times duller: go to the

country, Count, or I shall drop your friendship.”

“Drop it!” said I, yawning, and Tarleton took pet, and did as I desired

him. Now I had got rid of my friend as easily as I had found him,--a

matter that would not have been so readily accomplished had not Mr.

Tarleton owed me certain moneys, concerning which, from the moment he

had “dropped my friendship,” good breeding effectually prevented his

saying a single syllable to me ever after. There is no knowing the

blessings of money until one has learned to manage it properly!

So much, then, for the friend; now for the mistress. Lady Hasselton had,

as Tarleton hinted before, resolved to play me a trick of spite; the

reasons of our rupture really were, as I had stated to Tarleton, the

mighty effects of little things. She lived in a sea of trifles, and

she was desperately angry if her lover was not always sailing a

pleasure-boat in the same ocean. Now this was expecting too much from

me, and, after twisting our silken strings of attachment into all manner

of fantastic forms, we fell fairly out one evening and broke the little

ligatures in two. No sooner had I quarrelled with Tarleton than Lady

Hasselton received him in my place, and a week afterwards I was favoured

with an anonymous letter, informing me of the violent passion which a

certain _dame de la cour_ had conceived for me, and requesting me to

meet her at an appointed place. I looked twice over the letter, and

discovered in one corner of it two _g’s_ peculiar to the caligraphy of

Lady Hasselton, though the rest of the letter (bad spelling excepted)

was pretty decently disguised. Mr. Fielding was with me at the time.

“What disturbs you?” said he, adjusting his knee-buckles.

“Read it!” said I, handing him the letter.

“Body of me, you are a lucky dog!” cried the beau. “You will hasten

thither on the wings of love.”

“Not a whit of it,” said I; “I suspect that it comes from a rich old

widow whom I hate mortally.”

“A rich old widow!” repeated Mr. Fielding, to whose eyes there was

something very piquant in a jointure, and who thought consequently that

there were few virginal flowers equal to a widow’s weeds. “A rich old

widow: you are right, Count, you are right. Don’t go, don’t think of

it. I cannot abide those depraved creatures. Widow, indeed,--quite an

affront to your gallantry.”

“Very true,” said I. “Suppose you supply my place?”

“I’d sooner be shot first,” said Mr. Fielding, taking his departure, and

begging me for the letter to wrap some sugar plums in.

Need I add, that Mr. Fielding repaired to the place of assignation,

where he received, in the shape of a hearty drubbing, the kind favours

intended for me? The story was now left for me to tell, not for the Lady

Hasselton; and that makes all the difference in the manner a story is

told,--_me_ narrante, it is de _te_ fabula narratur; _te_ narrante, and

it is de _me_ fabula, etc. Poor Lady Hasselton! to be laughed at, and

have Tarleton for a lover!

I have gone back somewhat in the progress of my history in order to make

the above honourable mention of my friend and my mistress, thinking

it due to their own merits, and thinking it may also be instructive to

young gentlemen who have not yet seen the world to testify the exact

nature and the probable duration of all the loves and friendships they

are likely to find in that Great Monmouth Street of glittering and of

damaged affections! I now resume the order of narration.

I wrote to Aubrey, thanking him for his intercession, but concealing,

till we met, the measure I had adopted. I wrote also to my uncle,

assuring him that I would take an early opportunity of hastening to

Devereux Court, and conversing with him on the subject of his letter.

And after an interval of some weeks, I received the two following

answers from my correspondents; the latter arrived several days after

the former:--

FROM AUBREY DEVEREUX.

I am glad to understand from your letter, unexplanatory as it is, that

you have followed my advice. I will shortly write to you more at large;

at present I am on the eve of my departure for the North of England, and

have merely time to assure you of my affection.

AUBREY DEVEREUX.

P. S. Gerald is in London; have you seen him? Oh, this world! this

world! how it clings to us, despite our education, our wishes, our

conscience, our knowledge of the Dread Hereafter!

LETTER FROM SIR WILLIAM DEVEREUX.

MY DEAR NEPHEW,--Thank thee for thy letter, and the new plays thou

sentest me down, and that droll new paper, the “Spectator:” it is a

pretty shallow thing enough,--though it is not so racy as Rochester or

little Sid would have made it; but I thank thee for it, because it shows

thou wast not angry with thine old uncle for opposing thee on thy love

whimsies (in which most young men are dreadfully obstinate), since thou

didst provide so kindly for his amusement. Well, but, Morton, I hope

thou hast got that crotchet clear out of thy mind, and prithee now

_don’t_ talk of it when thou comest down to see me. I hate conversations

on marriage more than a boy does flogging,--ods fish, I do. So you must

humour me on that point!

