THE last accounts received of the Czar reported him to be at Dantzic. He

had, however, quitted that place when I arrived there. I lost no time

in following him, and presented myself to his Majesty one day after

his dinner, when he was sitting with one leg in the Czarina’s lap and a

bottle of the best _eau de vie_ before him. I had chosen my time well;

he received me most graciously, read my letter from the Regent--about

which, remembering the fate of Bellerophon, I had had certain

apprehensions, but which proved to be in the highest degree

complimentary--and then declared himself extremely happy to see me

again. However parsimonious Peter generally was towards foreigners, I

never had ground for personal complaint on that score. The very next day

I was appointed to a post of honour and profit about the royal person;

from this I was transferred to a military station, in which I rose

with great rapidity; and I was only occasionally called from my

warlike duties to be intrusted with diplomatic missions of the highest

confidence and importance.

It is this portion of my life--a portion of nine years to the time of

the Czar’s death--that I shall, in this history, the most concentrate

and condense. In truth, were I to dwell upon it at length, I should make

little more than a mere record of political events; differing, in some

respects, it is true, from the received histories of the time, but

containing nothing to compensate in utility for the want of interest.

That this was the exact age for adventurers, Alberoni and Dubois are

sufficient proofs. Never was there a more stirring, active, restless

period; never one in which the genius of intrigue was so pervadingly at

work. I was not less fortunate than my brethren. Although scarcely four

and twenty when I entered the Czar’s service, my habits of intimacy with

men much older; my customary gravity, reserve, and thought; my freedom,

since Isora’s death, from youthful levity or excess; my early entrance

into the world; and a countenance prematurely marked with the lines of

reflection and sobered by its hue,--made me appear considerably older

than I was. I kept my own counsel, and affected to be so: youth is a

great enemy to one’s success; and more esteem is often bestowed upon a

wrinkled brow than a plodding brain.

All the private intelligence which during this space of time I had

received from England was far from voluminous. My mother still enjoyed

the quiet of her religious retreat. A fire, arising from the negligence

of a servant, had consumed nearly the whole of Devereux Court (the fine

old house! till _that_ went, I thought even England held one friend).

Upon this accident, Gerald had gone to London; and, though there was now

no doubt of his having been concerned in the Rebellion of 1715, he had

been favourably received at court, and was already renowned throughout

London for his pleasures, his excesses, and his munificent profusion.

Montreuil, whose lot seemed to be always to lose by intrigue what he

gained by the real solidity of his genius, had embarked very largely in

the rash but gigantic schemes of Gortz and Alberoni; schemes which, had

they succeeded, would not only have placed a new king upon the English

throne, but wrought an utter change over the whole face of Europe.

With Alberoni and with Gortz fell Montreuil. He was banished France and

Spain; the penalty of death awaited him in Britain; and he was supposed

to have thrown himself into some convent in Italy, where his name and

his character were unknown. In this brief intelligence was condensed

all my information of the actors in my first scenes of life. I return to

that scene on which I had now entered.

At the age of thirty-three I had acquired a reputation sufficient

to content my ambition; my fortune was larger than my wants; I was

a favourite in courts; I had been successful in camps; I had already

obtained all that would have rewarded the whole lives of many men

superior to myself in merit, more ardent than myself in desires. I was

still young; my appearance, though greatly altered, manhood had rather

improved than impaired. I had not forestalled my constitution by

excesses, nor worn dry the sources of pleasure by too large a demand

upon their capacities; why was it then, at that golden age, in the very

prime and glory of manhood, in the very zenith and summer of success,

that a deep, dark, pervading melancholy fell upon me? a melancholy so

gloomy that it seemed to me as a thick and impenetrable curtain drawn

gradually between myself and the blessed light of human enjoyment. A

torpor crept upon me; an indolent, heavy, clinging languor gathered over

my whole frame, the physical and the mental: I sat for hours without

book, paper, object, thought, gazing on vacancy, stirring not, feeling

not,--yes, feeling, but feeling only one sensation, a sick, sad,

drooping despondency, a sinking in of the heart, a sort of gnawing

within as if something living were twisted round my vitals, and, finding

no other food, preyed, though with a sickly and dull maw, upon _them_.

This disease came upon me slowly: it was not till the beginning of the

second year, from its obvious and palpable commencement, that it grew to

the height that I have described. It began with a distaste to all that

I had been accustomed to enjoy or to pursue. Music, which I had always

passionately loved, though from some defect in the organs of hearing, I

was incapable of attaining the smallest knowledge of the science,

music lost all its diviner spells, all its properties of creating a new

existence, a life of dreaming and vain luxuries, within the mind: it

became only a monotonous sound, less grateful to the languor of my

faculties than an utter and dead stillness. I had never been what is

generally termed a boon companion; but I had had the social vanities,

if not the social tastes; I had insensibly loved the board which echoed

with applause at my sallies, and the comrades who, while they deprecated

my satire, had been complaisant enough to hail it as wit. One of my

weaknesses is a love of show, and I had gratified a feeling not the

less cherished because it arose from a petty source, in obtaining for my

equipages, my mansion, my banquets, the celebrity which is given no less

to magnificence than to fame: now I grew indifferent alike to the signs

of pomp, and to the baubles of taste; praise fell upon a listless ear,

and (rare pitch of satiety!) the pleasures that are the offspring of

our foibles delighted me no more. I had early learned from Bolingbroke

a love for the converse of men, eminent, whether for wisdom or for wit:

the graceful _badinage,_ or the keen critique; the sparkling flight of

the winged words which circled and rebounded from lip to lip, or the

deep speculation upon the mysterious and unravelled wonders of man, of

Nature, and the world; the light maxim upon manners, or the sage inquiry

into the mines of learning, all and each had possessed a link to bind my

temper and my tastes to the graces and fascination of social life. Now a

new spirit entered within me: the smile faded from my lip, and the jest

departed from my tongue; memory seemed no less treacherous than fancy,

and deserted me the instant I attempted to enter into those contests

of knowledge in which I had been not undistinguished before. I grew

confused and embarrassed in speech; my words expressed a sense utterly

different to that which I had intended to convey; and at last, as my

apathy increased, I sat at my own board, silent and lifeless, freezing

into ice the very powers and streams of converse which I had once been

the foremost to circulate and to warm.

At the time I refer to, I was Minister at one of the small Continental

courts, where life is a round of unmeaning etiquette and wearisome

ceremonials, a daily labour of trifles, a ceaseless pageantry of

nothings. I had been sent there upon one important event; the business

resulting from it had soon ceased, and all the duties that remained

for me to discharge were of a negative and passive nature. Nothing that

could arouse, nothing that could occupy faculties that had for years

been so perpetually wound up to a restless excitement, was left for me

in this terrible reservoir of _ennui_. I had come thither at once from

the skirmishing and wild warfare of a Tartar foe; a war in which, though

the glory was obscure, the action was perpetual and exciting. I had come

thither, and the change was as if I had passed from a mountain stream to

a stagnant pool. Society at this court reminded me of a state funeral:

everything was pompous and lugubrious, even to the drapery--even to

the feathers--which, in other scenes, would have been consecrated to

associations of levity or of grace; the hourly pageant swept on slow,

tedious, mournful, and the object of the attendants was only to entomb

the Pleasure which they affected celebrate. What a change for the wild,

the strange, the novel, the intriguing, the varying life, which, whether

in courts or camps, I had hitherto led! The internal change that came

over myself is scarcely to be wondered at; the winds stood still, and

the straw they had blown from quarter to quarter, whether in anger or in

sport, began to moulder upon the spot where they had left it.

From this cessation of the aims, hopes, and thoughts of life I was

awakened by the spreading, as it were, of another disease: the dead,

dull, aching pain at my heart was succeeded by one acute and intense;

the absence of thought gave way to one thought more terrible, more dark,

more despairing than any which had haunted me since the first year of

Isora’s death; and from a numbness and pause, as it were, of existence,

existence became too keen and intolerable a sense. I will enter into an

explanation.

At the court of------, there was an Italian, not uncelebrated for his

wisdom, nor unbeloved for an innocence and integrity of life rarely

indeed to be met with among his countrymen. The acquaintance of this

man, who was about fifty years of age, and who was devoted almost

exclusively to the pursuit of philosophical science, I had sedulously

cultivated. His conversation pleased me; his wisdom improved; and his

benevolence, which reminded me of the traits of La Fontaine, it was so

infantine, made me incline to love him. Upon the growth of the fearful

malady of mind which seized me, I had discontinued my visits and my

invitations to the Italian; and Bezoni (so was he called) felt a little

offended by my neglect. As soon, however, as he discovered my state

of mind, the good man’s resentment left him. He forced himself upon

my solitude, and would sit by me whole evenings,--sometimes without

exchanging a word, sometimes with vain attempts to interest, to arouse,

or to amuse me.

At last, one evening--it was the era of a fearful suffering to me--our

conversation turned upon those subjects which are at once the most

important and the most rarely discussed. We spoke of _religion_. We

first talked upon the theology of revealed religion. As Bezoni warmed

into candour, I perceived that his doctrines differed from my own, and

that he inly disbelieved that divine creed which Christians profess to

adore. From a dispute on the ground of faith, we came to one upon the

more debatable ground of reason. We turned from the subject of revealed

to that of natural religion; and we entered long and earnestly into that

grandest of all earthly speculations,--the metaphysical proofs of the

immortality of the soul. Again the sentiments of Bezoni were opposed to

mine. He was a believer in the dark doctrine which teaches that man is

dust and that all things are forgotten in the grave. He expressed his

opinions with a clearness and precision the more impressive because

totally devoid of cavil and of rhetoric. I listened in silence, but with

a deep and most chilling dismay. Even now I think I see the man as he

sat before me, the light of the lamp falling on his high forehead and

dark features; even now I think I hear his calm, low voice--the silver

voice of his country--stealing to my heart, and withering the only pure

and unsullied hope which I yet cherished there.

Bezoni left me, unconscious of the anguish he bequeathed me, to think

over all he had said. I did not sleep nor even retire to bed. I laid

my head upon my hands, and surrendered myself to turbulent yet intense

reflection. Every man who has lived much in the world, and conversed

with its various tribes, has, I fear, met with many who, on this

momentous subject, profess the same tenets as Bezoni. But he was the

first person I had met of that sect who had evidently thought long and

deeply upon the creed he had embraced. He was not a voluptuary nor a

boaster nor a wit. He had not been misled by the delusions either of

vanity or of the senses. He was a man pure, innocent, modest, full

of all tender charities and meek dispositions towards mankind: it was

evidently his interest to believe in a future state; he could have had

nothing to fear from it. Not a single passion did he cherish which the

laws of another world would have condemned. Add to this, what I have

observed before, that he was not a man fond of the display of intellect,

nor one that brought to the discussions of wisdom the artillery of wit.

He was grave, humble, and self-diffident, beyond all beings. I would

have given a kingdom to have found something in the advocate by which I

could have condemned the cause: I could not, and I was wretched.

I spent the whole of the next week among my books. I ransacked whatever

in my scanty library the theologians had written or the philosophers

had bequeathed upon that mighty secret. I arranged their arguments in my

mind. I armed myself with their weapons. I felt my heart spring joyously

within me as I felt the strength I had acquired, and I sent to the

philosopher to visit me, that I might conquer and confute him. He came;

but he spoke with pain and reluctance. He saw that I had taken the

matter far more deeply to heart than he could have supposed it possible

in a courtier and a man of fortune and the world. Little did he know of

me or my secret soul. I broke down his reserve at last. I unrolled my

arguments. I answered his, and we spent the whole night in controversy.

He left me, and I was more bewildered than ever.

To speak truth, he had devoted years to the subject: I had devoted only

a week. He had come to his conclusions step by step; he had reached

the great ultimatum with slowness, with care, and, he confessed, with

anguish and with reluctance. What a match was I, who brought a hasty

temper, and a limited reflection on that subject to a reasoner like

this? His candour staggered and chilled me even more than his logic.

Arguments that occurred not to me, upon my side of the question, _he_

stated at length and with force; I heard, and, till he replied to

them, I deemed they were unanswerable: the reply came, and I had no

counter-word. A meeting of this nature was often repeated; and when he

left me, tears crept into my wild eyes, my heart melted within me, and I

wept!

I must now enter more precisely than I have yet done into my state of

mind upon religious matters at the time this dispute with the Italian

occurred. To speak candidly, I had been far less shocked with his

opposition to me upon matters of doctrinal faith than with that upon

matters of abstract reasoning. Bred a Roman Catholic, though pride,

consistency, custom, made me externally adhere to the Papal Church, I

inly perceived its errors and smiled at its superstitions. And in the

busy world, where so little but present objects or _human_ anticipations

of the future engross the attention, I had never given the subject that

consideration which would have enabled me (as it has since) to separate

the dogmas of the priest from the precepts of the Saviour, and thus

confirmed my belief as the Christian by the very means which would

have loosened it as the Sectarian. So that at the time Bezoni knew me a

certain indifference to--perhaps arising from an ignorance of--doctrinal

points, rendered me little hurt by arguments against opinions which I

embraced indeed, but with a lukewarm and imperfect affection. But it was

far otherwise upon abstract points of reasoning, far otherwise, when

the hope of surviving this frail and most unhallowed being was to be

destroyed: I might have been indifferent to cavil upon _what_ was the

word of God, but never to question of the justice of God Himself. In

the whole world there was not a more ardent believer in our imperishable

nature, nor one more deeply interested in the belief. Do not let it be

supposed that because I have not often recurred to Isora’s death (or

because I have continued my history in a jesting and light tone) that

that event ever passed from the memory which it had turned to bitterness

and gall. Never in the masses of intrigue, in the festivals of pleasure,

in the tumults of ambition, in the blaze of a licentious court, or

by the rude tents of a barbarous host,--never, my buried love, had I

forgotten thee! That remembrance, had no other cause existed, would

have led me to God. Every night, in whatever toils or whatever objects,

whatever failures or triumphs, the day had been consumed; every night

before I laid my head upon my widowed and lonely pillow,--I had knelt

down and lifted my heart to Heaven, blending the hopes of that Heaven

with the memory and the vision of Isora. Prayer had seemed to me a

commune not only with the living God, but with the dead by whom His

dwelling is surrounded. Pleasant and soft was it to turn to one thought,

to which all the holiest portions of my nature clung between the

wearying acts of this hard and harsh drama of existence. Even the

bitterness of Isora’s early and unavenged death passed away when I

thought of the heaven to which she was gone, and in which, though I

journeyed now through sin and travail and recked little if the paths of

others differed from my own, I yet trusted with a solemn trust that

I should meet her at last. There was I to merit her with a love as

undying, and at length as pure, as her own. It was this that at the

stated hour in which, after my prayer for our reunion, I surrendered my

spirit to the bright and wild visions of her far, but _not impassable_

home,--it was this which for that single hour made all around me a

paradise of delighted thoughts! It was not the little earth, nor the

cold sky, nor the changing wave, nor the perishable turf,--no, nor the

dead wall and the narrow chamber,--which were around me then! No dreamer

ever was so far from the localities of flesh and life as I was in that

enchanted hour: a light seemed to settle upon all things around me; her

voice murmured on my ear, her kisses melted on my brow; I shut my eyes,

and I fancied that I beheld her.