Aubrey has left me again, and I am quite alone,--not that I was much

better off when he was here, for he was wont, of late, to shun my poor

room like a “lazar house,” and when I spoke to his mother about it, she

muttered something about “example” and “corrupting.” ‘Sdeath, Morton, is

your old uncle, who loves all living things, down to poor Ponto the dog,

the sort of man whose example corrupts youth? As for thy mother, she

grows more solitary every day; and I don’t know how it is, but I am not

so fond of strange faces as I used to be. ‘Tis a new thing for me to

be avoided and alone. Why, I remember even little Sid, who had as much

venom as most men, once said it was impossible to--Fie now--see if I was

not going to preach a sermon from a text in favour of myself! But come,

Morton, come, I long for your face again: it is not so soft as Aubrey’s,

nor so regular as Gerald’s; but it is twice as kind as either. Come,

before it is too late: I feel myself going; and, to tell thee a secret,

the doctors tell me I may not last many months longer. Come, and laugh

once more at the old knight’s stories. Come, and show him that there is

still some one not too good to love him. Come, and I will tell thee a

famous thing of old Rowley, which I am too ill and too sad to tell thee

now.

WM. DEVEREUX.

Need I say that, upon receiving this letter, I resolved, without any

delay, to set out for Devereux Court? I summoned Desmarais to me; he

answered not my call: he was from home,--an unfrequent occurrence with

the necessitarian valet. I waited his return, which was not for

some hours, in order to give him sundry orders for my departure. The

exquisite Desmarais hemmed thrice,--“Will Monsieur be so very kind as

to excuse my accompanying him?” said he, with his usual air and tone of

obsequious respect.

“And why?” The valet explained. A relation of his was in England only

for a few days: the philosopher was most anxious to enjoy his society, a

pleasure which fate might not again allow him.

Though I had grown accustomed to the man’s services, and did not like

to lose him even for a time, yet I could not refuse his request; and

I therefore ordered another of my servants to supply his place. This

change, however, determined me to adopt a plan which I had before

meditated; namely, the conveying of my own person to Devereux Court on

horseback, and sending my servant with my luggage in my post-chaise.

The equestrian mode of travelling is, indeed to this day, the one most

pleasing to me; and the reader will find me pursuing it many years

afterwards, and to the same spot.

I might as well observe here that I had never intrusted Desmarais--no,

nor one of my own servants--with the secret of my marriage with, or my

visits to, Isora. I am a very fastidious person on those matters; and

of all confidants, even in the most trifling affairs, I do most eschew

those by whom we have the miserable honour of being served.

In order, then, to avoid having my horse brought me to Isora’s house by

any of these menial spies, I took the steed which I had selected for my

journey, and rode to Isora’s with the intention of spending the evening

there, and thence commencing my excursion with the morning light.

CHAPTER II.

LOVE; PARTING; A DEATH-BED.--AFTER ALL HUMAN NATURE IS A BEAUTIFUL

FABRIC; AND EVEN ITS IMPERFECTIONS ARE NOT ODIOUS TO HIM WHO HAS STUDIED

THE SCIENCE OF ITS ARCHITECTURE, AND FORMED A REVERENT ESTIMATE OF ITS

CREATOR.

IT is a noticeable thing how much fear increases love. I mean--for the

aphorism requires explanation--how much we love in proportion to our

fear of losing (or even to our fear of injury done to) the beloved

object. ‘Tis an instance of the reaction of the feelings: the love

produces the fear, and the fear reproduces the love. This is one reason,

among many, why women love so much more tenderly and anxiously than we

do; and it is also one reason among many why frequent absences are,

in all stages of love, the most keen exciters of the passion. I never

breathed, away from Isora, without trembling for her safety. I trembled

lest this Barnard, if so I should still continue to call her persecutor,

should again discover and again molest her. Whenever (and that was

almost daily) I rode to the quiet and remote dwelling I had procured

her, my heart beat so vehemently, and my agitation was so intense,

that on arriving at the gate I have frequently been unable, for several

minutes, to demand admittance. There was, therefore, in the mysterious

danger which ever seemed to hang over Isora, a perpetual irritation to

a love otherwise but little inclined to slumber; and this constant

excitement took away from the torpor into which domestic affection too

often languishes, and increased my passion even while it diminished my

happiness.