Wherefore was this comfort? Whence came the spell which admitted me to

this fairy land? What was the source of the hope and the rapture and the

delusion? Was it not the deep certainty that _Isora yet existed_; that

her spirit, her nature, her love were preserved, were inviolate, were

the same? That they watched over me yet, that she knew that in that hour

I was with her, that she felt my prayer, that even then she anticipated

the moment when my soul should burst the human prison-house and be once

more blended with her own?

What! and was this to be no more? Were those mystic and sweet revealings

to be mute to me forever? Were my thoughts of Isora to be henceforth

bounded to the charnel-house and the worm? Was she indeed _no more_? _No

more_, oh, intolerable despair! Why, there was not a thing I had once

known, not a dog that I had caressed, not a book that I had read,

which I could know that I should see _no more_, and, knowing, not

feel something of regret. No more! were we, indeed, parted forever and

forever? Had she gone in her young years, with her warm affections, her

new hopes, all green and unwithered at her heart, at once into dust,

stillness, ice? And had I known her only for one year, one little year,

to see her torn from me by a violent and bloody death, and to be left a

mourner in this vast and eternal charnel, without a solitary consolation

or a gleam of hope? Was the earth to be henceforth a mere mass conjured

from the bones and fattened by the clay of our dead sires? Were the

stars and the moon to be mere atoms and specks of a chill light, no

longer worlds, which the ardent spirit might hereafter reach and be

fitted to enjoy? Was the heaven--the tender, blue, loving heaven, in

whose far regions I had dreamed was Isora’s home, and had, therefore,

grown better and happier when I gazed upon it--to be nothing but cloud

and air? and had the love which had seemed so immortal, and so springing

from that which had not blent itself with mortality, been but a gross

lamp fed only by the properties of a brute nature, and placed in a dark

cell of clay, to glimmer, to burn, and to expire with the frail walls

which it had illumined? Dust, death, worms,--were these the heritage of

love and hope, of thought, of passion, of all that breathed and kindled

and exalted and _created_ within?

Could I contemplate this idea; could I believe it possible? _I could

not_. But against the abstract, the logical arguments for this idea,

had I a reply? I shudder as I write that at that time I had not! I

endeavoured to fix my whole thoughts to the study of those subtle

reasonings which I had hitherto so imperfectly conned: but my mind was

jarring, irresolute, bewildered, confused; my stake seemed too vast to

allow me coolness for the game.

Whoever has had cause for some refined and deep study in the midst of

the noisy and loud world may perhaps readily comprehend that feeling

which now possessed me; a feeling that it was utterly impossible to

abstract and concentrate one’s thoughts, while at the mercy of every

intruder, and fevered and fretful by every disturbance. Men early and

long accustomed to mingle such reflections with the avocations of courts

and cities have grown callous to these interruptions, and it has been in

the very heart of the multitude that the profoundest speculations have

been cherished and produced; but I was not of this mould. The world,

which before had been distasteful, now grew insufferable; I longed for

some seclusion, some utter solitude, some quiet and unpenetrated nook,

that I might give my undivided mind to the knowledge of these things,

and build the tower of divine reasonings by which I might ascend to

heaven. It was at this time, and in the midst of my fiercest internal

conflict, that the great Czar died, and I was suddenly recalled to

Russia.

“Now,” I said, when I heard of my release, “now shall my wishes be

fulfilled!”

I sent to Bezoni. He came, but he refused, as indeed he had for some

time done, to speak to me further upon the question which so wildly

engrossed me. “I forgive you,” said I, when we parted, “I forgive you

for all that you have cost me: I feel that the moment is now at hand

when my faith shall frame a weapon wherewith to triumph over yours!”

Father in Heaven! thanks be to Thee that my doubts were at last removed,

and the cloud rolled away from my soul.

Bezoni embraced me, and wept over me. “All good men,” said he, “have a

mighty interest in your success; for me there is nothing dark, even in

the mute grave, if it covers the ashes of one who has loved and served

his brethren, and done, with a wilful heart, no living creature wrong.”

Soon afterwards the Italian lost his life in attending the victims of a

fearful and contagious disease, whom even the regular practitioners of

the healing art hesitated to visit.

At this moment I am, in the strictest acceptation of the words, a

believer and a Christian. I have neither anxiety nor doubt upon the

noblest and the most comforting of all creeds, and I am grateful, among

the other blessings which faith has brought me,--I am grateful that

it has brought me CHARITY! Dark to all human beings was Bezoni’s

doctrine,--dark, above all, to those who have mourned on earth; so

withering to all the hopes which cling the most enduringly to the

heart was his unhappy creed that he who knows how inseparably,

though insensibly, our moral legislation is woven with our supposed

self-interest will scarcely marvel at, even while he condemns, the

unwise and unholy persecution which that creed universally sustains!

Many a most wretched hour, many a pang of agony and despair, did those

doctrines inflict upon myself; but I know that the intention of Bezoni

was benevolence and that the practice of his life was virtue: and

while my reason tells me that God will not punish the reluctant and

involuntary error of one to whom all God’s creatures were so dear, my

religion bids me hope that I shall meet him in that world where no error

_is_, and where the Great Spirit to whom all human passions are unknown

avenges the momentary doubt of His justice by a proof of the infinity of

His mercy.

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER I.

THE RETREAT.

I ARRIVED at St. Petersburg, and found the Czarina, whose conjugal

perfidy was more than suspected, tolerably resigned to the extinction

of that dazzling life whose incalculable and god-like utility it is

reserved for posterity to appreciate! I have observed, by the way, that

in general men are the less mourned by their families in proportion

as they are the more mourned by the community. The great are seldom

amiable; and those who are the least lenient to our errors are

invariably our relations!

Many circumstances at that time conspired to make my request to quit the

imperial service appear natural and appropriate. The death of the Czar,

joined to a growing jealousy and suspicion between the English monarch

and Russia, which, though long existing, was now become more evident and

notorious than heretofore, gave me full opportunity to observe that my

pardon had been obtained from King George three years since, and that

private as well as national ties rendered my return to England a measure

not only of expediency but necessity. The imperial Catherine granted

me my dismissal in the most flattering terms, and added the high

distinction of the Order founded in honour of the memorable feat by

which she had saved her royal consort and the Russian army to the Order

of St. Andrew, which I had already received.

I transferred my wealth, now immense, to England, and, with the pomp

which became the rank and reputation Fortune had bestowed upon me, I

commenced the long land-journey I had chalked out to myself. Although

I had alleged my wish to revisit England as the main reason of my

retirement from Russia, I had also expressed an intention of visiting

Italy previous to my return to England. The physicians, indeed, had

recommended to me that delicious climate as an antidote to the ills my

constitution had sustained in the freezing skies of the north; and in my

own heart I had secretly appointed some more solitary part of the Divine

Land for the scene of my purposed hermitage and seclusion. It is indeed

astonishing how those who have lived much in cold climates yearn for

lands of mellow light and summer luxuriance; and I felt for a southern

sky the same resistless longing which sailors, in the midst of the

vast ocean, have felt for the green fields and various landscape of the

shore.

I traversed, then, the immense tracts of Russia, passed through Hungary,

entered Turkey, which I had wished to visit, where I remained a short

time; and, crossing the Adriatic, hailed, for the first time, the

Ausonian shore. It was the month of May--that month, of whose lustrous

beauty none in a northern clime can dream--that I entered Italy. It may

serve as an instance of the power with which a thought that, however

important, is generally deemed of too abstract and metaphysical a nature

deeply to engross the mind, possessed me then, that I--no cold nor

unenthusiastic votary of the classic Muse--made no pilgrimage to city

or ruin, but, after a brief sojourn at Ravenna, where I dismissed all my

train, set out alone to find the solitary cell for which I now sickened

with a hermit’s love.

It was at a small village at the foot of the Apennines that I found

the object of my search. Strangely enough, there blended with my

philosophical ardour a deep mixture of my old romance. Nature, to whose

voice the dweller in cities and struggler with mankind had been so long

obtuse, now pleaded audibly at my heart, and called me to her embraces,

as a mother calls unto her wearied child. My eye, as with a new vision,

became open to the mute yet eloquent loveliness of this most fairy

earth; and hill and valley, the mirror of silent waters, the sunny

stillness of woods, and the old haunts of satyr and nymph, revived in me

the fountains of past poetry, and became the receptacles of a thousand

spells, mightier than the charms of any enchanter save Love, which

was departed,--Youth, which was nearly gone,--and Nature, which (more

vividly than ever) existed for me still.

I chose, then, my retreat. As I was fastidious in its choice, I cannot

refrain from the luxury of describing it. Ah, little did I dream that I

had come thither, not only to find a divine comfort but the sources of

a human and most passionate woe! Mightiest of the Roman bards! in whom

tenderness and reason were so entwined, and who didst sanctify even

thine unholy errors with so beautiful and rare a genius! what an

invariable truth one line of thine has expressed: “Even in the fairest

fountain of delight there is a secret and evil spring eternally bubbling

up and scattering its bitter waters over the very flowers which surround

its margin!”

In the midst of a lovely and tranquil vale was a small cottage; that

was my home. The good people there performed for me all the hospitable

offices I required. At a neighbouring monastery I had taken the

precaution to make myself known to the superior. Not all Italians--no,

nor all monks--belong to either of the two great tribes into which they

are generally divided,--knaves or fools. The Abbot Anselmo was a man of

rather a liberal and enlarged mind; he not only kept my secret, which

was necessary to my peace, but he took my part, which was perhaps

necessary to my safety. A philosopher, who desires only to convince

himself, and upon one subject, does not require many books. Truth lies

in a small compass; and for my part, in considering any speculative

subject, I would sooner have with me one book of Euclid as a model than

all the library of the Vatican as authorities. But then I am not fond of

drawing upon any resources but those of reason for reasonings: wiser

men than I am are not so strict. The few books that I did require were,

however, of a nature very illicit in Italy; the good Father passed them

to me from Ravenna, under his own protection. “I was a holy man,” he

said, “who wished to render the Catholic Church a great service, by

writing a vast book against certain atrocious opinions; and the works I

read were, for the most part, works that I was about to confute.” This

report gained me protection and respect; and, after I had ordered my

agent at Ravenna to forward to the excellent Abbot a piece of plate, and

a huge cargo of a rare Hungary wine, it was not the Abbot’s fault if I

was not the most popular person in the neighbourhood.

But to my description: my home was a cottage; the valley in which it lay

was divided by a mountain stream, which came from the forest Apennine,

a sparkling and wild stranger, and softened into quiet and calm as it

proceeded through its green margin in the vale. And that margin, how

dazzlingly green it was! At the distance of about a mile from my hut,

the stream was broken into a slight waterfall, whose sound was heard

distinct and deep in that still place; and often I paused, from my

midnight thoughts, to listen to its enchanted and wild melody. The

fall was unseen by the ordinary wanderer, for, there, the stream passed

through a thick copse; and even when you pierced the grove, and gained

the water-side, dark trees hung over the turbulent wave, and the silver

spray was thrown upward through the leaves, and fell in diamonds upon

the deep green sod.

This was a most favoured haunt with me: the sun glancing through the

idle leaves; the music of the water; the solemn absence of all other

sounds, except the songs of birds, to which the ear grew accustomed,

and, at last, in the abstraction of thought, scarcely distinguished from

the silence; the fragrant herbs; and the unnumbered and nameless

flowers which formed my couch,--were all calculated to make me pursue

uninterruptedly the thread of contemplation which I had, in the less

voluptuous and harsher solitude of the closet, first woven from the web

of austerest thought. I say pursue, for it was too luxurious and

sensual a retirement for the conception of a rigid and severe train of

reflection; at least it would have been so to me. But when the thought

_is once born_, such scenes seem to me the most fit to cradle and to

rear it. The torpor of the physical appears to leave to the mental

frame a full scope and power; the absence of human cares, sounds, and

intrusions, becomes the best nurse to contemplation; and even that

delicious and vague sense of enjoyment which would seem, at first, more

genial to the fancy than the mind, preserves the thought undisturbed

because contented; so that all but the scheming mind becomes lapped

in sleep, and the mind itself lives distinct and active as a dream,--a

dream, not vague nor confused nor unsatisfying, but endowed with more

than the clearness, the precision, the vigour, of waking life.

A little way from this waterfall was a fountain, a remnant of a classic

and golden age. Never did Naiad gaze on a more glassy mirror, or dwell

in a more divine retreat. Through a crevice in an overhanging mound of

the emerald earth, the father stream of the fountain crept out, born,

like Love, among flowers, and in the most sunny smiles; it then fell,

broadening and glowing, into a marble basin, at whose bottom, in the

shining noon, you might see a soil which mocked the very hues of gold,

and the water insects, in their quaint shapes and unknown sports,

grouping or gliding in the mid-most wave. A small temple of the lightest

architecture stood before the fountain, and in a niche therein a

mutilated statue,--possibly of the Spirit of the place. By this fountain

my evening walk would linger till the short twilight melted away and

the silver wave trembled in the light of the western star. Oh, then what

feelings gathered over me as I turned slowly homeward! the air still,

breathless, shining; the stars gleaming over the woods of the far

Apennine; the hills growing huger in the shade; the small insects

humming on the wing; and, ever and anon, the swift bat, wheeling round

and amidst them; the music of the waterfall deepening on the ear; and

the light and hour lending even a mysterious charm to the cry of the

weird owl, flitting after its prey,--all this had a harmony in my

thoughts and a food for the meditations in which my days and nights were

consumed. The World moulders away the fabric of our early nature, and

Solitude rebuilds it on a firmer base.

CHAPTER II.

THE VICTORY.

O EARTH! Reservoir of life, over whose deep bosom brood the wings of the

Universal Spirit, shaking upon thee a blessing and a power,--a blessing

and a power to produce and reproduce the living from the dead, so that

our flesh is woven from the same atoms which were once the atoms of our

sires, and the inexhaustible nutriment of Existence is Decay! O eldest

and most solemn Earth, blending even thy loveliness and joy with a

terror and an awe! thy sunshine is girt with clouds and circled with

storm and tempest; thy day cometh from the womb of darkness, and

returneth unto darkness, as man returns unto thy bosom. The green herb

that laughs in the valley, the water that sings merrily along the wood;

the many-winged and all-searching air, which garners life as a harvest

and scatters it as a seed,--all are pregnant with corruption and carry

the cradled death within them, as an oak banqueteth the destroying worm.

But who that looks upon thee, and loves thee, and inhales thy blessings

will ever mingle too deep a moral with his joy? Let us not ask whence

come the garlands that we wreathe around our altars or shower upon our

feasts: will they not bloom as brightly, and breathe with as rich a

fragrance, whether they be plucked from the garden or the grave? O

Earth, my Mother Earth! dark Sepulchre that closes upon all which the

Flesh bears, but Vestibule of the vast regions which the Soul shall

pass, how leaped my heart within me when I first fathomed thy real

spell!