On my arrival now at Isora’s, I found her already stationed at the

window, watching for my coming. How her dark eyes lit into lustre when

they saw me! How the rich blood mantled up under the soft cheek which

feeling had refined of late into a paler hue than it was wont, when I

first gazed upon it, to wear! Then how sprang forth her light step to

meet me! How trembled her low voice to welcome me! How spoke, from

every gesture of her graceful form, the anxious, joyful, all-animating

gladness of her heart! It is a melancholy pleasure to the dry, harsh

afterthoughts of later life, to think one has been thus loved; and one

marvels, when one considers what one is now, how it could have ever

been! That love _of ours_ was never made for after years! It could never

have flowed into the common and cold channel of ordinary affairs! It

could never have been mingled with the petty cares and the low objects

with which the loves of all who live long together in this sordid and

most earthly earth are sooner or later blended! We could not have spared

to others an atom of the great wealth of our affection. We were misers

of every coin in that boundless treasury. It would have pierced me to

the soul to have seen Isora smile upon another. I know not even, had we

had children, if I should not have been jealous of my child! Was this

selfish love? yes, it was, intensely, wholly selfish; but it was a love

made so only by its excess; nothing selfish on a smaller scale polluted

it. There was not on earth that which the one would not have forfeited

at the lightest desire of the other. So utterly were happiness and Isora

entwined together that I could form no idea of the one with which the

other was not connected. Was this love made for the many and miry roads

through which man must travel? Was it made for age, or, worse than age,

for those cool, ambitious, scheming years that we call mature, in which

all the luxuriance and verdure of things are pared into tame shapes that

mimic life, but a life that is estranged from Nature, in which art

is the only beauty and regularity the only grace? No, in my heart

of hearts, I feel that our love was not meant for the stages of life

through which I have already passed; it would have made us miserable to

see it fritter itself away, and to remember what it once was. Better

as it is! better to mourn over the green bough than to look upon the

sapless stem. You who now glance over these pages, are you a mother? If

so, answer me one question: Would you not rather that the child whom

you have cherished with your soul’s care, whom you have nurtured at

your bosom, whose young joys your eyes have sparkled to behold, whose

lightest grief you have wept to witness as you would have wept not for

your own; over whose pure and unvexed sleep you have watched and prayed,

and, as it lay before you thus still and unconscious of your vigil, have

shaped out, oh, such bright hopes for its future lot,--would you not

rather that while thus young and innocent, not a care tasted, not a

crime incurred, it went down at once into the dark grave? Would you

not rather suffer this grief, bitter though it be, than watch the

predestined victim grow and ripen, and wind itself more and more around

your heart, and when it is of full and mature age, and you yourself are

stricken by years, and can form no new ties to replace the old that are

severed, when woes have already bowed the darling of your hope, whom woe

never was to touch, when sins have already darkened the bright, seraph,

unclouded heart which sin never was to dim,--behold it sink day by day

altered, diseased, decayed, into the tomb which its childhood had in

vain escaped? Answer me: would not the earlier fate be far gentler than

the last? And if you _have_ known and wept over that early tomb, if

you have seen the infant flower fade away from the green soil of your

affections; if you have missed the bounding step, and the laughing

eye, and the winning mirth which made this sterile world a perpetual

holiday,--Mother of the Lost, if you have known, and you still pine for

these, answer me yet again! Is it not a comfort, even while you mourn,

to think of all that that breast, now so silent, has escaped? The cream,

the sparkle, the elixir of life, it had already quaffed: is it not sweet

to think it shunned the wormwood and the dregs? Answer me, even though

the answer be in tears! Mourner, your child was to you what my early and

only love was to me; and could you pierce down, down through a thousand

fathom of ebbing thought, to the far depths of my heart, you would there

behold a sorrow _and a consolation_ that have something in unison with

your own!