Yes! never shall I forget the rapture with which I hailed the light that

dawned upon me at last! Never shall I forget the suffocating, the full,

the ecstatic joy with which I saw the mightiest of all human hopes

accomplished; and felt, as if an angel spoke, that there is a life

beyond the grave! Tell me not of the pride of ambition; tell me not

of the triumphs of science: never had ambition so lofty an end as the

search after immortality! never had science so sublime a triumph as the

conviction that immortality will be gained! I had been at my task the

whole night,--pale alchymist, seeking from meaner truths to extract the

greatest of all! At the first hour of day, lo! the gold was there: the

labour for which I would have relinquished life was accomplished; the

dove descended upon the waters of my soul. I fled from the house. I was

possessed as with a spirit. I ascended a hill, which looked for leagues

over the sleeping valley. A gray mist hung around me like a veil; I

paused, and the great sun broke slowly forth; I gazed upon its majesty,

and my heart swelled. “So rises the soul,” I said, “from the vapours

of this dull being; but the soul waneth not, neither setteth it, nor

knoweth it any night, save that from which it dawneth!” The mists rolled

gradually away, the sunshine deepened, and the face of Nature lay in

smiles, yet silently, before me. It lay before me, a scene that I had

often witnessed and hailed and worshipped: _but it was not the same_; a

glory had passed over it; it was steeped in a beauty and a holiness, in

which neither youth nor poetry nor even love had ever robed it before!

The change which the earth had undergone was like that of some being we

have loved, when death is passed, and from a mortal it becomes an angel!

I uttered a cry of joy, and was then as silent as all around me. I felt

as if henceforth there was a new compact between Nature and myself. I

felt as if every tree and blade of grass were henceforth to be eloquent

with a voice and instinct with a spell. I felt as if a religion had

entered into the earth, and made oracles of all that the earth bears;

the old fables of Dodona were to become realized, and _the very leaves_

to be hallowed by a sanctity and to murmur with a truth. I was no longer

only a part of that which withers and decays; I was no longer a machine

of clay, moved by a spring, and to be trodden into the mire which I had

trod; I was no longer tied to humanity by links which could never be

broken, and which, if broken, would avail me not. I was become, as if

by a miracle, a part of a vast though unseen spirit. It was not to the

matter, but to the essences, of things that I bore kindred and alliance;

the stars and the heavens resumed over me their ancient influence; and,

as I looked along the far hills and the silent landscape, a voice seemed

to swell from the stillness, and to say, “I am the life of these things,

a spirit distinct from the things themselves. It is to me that you

belong forever and forever: separate, but equally indissoluble; apart,

but equally eternal!”

I spent the day upon the hills. It was evening when I returned. I

lingered by the old fountain, and saw the stars rise, and tremble, one

by one, upon the wave. The hour was that which Isora had loved the

best, and that which the love of her had consecrated the most to me. And

never, oh, never, did it sink into my heart with a deeper sweetness, or

a more soothing balm. I had once more knit my soul to Isora’s: I could

once more look from the toiling and the dim earth, and forget that Isora

had left me, in dreaming of our reunion. Blame me not, you who indulge

in a religious hope more severe and more sublime; you who miss

no footsteps from the earth, nor pine for a voice that your human

wanderings can hear no more,--blame me not, you whose pulses beat not

for the wild love of the created, but whose spirit languishes only for a

nearer commune with the Creator,--blame me not too harshly for my mortal

wishes, nor think that my faith was the less sincere because it was

tinted in the most unchanging dyes of the human heart, and indissolubly

woven with the memory of the dead! Often from our weaknesses our

strongest principles of conduct are born; and from the acorn which a

breeze has wafted springs the oak which defies the storm.

The first intoxication and rapture consequent upon the reward of my

labour passed away; but, unlike other excitement, it was followed not by

languor or a sated and torpid calm: a soothing and delicious sensation

possessed me; my turbulent senses slept; and Memory, recalling the

world, rejoiced at the retreat which Hope had acquired.

I now surrendered myself to a nobler philosophy than in crowds and

cities I had hitherto known. I no longer satirized; I inquired: I

no longer derided; I examined. I looked from the natural proofs of

immortality to the written promise of our Father; I sought not to baffle

men, but to worship Truth; I applied myself more to the knowledge of

good and evil; I bowed my soul before the loveliness of Virtue; and

though scenes of wrath and passion yet lowered in the future, and I was

again speedily called forth to act, to madden, to contend, perchance to

sin, the Image is still unbroken, and the Votary has still an offering

for its Altar!

CHAPTER III.

THE HERMIT OF THE WELL.

THE thorough and deep investigation of those principles from which we

learn the immortality of the soul, and the nature of its proper ends,

leads the mind through such a course of reflection and of study; it

is attended with so many exalting, purifying, and, if I may so say,

etherealizing thoughts,--that I do believe no man has ever pursued it,

and not gone back to the world a better and a nobler man than he was

before. Nay, so deeply must these elevating and refining studies be

conned, so largely and sensibly must they enter the intellectual system,

that I firmly think that even a sensualist who has only considered

the subject with a view to convince himself that he is clay, and has

therefore an excuse to the curious conscience for his grosser desires;

nay, should he come to his wished-for yet desolate conclusion, from

which the abhorrent nature shrinks and recoils, I do nevertheless firmly

think, should the study have been long and deep, that he would wonder to

find his desires had lost their poignancy and his objects their charm.

He would descend from the Alp he had climbed to the low level on which

he formerly deemed it a bliss to dwell, with the feeling of one who,

having long drawn in high places an empyreal air, has become unable to

inhale the smoke and the thick vapour he inhaled of yore. His soul once

aroused would stir within him, though he felt it not, and though he grew

not a believer, he would cease to be only the voluptuary.

I meant at one time to have here stated the arguments which had

perplexed me on one side, and those which afterwards convinced me on

the other. I do not do so for many reasons, one of which will suffice;

namely, the evident and palpable circumstance that a dissertation of

that nature would, in a biography like the present, be utterly out of

place and season. Perhaps, however, at a later period of life, I

may collect my own opinions on the subject into a separate work, and

bequeath that work to future generations, upon the same conditions as

the present memoir.

One day I was favoured by a visit from one of the monks at the

neighbouring abbey. After some general conversation he asked me if I had

yet encountered the Hermit of the Well?

“No,” said I, and I was going to add, that I had not even heard of him,

“but I now remember that the good people of the house have more than

once spoken to me of him as a rigid and self-mortifying recluse.”

“Yes,” said the holy friar; “Heaven forbid that I should say aught

against the practice of the saints and pious men to deny unto themselves

the lusts of the flesh, but such penances may be carried too far.

However, it is an excellent custom, and the Hermit of the Well is an

excellent creature. _Santa Maria!_ what delicious stuff is that Hungary

wine your scholarship was pleased to bestow upon our father Abbot. He

suffered me to taste it the eve before last. I had been suffering with

a pain in the reins, and the wine acted powerfully upon me as an

efficacious and inestimable medicine. Do you find, my Son, that it bore

the journey to your lodging here as well as to the convent cellars?”

“Why, really, my Father, I have none of it here; but the people of the

house have a few flasks of a better wine than ordinary, if you will

deign to taste it in lieu of the Hungary wine.”

“Oh--oh!” said the monk, groaning, “my reins trouble me much: perhaps

the wine may comfort me!” and the wine was brought.

“It is not of so rare a flavour as that which you sent to our reverend

father,” said the monk, wiping his mouth with his long sleeve.

“Hungary must be a charming place; is it far from hence? It joins the

heretical,--I pray your pardon, it joins the continent of England, I

believe?”

“Not exactly, Father; but whatever its topography, it is a rare

country--for those who like it! But tell me of this Hermit of the Well.

How long has he lived here? and how came he by his appellation? Of what

country is he? and of what birth?”

“You ask me too many questions at once, my Son. The country of the holy

man is a mystery to us all. He speaks the Tuscan dialect well, but with

a foreign accent. Nevertheless, though the wine is not of Hungary, it

has a pleasant flavour. I wonder how the rogues kept it so snugly from

the knowledge and comfort of their pious brethren of the monastery!”

“And how long has the Hermit lived in your vicinity?”

“Nearly eight years, my Son. It was one winter’s evening that he came

to our convent in the dress of a worldly traveller, to seek our

hospitality, and a shelter for the night, which was inclement and

stormy. He stayed with us a few days, and held some conversation with

our father Abbot; and one morning, after roaming in the neighbourhood to

look at the old stones and ruins, which is the custom of travellers,

he returned, put into our box some alms, and two days afterwards he

appeared in the place he now inhabits and in the dress he assumes.”

“And of what nature, my Father, is the place, and of what fashion the

dress?”

“Holy Saint Francis!” exclaimed the Father, with a surprise so great

that I thought at first it related to the wine, “Holy Saint Francis!

have you not seen the well yet?”

“No, Father, unless you speak of the fountain about a mile and a quarter

distant.”

“Tusk--tusk!” said the good man, “what ignoramuses you travellers are!

You affect to know what kind of slippers Prester John wears and to have

been admitted to the bed-chamber of _the Pagoda of China_; and yet, when

one comes to sound you, you are as ignorant of everything a man of real

learning knows as an Englishman is of his missal. Why, I thought that

every fool in every country had heard of the Holy Well of St. Francis,

situated exactly two miles from our famous convent, and that every fool

in the neighbourhood had seen it.”

“What the fools, my Father, whether in this neighbourhood or any other,

may have heard or seen, I, who profess not ostensibly to belong to so

goodly an order, cannot pretend to know; but be assured that the

Holy Well of St. Francis is as unfamiliar to me as the Pagoda of

China--Heaven bless _him_--is to you.”

Upon this the learned monk, after expressing due astonishment, offered

to show it to me; and as I thought I might by acquiescence get rid of

him the sooner, and as, moreover, I wished to see the Abbot, to whom

some books for me had been lately sent, I agreed to the offer.

The well, said the monk, lay not above a mile out of the customary way

to the monastery; and after _we_ had finished the flask of wine, we

sallied out on our excursion,--the monk upon a stately and strong ass,

myself on foot.

The Abbot, on granting me his friendship and protection, had observed

that I was not the only stranger and recluse on whom his favour was

bestowed. He had then mentioned the Hermit of the Well, as an eccentric

and strange being, who lived an existence of rigid penance, harmless to

others, painful only to himself. This story had been confirmed in the

few conversations I had ever interchanged with my host and hostess, who

seemed to take a peculiar pleasure in talking of the Solitary; and from

them I had heard also many anecdotes of his charity towards the poor and

his attention to the sick. All these circumstances came into my mind as

the good monk indulged his loquacity upon the subject, and my curiosity

became at last somewhat excited respecting my fellow recluse.

I now learned from the monk that the post of Hermit of the Well was an

office of which the present anchorite was by no means the first tenant.

The well was one of those springs, frequent in Catholic countries, to

which a legend and a sanctity are attached; and twice a year--once

in the spring, once in the autumn--the neighbouring peasants flocked

together, on a stated day, to drink, and lose their diseases. As

the spring most probably did possess some medicinal qualities, a few

extraordinary cures had occurred, especially among those pious persons

who took not biennial, but constant draughts; and to doubt its holiness

was downright heresy.

Now, hard by this well was a cavern, which, whether first formed

by nature or art, was now, upon the whole, constructed into a very

commodious abode; and here, for years beyond the memory of man, some

solitary person had fixed his abode to dispense and to bless the water,

to be exceedingly well fed by the surrounding peasants, to wear a long

gown of serge or sackcloth, and to be called the Hermit of the Well.

So fast as each succeeding anchorite died there were enough candidates

eager to supply his place; for it was no bad _metier_ to some penniless

imposter to become the quack and patentee of a holy specific. The choice

of these candidates always rested with the superior of the neighbouring

monastery; and it is not impossible that he made an indifferently good

percentage upon the annual advantages of his protection and choice.

At the time the traveller appeared, the former hermit had just departed

this life, and it was, therefore, to the vacancy thus occasioned that

he had procured himself to be elected. The incumbent appeared quite of a

different mould from the former occupants of the hermitage. He accepted,

it is true, the gifts laid at regular periods upon a huge stone between

the hermitage and the well, but he distributed among the donors alms far

more profitable than their gifts. He entered no village, borne upon an

ass laden with twin sacks, for the purpose of sanctimoniously robbing

the inhabitants; no profane songs were ever heard resounding from his

dwelling by the peasant incautiously lingering at a late hour too

near its vicinity; my guide, the monk, complained bitterly of his

unsociability, and no scandalous legend of nymph-like comforters and

damsel visitants haunting the sacred dwelling escaped from the garrulous

friar’s well-loaded budget.

“Does he study much?” said I, with the interest of a student.

“I fear me not,” quoth the monk. “I have had occasion often to enter his

abode, and I have examined all things with a close eye,--for, praised

be the Lord, I have faculties more than ordinarily clear and

observant,--but I have seen no books therein, excepting a missal, and

a Latin or Greek Testament, I know not well which; nay, so incurious or

unlearned is the holy man that he rejected even a loan of the ‘Life of

Saint Francis,’ notwithstanding it has many and rare pictures, to say

nothing of its most interesting and amazing tales.”

More might the monk have said, had we not now suddenly entered a thick

and sombre wood. A path cut through it was narrow, and only capable of

admitting a traveller on foot or horseback; and the boughs overhead were

so darkly interlaced that the light scarcely, and only in broken and

erratic glimmerings, pierced the canopy.

“It is the wood,” said the monk, crossing himself, “wherein the

wonderful adventure happened to Saint Francis, which I will one day

narrate at length to you.”

“And we are near the well, I suppose?” said I.

“It is close at hand,” answered the monk.

In effect we had not proceeded above fifty yards before the path brought

us into a circular space of green sod, in the midst of which was a small

square stone building, of plain but not inelegant shape, and evidently

of great antiquity. At one side of this building was an iron handle, for

the purpose of raising water, that cast itself into a stone basin,

to which was affixed by a strong chain an iron cup. An inscription in

monkish Latin was engraved over the basin, requesting the traveller to

pause and drink, and importing that what that water was to the body,

faith was to the soul; near the cistern was a rude seat, formed by the

trunk of a tree. The door of the well-house was of iron, and secured by

a chain and lock; perhaps the pump was so contrived that only a certain

quantum of the sanctified beverage could be drawn up at a time, without

application to some mechanism within; and wayfarers were thereby

prevented from helping themselves _ad libitum_, and thus depriving the

anchorite of the profit and the necessity of his office.

It was certainly a strange, lonely, and wild place; and the green sward,

round as a fairy ring, in the midst of trees, which, black, close, and

huge, circled it like a wall; and the solitary gray building in the

centre, gaunt and cold, startled the eye with the abruptness of its

appearance, and the strong contrast made by its wan hues to the dark

verdure and forest gloom around it.

I took a draught of the water, which was very cold and tasteless, and

reminded the monk of his disorder in the reins, to which a similar

potation might possibly be efficacious. To this suggestion the monk

answered that he would certainly try the water some other time; but that

at present the wine he had drunk might pollute its divine properties. So

saying, he turned off the conversation by inviting me to follow him to

the hermitage.