When the light of the next morning broke into our room, Isora was still

sleeping. Have you ever observed that the young, seen asleep and by the

morning light, seem much younger even than they are? partly because the

air and the light sleep of dawn bring a fresher bloom to the cheek,

and partly, because the careless negligence and the graceful postures

exclusively appropriated to youth, are forbidden by custom and formality

through the day, and developing themselves unconsciously in sleep, they

strike the eye like the ease and freedom of childhood itself. There,

as I looked upon Isora’s tranquil and most youthful beauty, over which

circled and breathed an ineffable innocence,--even as the finer and

subtler air, which was imagined by those dreamy bards who kindled the

soft creations of naiad and of nymph, to float around a goddess,--I

could not believe that aught evil awaited one for whom infancy itself

seemed to linger,--linger as if no elder shape and less delicate hue

were meet to be the garment of so much guilelessness and tenderness of

heart. I felt, indeed, while I bent over her, and her regular and quiet

breath came upon my cheek, that feeling which is exactly the reverse to

a presentiment of ill. I felt as if, secure in her own purity, she

had nothing to dread, so that even the pang of parting was lost in the

confidence which stole over me as I then gazed.

I rose gently, went to the next room, and dressed myself; I heard my

horse neighing beneath, as the servant walked him lazily to and fro.

I re-entered the bed-chamber in order to take leave of Isora; she was

already up. “What!” said I, “it is but three minutes since I left you

asleep, and I stole away as time does when with you.”

“Ah!” said Isora, smiling and blushing too, “but for my part, I think

there is an instinct to know, even if all the senses were shut up,

whether the one we love is with us or not. The moment you left me, I

felt it at once, even in sleep, and I woke. But you will not, no, you

will not leave me yet!”

I think I see Isora now, as she stood by the window which she had

opened, with a woman’s minute anxiety, to survey even the aspect of the

clouds, and beseech caution against the treachery of the skies. I think

I see her now, as she stood the moment after I had torn myself from her

embrace, and had looked back, as I reached the door, for one parting

glance,--her eyes all tenderness, her lips parted, and quivering with

the attempt to smile, the long, glossy ringlets (through whose raven

hue the _purpureum lumen_ broke like an imprisoned sunbeam) straying in

dishevelled beauty over her transparent neck; the throat bent in mute

despondency; the head drooping; the arms half extended, and dropping

gradually as my steps departed; the sunken, absorbed expression of face,

form, and gesture, so steeped in the very bitterness of dejection,--all

are before me now, sorrowful, and lovely in sorrow, as they were beheld

years ago, by the gray, cold, comfortless light of morning!

“God bless you,--my own, own love,” I said; and as my look lingered,

I added, with a full but an assured heart; “and He will!” I tarried

no more: I flung myself on my horse, and rode on as if I were speeding

_to_, and not _from_, my bride.

The noon was far advanced, as, the day after I left Isora, I found

myself entering the park in which Devereux Court is situated. I did not

enter by one of the lodges, but through a private gate. My horse was

thoroughly jaded; for the distance I had come was great, and I had

ridden rapidly; and as I came into the park, I dismounted, and, throwing

the rein over my arm, proceeded slowly on foot. I was passing through a

thick, long plantation, which belted the park and in which several walks

and rides had been cut, when a man crossed the same road which I took,

at a little distance before me. He was looking on the ground, and

appeared wrapt in such earnest meditation that he neither saw nor heard

me. But I had seen enough of him, in that brief space of time, to feel

convinced that it was Montreuil whom I beheld. What brought him hither,

him, whom I believed in London, immersed with Gerald in political

schemes, and for whom these woods were not only interdicted ground, but

to whom they must have also been but a tame field of interest, after

his audiences with ministers and nobles? I did not, however, pause

to consider on his apparition; I rather quickened my pace towards the

house, in the expectation of there ascertaining the cause of his visit.

The great gates of the outer court were open as usual: I rode

unheedingly through them, and was soon at the door of the hall. The

porter, who unfolded to my summons the ponderous door, uttered, when

he saw me, an exclamation that seemed to my ear to have in it more of

sorrow than welcome.

“How is your master?” I asked.

The man shook his head, but did not hasten to answer; and, impressed

with a vague alarm, I hurried on without repeating the question. On the

staircase I met old Nicholls, my uncle’s valet; I stopped and questioned

him. My uncle had been seized on the preceding day with gout in the

stomach; medical aid had been procured, but it was feared ineffectually,

and the physicians had declared, about an hour before I arrived, that he

could not, in human probability, outlive the night. Stifling the rising

at my heart, I waited to hear no more: I flew up the stairs; I was at

the door of my uncle’s chamber; I stopped there, and listened; all

was still; I opened the door gently; I stole in, and, creeping to the

bedside, knelt down and covered my face with my hands; for I required

a pause for self-possession, before I had courage to look up. When I

raised my eyes, I saw my mother on the opposite side; she sat on a chair

with a draught of medicine in one hand, and a watch in the other. She

caught my eye, but did not speak; she gave me a sign of recognition, and

looked down again upon the watch. My uncle’s back was turned to me,

and he lay so still that, for some moments, I thought he was asleep; at

last, however, he moved restlessly.