In our way thither he pointed out a large fragment of stone, and

observed that the water would do me evil instead of good if I forgot to

remunerate its guardian. I took the hint, and laid a piece of silver on

the fragment.

A short journey through the wood brought us to the foot of a hill

covered with trees, and having at its base a strong stone door, the

entrance to the excavated home of the anchorite. The monk gently tapped

thrice at this door, but no answer came. “The holy man is from home,”

said he, “let us return.”

We did so; and the monk, keeping behind me, managed, as he thought

unseen, to leave the stone as naked as we had found it! We now struck

through another path in the wood, and were soon at the convent. I did

not lose the opportunity to question the Abbot respecting his tenant:

I learned from him little more than the particulars I have already

narrated, save that in concluding his details, he said:--

“I can scarcely doubt but that the Hermit is, like yourself, a person

of rank; his bearing and his mien appear to denote it. He has given,

and gives yearly, large sums to the uses of the convent: and, though

he takes the customary gifts of the pious villagers, it is only by

my advice and for the purpose of avoiding suspicion. Should he be

considered rich, it might attract cupidity; and there are enough bold

hands and sharp knives in the country to place the wealthy and the

unguarded in some peril. Whoever he may be--for he has not confided his

secret to me--I do not doubt but that he is doing penance for some great

crime; and, whatever be the crime, I suspect that its earthly punishment

is nearly over. The Hermit is naturally of a delicate and weak frame,

and year after year I have marked him sensibly wearing away; so that

when I last saw him, three days since, I was shocked at the visible

ravages which disease or penance had engraven upon him. If ever Death

wrote legibly, its characters are in that brow and cheek.”

“Poor man! Know you not even whom to apprise of his decease when he is

no more?”

“I do not yet; but the last time I saw him he told me that he found

himself drawing near his end, and that he should not quit life without

troubling me with one request.”

After this the Abbot spoke of other matters, and my visit expired.

Interested in the recluse more deeply than I acknowledged to myself,

I found my steps insensibly leading me homeward by the more circuitous

road which wound first by the holy well. I did not resist the impulse,

but walked musingly onward by the waning twilight, for the day was now

over, until I came to the well. As I emerged from the wood, I started

involuntarily and drew back. A figure, robed from head to foot in a long

sable robe, sat upon the rude seat beside the well; sat so still, so

motionless, that coming upon it abruptly in that strange place, the

heart beat irregularly at an apparition so dark in hue and so death-like

in its repose. The hat, large, broad, and overhanging, which suited the

costume, was lying on the ground; and the face, which inclined upward,

seemed to woo the gentle air of the quiet and soft skies. I approached a

few steps, and saw the profile of the countenance more distinctly than

I had done before. It was of a marble whiteness; the features, though

sharpened and attenuated by disease, were of surpassing beauty; the hair

was exceedingly, almost effeminately, long, and hung in waves of perfect

jet on either side; the mouth was closed firmly, and deep lines or

rather furrows were traced from its corners to either nostril. The

stranger’s beard, of a hue equally black as the hair, was dishevelled

and neglected, but not very long; and one hand, which lay on the sable

robe, was so thin and wan you might have deemed the very starlight could

have shone through it. I did not doubt that it was the recluse whom I

saw; I drew near and accosted him.

“Your blessing, holy Father, and your permission to taste the healing of

your well.”

Sudden as was my appearance, and abrupt my voice, the Hermit evinced by

no startled gesture a token of surprise. He turned very slowly round,

cast upon me an indifferent glance, and said, in a sweet and very low

tone,--

“You have my blessing, Stranger: there is water in the cistern; drink,

and be healed.”

I dipped the bowl in the basin, and took sparingly of the water. In the

accent and tone of the stranger, my ear, accustomed to the dialects of

many nations, recognized something English; I resolved, therefore, to

address him in my native tongue, rather than the indifferent Italian in

which I had first accosted him.

“The water is fresh and cooling: would, holy Father, that it could

penetrate to a deeper malady than the ills of flesh; that it could

assuage the fever of the heart, or lave from the wearied mind the dust

which it gathers from the mire and travail of the world.”

Now the Hermit testified surprise; but it was slight and momentary. He

gazed upon me more attentively than he had done before, and said, after

a pause,--

“My countryman! and in this spot! It is not often that the English

penetrate into places where no ostentatious celebrity dwells to sate

curiosity and flatter pride. My countryman: it is well, and perhaps

fortunate. Yes,” he said, after a second pause, “yes; it were indeed

a boon, had the earth a fountain for the wounds which fester and the

disease which consumes the heart.”

“The earth has oblivion, Father, if not a cure.”

“It is false!” cried the Hermit, passionately, and starting wildly

from his seat; “the earth has _no_ oblivion. The grave,--is _that_

forgetfulness? No, no: _there is no grave for the soul_! The deeds pass;

the flesh corrupts: but the memory passes not, and withers not. From age

to age, from world to world, through eternity, throughout creation, it

is perpetuated; and immortality,--a curse,--_a hell_!”

Surprised by the vehemence of the Hermit, I was still more startled by

the agonizing and ghastly expression of his face.

“My Father,” said I, “pardon me if I have pressed upon a sore. I also

have that within which, did a stranger touch it, would thrill my whole

frame with torture, and I would fain ask from your holy, soothing, and

pious comfort, something of alleviation or of fortitude.”

The Hermit drew near to me; he laid his thin hand upon my arm, and

looked long and wistfully in my face. It was then that a suspicion

crept through me which after observation proved to be true, that the

wanderings of those dark eyes and the meaning of that blanched brow were

tinctured with insanity.

“Brother and fellow man,” said he, mournfully, “hast thou in truth

suffered? and dost thou still smart at the remembrance? We are friends

then. If thou hast suffered as much as I have, I will fall down and do

homage to thee as a superior; for pain has its ranks, and I think at

times that none ever climbed the height that I have done. Yet you look

not like one who has had nights of delirium, and days in which the heart

lay in the breast, as a corpse endowed with consciousness might lie

in the grave, feeling the worm gnaw it, and the decay corrupt, and yet

incapable of resistance or of motion. Your cheek is thin, but firm; your

eye is haughty and bright; you have the air of one who has lived with

men, and struggled and not been vanquished in the struggle. Suffered!

No, man, no,--_you_ have not suffered!”

“My Father, it is not in the countenance that Fate graves her records. I

have, it is true, contended with my fellows; and if wealth and honour be

the premium, not in vain: but I have not contended against Sorrow with

a like success; and I stand before you, a being who, if passion be a

tormentor and the death of the loved a loss, has borne that which the

most wretched will not envy.”

Again a fearful change came over the face of the recluse: he grasped my

arm more vehemently, “You speak my own sorrows; you utter my own curse;

I will see you again; you may do my last will better than yon monks. Can

I trust you? If you have in truth known misfortune, I will! I will! yea,

even to the outpouring--merciful, merciful God, what would I say,--what

would I reveal!”

Suddenly changing his voice, he released me, and said, touching his

forehead with a meaning gesture and a quiet smile, “You say you are my

rival in pain. Have you ever known the rage and despair of the heart

mount _here_? It is a wonderful thing to be calm as I am now, when that

rising makes itself felt in fire and torture!”

“If there be aught, Father, which a man who cares not what country he

visit, or what deed--so it be not of guilt or shame--he commit, can do

towards the quiet of your soul, say it, and I will attempt your will.”

“You are kind, my Son,” said the Hermit, resuming his first melancholy

and dignified composure of mien and bearing; “and there is something in

your voice which seems to me like a tone that I have heard in youth. Do

you live near at hand?”