“It is past noon!” said he to my mother, “is it not?”

“It is three minutes and six seconds after four,” replied my mother,

looking closer at the watch.

My uncle sighed. “They have sent an express for the dear boy, Madam?”

said he.

“Exactly at half-past nine last evening,” answered my mother, glancing

at me.

“He could scarcely be here by this time,” said my uncle, and he moved

again in the bed. “Pish, how the pillow frets one!”

“Is it too high?” said my mother.

“No,” said my uncle, faintly, “no--no--the discomfort is not in the

pillow, after all: ‘tis a fine day; is it not?”

“Very!” said my mother; “I wish you could go out.”

My uncle did not answer: there was a pause. “Ods fish, Madam, are those

carriage wheels?”

“No, Sir William--but--”

“There _are_ sounds in my ear; my senses grow dim,” said my uncle,

unheeding her: “would that I might live another day; I should not

like to die without seeing him. ‘Sdeath, Madam, I do hear something

behind!--Sobs, as I live!--Who sobs for the old knight?” and my uncle

turned round, and saw me.

“My dear--dear uncle!” I said, and could say no more.

“Ah, Morton,” cried the kind old man, putting his hand affectionately

upon mine. “Beshrew me, but I think I have conquered the grim enemy now

that you are come. But what’s this, my boy?--tears--tears,--why, little

Sid--no, nor Rochester either, would ever have believed this if I had

sworn it! Cheer up, cheer up.”

But, seeing that I wept and sobbed the more, my uncle, after a pause,

continued in the somewhat figurative strain which the reader has

observed he sometimes adopted, and which perhaps his dramatic studies

had taught him.

“Nay, Morton, what do you grieve for?--that Age should throw off its

fardel of aches and pains, and no longer groan along its weary road,

meeting cold looks and unwilling welcomes, as both host and comrade grow

weary of the same face, and the spendthrift heart has no longer quip

or smile wherewith to pay the reckoning? No, no: let the poor pedler

shuffle off his dull pack, and fall asleep. But I am glad you are come:

I would sooner have one of your kind looks at your uncle’s stale saws or

jests than all the long faces about me, saving only the presence of

your mother;” and with his characteristic gallantry, my uncle turned

courteously to her.

“Dear Sir William!” said she, “it is time you should take your draught;

and then would it not be better that you should see the chaplain? he

waits without.”

“Ods fish,” said my uncle, turning again to me, “‘tis the way with them

all: when the body is past hope comes the physician, and when the soul

is past mending comes the priest. No, Madam, no, ‘tis too late for

either.--Thank ye, Morton, thank ye” (as I started up--took the draught

from my mother’s hand, and besought him to drink it), “‘tis of no use;

but if it pleases thee, I must,”--and he drank the medicine.

My mother rose, and walked towards the door: it was ajar; and, as my eye

followed her figure, I perceived, through the opening, the black garb of

the chaplain.

“Not yet,” said she, quietly; “wait.” And then gliding away, seated

herself by the window in silence, and told her beads.

My uncle continued: “They have been at me, Morton, as if I had been a

pagan; and I believe, in their hearts, they are not a little scandalized

that I don’t try to win the next world by trembling like an ague. Faith

now, I never could believe that Heaven was so partial to cowards; nor

can I think, Morton, that Salvation is like a soldier’s muster-roll, and

that we may play the devil between hours, so that, at the last moment,

we whip in, and answer to our names. Ods fish, Morton, I could tell thee

a tale of that; but ‘tis a long one, and we have not time now. Well,

well, for my part, I deem reverently and gratefully of God, and do not

believe He will be very wroth with our past enjoyment of life, if we

have taken care that others should enjoy it too; nor do I think, with

thy good mother, and Aubrey, dear child! that an idle word has the same

weight in the Almighty’s scales as a wicked deed.”

“Blessed, blessed, are they,” I cried through my tears, “on whose souls

there is as little stain as there is on yours!”

“Faith, Morton, that’s kindly said; and thou knowest not how strangely

it sounds, after their exhortations to repentance. I know I have had my

faults, and walked on to our common goal in a very irregular line; but I

never wronged the living nor slandered the dead, nor ever shut my heart

to the poor,--‘t were a burning sin if I had,--and I have loved all men

and all things, and I never bore ill-will to a creature. Poor Ponto,

Morton, thou wilt take care of poor Ponto, when I’m dead,--nay, nay,

don’t grieve so. Go, my child, go: compose thyself while I see the

priest, for ‘t will please thy poor mother; and though she thinks

harshly of me now, I should not like her to do so _to-morrow_! Go, my

dear boy, go.”

I went from the room, and waited by the door, till the office of the

priest was over. My mother then came out, and said Sir William had

composed himself to sleep. While she was yet speaking, Gerald surprised

me by his appearance. I learned that he had been in the house for the

last three days, and when I heard this, I involuntarily accounted for

the appearance of Montreuil. I saluted him distantly, and he returned

my greeting with the like pride. He seemed, however, though in a less

degree, to share in my emotions; and my heart softened to him for it.

Nevertheless we stood apart, and met not as brothers should have met by

the death-bed of a mutual benefactor.

“Will you wait without?” said my mother.

“No,” answered I, “I will watch over him.” So I stole in, with a light

step, and seated myself by my uncle’s bed-side. He was asleep, and his

sleep was as hushed and quiet as an infant’s. I looked upon his face,

and saw a change had come over it, and was increasing sensibly: but

there was neither harshness nor darkness in the change, awful as it was.

The soul, so long nurtured on benevolence, could not, in parting, leave

a rude stamp on the kindly clay which had seconded its impulses so well.

The evening had just set in, when my uncle woke; he turned very gently,

and smiled when he saw me.

“It is late,” said he, and I observed with a wrung heart, that his voice

was fainter.

“No, Sir, not very,” said I.

“Late enough, my child; the warm sun has gone down; and ‘tis a good time

to close one’s eyes, when all without looks gray and chill: methinks

it is easier to wish thee farewell, Morton, when I see thy face

indistinctly. I am glad I shall not die in the daytime. Give me thy

hand, my child, and tell me that thou art not angry with thine old uncle

for thwarting thee in that love business. I have heard tales of the

girl, too, which made me glad, for thy sake, that it is all off, though

I might not tell thee of them before. ‘Tis very dark, Morton. I have had

a pleasant sleep. Ods fish, I do not think a bad man would have slept so

well. The fire burns dim, Morton: it is very cold. Cover me up; double

the counterpane over the legs, Morton. I remember once walking in the

Mall; little Sid said, ‘Devereux’--it is colder and colder, Morton;

raise the blankets more over the back; ‘Devereux,’ said little

Sid--faith, Morton, ‘tis ice now--where art thou?--is the fire out, that

I can’t see thee? Remember thine old uncle, Morton--and--and--don’t

forget poor--Ponto. Bless thee, my child; bless you all!”

And my uncle died!

CHAPTER III.

A GREAT CHANGE OF PROSPECTS.

I SHUT myself up in the apartments prepared for me (they were not those

I had formerly occupied), and refused all participation in my solitude,

till, after an interval of some days, my mother came to summon me to the

opening of the will. She was more moved than I had expected. “It is a

pity,” said she, as we descended the stairs, “that Aubrey is not here,

and that we should be so unacquainted with the exact place where he is

likely to be that I fear the letter I sent him may be long delayed, or,

indeed, altogether miscarry.”

“Is not the Abbe here?” said I, listlessly.

“No!” answered my mother, “to be sure not.”

“He has _been_ here,” said I, greatly surprised. “I certainly saw him on

the day of my arrival.”

“Impossible!” said my mother, in evident astonishment; and seeing that,

at all events, she was unacquainted with the circumstance, I said no

more.

The will was to be read in the little room where my uncle had been

accustomed to sit. I felt it as a sacrilege to his memory to choose that

spot for such an office, but I said nothing. Gerald and my mother, the

lawyer (a neighbouring attorney, named Oswald), and myself were the only

persons present. Mr. Oswald hemmed thrice, and broke the seal. After

a preliminary, strongly characteristic of the testator, he came to the

disposition of the estates. I had never once, since my poor uncle’s

death, thought upon the chances of his will; indeed, knowing myself so

entirely his favourite, I could not, if I had thought upon them, have

entertained a doubt as to their result. What then was my astonishment

when, couched in terms of the strongest affection, the whole bulk of the

property was bequeathed to Gerald; to Aubrey the sum of forty, to myself

that of twenty thousand pounds (a capital considerably less than the

yearly income of my uncle’s princely estates), was allotted. Then

followed a list of minor bequests,--to my mother an annuity of three

thousand a year, with the privilege of apartments in the house during

her life; to each of the servants legacies sufficient for independence;

to a few friends, and distant connections of the family, tokens of the

testator’s remembrance,--even the horses to his carriage, and the dogs

that fed from his menials’ table, were not forgotten, but were to be set

apart from work, and maintained in indolence during their remaining span

of life. The will was concluded: I could not believe my senses; not a

word was said as a reason for giving Gerald the priority.

I rose calmly enough. “Suffer me, Sir,” said I to the lawyer, “to

satisfy my own eyes.” Mr. Oswald bowed, and placed the will in my hands.

I glanced at Gerald as I took it: his countenance betrayed, or feigned,

an astonishment equal to my own. With a jealous, searching, scrutinizing

eye, I examined the words of the bequest; I examined especially (for I

suspected that the names must have been exchanged) the place in which my

name and Gerald’s occurred. In vain: all was smooth and fair to the eye,

not a vestige of possible erasure or alteration was visible. I looked

next at the wording of the will: it was evidently my uncle’s; no one

could have feigned or imitated the peculiar turn of his expressions;

and, above all, many parts of the will (the affectionate and personal

parts) were in his own handwriting.

“The date,” said I, “is, I perceive, of very recent period; the will is

signed by two witnesses besides yourself. Who and where are they?”

“Robert Lister, the first signature, my clerk; he is since dead, Sir.”

“Dead!” said I; “and the other witness, George Davis?”

“Is one of Sir William’s tenants, and is below, Sir, in waiting.”

“Let him come up,” and a middle-sized, stout man, with a blunt, bold,

open countenance, was admitted.

“Did you witness this will?” said I.

“I did, your honour!”

“And this is your handwriting?” pointing to the scarcely legible scrawl.

“Yees, your honour,” said the man, scratching his head, “I think it be;

they are my _ees_, and G, and D, sure enough.”

“And do you know the purport of the will you signed?”

“Anan!”

“I mean, do you know to whom Sir William--stop, Mr. Oswald, suffer the

man to answer me--to whom Sir William left his property?”

“Noa, to be sure, Sir; the will was a woundy long one, and Maister

Oswald there told me it was no use to read it over to me, but merely to

sign, as a witness to Sir William’s handwriting.”

“Enough: you may retire;” and George Davis vanished.

“Mr. Oswald,” said I, approaching the attorney, “I may wrong you, and

if so, I am sorry for it, but I suspect there has been foul practice in

this deed. I have reason to be convinced that Sir William Devereux could

never have made this devise. I give you warning, Sir, that I shall bring

the business immediately before a court of law, and that if guilty--ay,

tremble, Sir--of what I suspect, you will answer for this deed at the

foot of the gallows.”

I turned to Gerald, who rose while I was yet speaking. Before I could

address him, he exclaimed, with evident and extreme agitation,

“You cannot, Morton,--you cannot--you dare not--insinuate that I, your

brother, have been base enough to forge, or to instigate the forgery of,

this will?”

Gerald’s agitation made me still less doubtful of his guilt.

“The case, Sir,” I answered coldly, “stands thus: my uncle could not

have made this will; it is a devise that must seem incredible to all who

knew aught of our domestic circumstances. Fraud has been practised, how

I know not; by whom I do know.”

“Morton, Morton: this is insufferable; I cannot bear such charges, even

from a brother.”

“Charges!--your conscience speaks, Sir,--not I; no one benefits by this

fraud but you: pardon me if I draw an inference from a fact.”

So saying, I turned on my heel, and abruptly left the apartment. I

ascended the stairs which led to my own: there I found my servant

preparing the paraphernalia in which that very evening I was to attend

my uncle’s funeral. I gave him, with a calm and collected voice, the

necessary instructions for following me to town immediately after that

event, and then I passed on to the room where the deceased lay in state.

The room was hung with black: the gorgeous pall, wrought with the proud

heraldry of our line, lay over the coffin; and by the lights which made,

in that old chamber, a more brilliant, yet more ghastly, day, sat the

hired watchers of the dead.

I bade them leave me, and kneeling down beside the coffin, I poured out

the last expressions of my grief. I rose, and was retiring once more to

my room, when I encountered Gerald.