“In the valley, about four miles hence; I am, like yourself, a fugitive

from the world.”

“Come to me then to-morrow at eve; to-morrow! No, that is a holy eve,

and I must keep it with scourge and prayer. The next at sunset. I shall

be collected then, and I would fain know more of you than I do. Bless

you, my Son; adieu.”

“Yet stay, Father, may I not conduct you home?”

“No; my limbs are weak, but I trust they can carry me to that home, till

I be borne thence to my last. Farewell! the night grows, and man fills

even these shades with peril. The eve after next, at sunset, we meet

again.”

So saying, the hermit waved his hand, and I stood apart, watching his

receding figure, until the trees cloaked the last glimpse from my view.

I then turned homeward, and reached my cottage in safety, despite of the

hermit’s caution. But I did not retire to rest: a powerful foreboding,

rather than suspicion, that, in the worn and wasted form which I had

beheld, there was identity with one whom I had not met for years, and

whom I had believed to be no more, thrillingly possessed me.

“Can--can it be?” thought I. “Can grief have a desolation, or

remembrance an agony, sufficient to create so awful a change? And of all

human beings, for that one to be singled out; that one in whom passion

and sin were, if they existed, nipped in their earliest germ, and

seemingly rendered barren of all fruit! If too, almost against the

evidence of sight and sense, an innate feeling has marked in that most

altered form the traces of a dread recognition, would not his memory

have been yet more vigilant than mine? Am I so changed that he should

have looked me in the face so wistfully, and found there naught save the

lineaments of a stranger?” And, actuated by this thought, I placed the

light by the small mirror which graced my chamber. I recalled, as I

gazed, my features as they had been in earliest youth. “No,” I said,

with a sigh, “there is nothing here that he should recognize.”

And I said aright: my features, originally small and delicate, had grown

enlarged and prominent. The long locks of my youth (for only upon state

occasions did my early vanity consent to the fashion of the day) were

succeeded by curls, short and crisped; the hues, alternately pale and

hectic, that the dreams of romance had once spread over my cheek,

had settled into the unchanging bronze of manhood; the smooth lip and

unshaven chin were clothed with a thick hair; the once unfurrowed brow

was habitually knit in thought; and the ardent, restless expression that

boyhood wore had yielded to the quiet unmoved countenance of one in

whom long custom has subdued all outward sign of emotion, and many

and various events left no prevalent token of the mind save that of an

habitual but latent resolution. My frame, too, once scarcely less slight

than a woman’s, was become knit and muscular; and nothing was left by

which, in the foreign air, the quiet brow, and the athletic form, my

very mother could have recognized the slender figure and changeable face

of the boy she had last beheld. The very sarcasm of the eye was gone;

and I had learned the world’s easy lesson,--the dissimulation of

composure.

I have noted one thing in others, and it was particularly noticeable

in me; namely, that few who mix very largely with men, and with the

courtier’s or the citizen’s design, ever retain the key and tone of

their original voice. The voice of a young man is as yet modulated by

nature, and expresses the passion of the moment; that of the matured

pupil of art expresses rather the customary occupation of his life.

Whether he aims at persuading, convincing, or commanding others, his

voice irrevocably settles into the key he ordinarily employs; and, as

persuasion is the means men chiefly employ in their commerce with each

other, especially in the regions of a court, so a tone of artificial

blandness and subdued insinuation is chiefly that in which the accents

of worldly men are clothed; the artificial intonation, long continued,

grows into nature, and the very pith and basis of the original sound

fritter themselves away. The change was great in me, for at that time

which I brought in comparison with the present my age was one in which

the voice is yet confused and undecided, struggling between the accents

of youth and boyhood; so that even this most powerful and unchanging

of all claims upon the memory was in a great measure absent in me; and

nothing but an occasional and rare tone could have produced even that

faint and unconscious recognition which the Hermit had confessed.

I must be pardoned these egotisms, which the nature of my story renders

necessary.

With what eager impatience did I watch the hours to the appointed

interview with the Hermit languish themselves away! However, before that

time arrived and towards the evening of the next day, I was surprised by

the rare honour of a visit from Anselmo himself. He came attended by two

of the mendicant friars of his order, and they carried between them a

basket of tolerable size, which, as mine hostess afterwards informed me,

with many a tear, went back somewhat heavier than it came, from the

load of certain _receptacula_ of that rarer wine which she had had the

evening before the indiscreet hospitality to produce.

The Abbot came to inform me that the Hermit had been with him that

morning, making many inquiries respecting me. “I told him,” said he,

“that I was acquainted with your name and birth, but that I was under

a solemn promise not to reveal them, without your consent; and I am now

here, my Son, to learn from you whether that consent may be obtained?”

“Assuredly not, holy Father!” said I, hastily; nor was I contented until

I had obtained a renewal of his promise to that effect. This seemed to

give the Abbot some little chagrin: perhaps the Hermit had offered a

reward for my discovery. However, I knew that Anselmo, though a griping

was a trustworthy man, and I felt safe in his renewed promise. I saw him

depart with great satisfaction, and gave myself once more to conjectures

respecting the strange recluse.

As the next evening I prepared to depart towards the hermitage, I took

peculiar pains to give my person a foreign and disguised appearance. A

loose dress, of rude and simple material, and a high cap of fur, were

pretty successful in accomplishing this purpose. And, as I gave the last

look at the glass before I left the house, I said inly, “If there be any

truth in my wild and improbable conjecture respecting the identity of

the anchorite, I think time and this dress are sufficient wizards to

secure me from a chance of discovery. I will keep a guard upon my words

and tones, until, if my thought be verified, a moment fit for unmasking

myself arrives. But would to God that the thought be groundless! In

such circumstances, and after such an absence, to meet _him_! No; and

yet--Well, this meeting will decide.”

CHAPTER IV.

THE SOLUTION OF MANY MYSTERIES.--A DARK VIEW OF THE LIFE AND NATURE OF

MAN.

POWERFUL, though not clearly developed in my own mind, was the motive

which made me so strongly desire to preserve the _incognito_ during my

interview with the Hermit. I have before said that I could not resist a

vague but intense belief that he was a person whom I had long believed

in the grave; and I had more than once struggled against a dark but

passing suspicion that that person was in some measure--mediately,

though not directly--connected with the mysteries of my former life.

If both these conjectures were true, I thought it possible that the

communication the Hermit wished to make might be made yet more willingly

to me as a stranger than if he knew who was in reality his confidant.

And, at all events, if I could curb the impetuous gushings of my own

heart, which yearned for immediate disclosure, I might by hint and

prelude ascertain the advantages and disadvantages of revealing myself.

I arrived at the well: the Hermit was already at the place of

rendezvous, seated in the same posture in which I had before seen him. I

made my reverence and accosted him.

“I have not failed you, Father.”

“That is rarely a true boast with men,” said the Hermit, smiling

mournfully, but without sarcasm; “and were the promise of greater avail,

it might not have been so rigidly kept.”

“The promise, Father, seemed to me of greater weight than you would

intimate,” answered I.

“How mean you?” said the Hermit, hastily.

“Why, that we may perhaps serve each other by our meeting: you, Father,

may comfort me by your counsels; I you by my readiness to obey your

request.”

The Hermit looked at me for some moments, and, as well as I could,

I turned away my face from his gaze. I might have spared myself the

effort. He seemed to recognize nothing familiar in my countenance;

perhaps his mental malady assisted my own alteration.

“I have inquired respecting you,” he said, after a pause, “and I hear

that you are a learned and wise man, who has seen much of the world, and

played the part both of soldier and of scholar in its various theatres:

is my information true?”

“Not true with the respect to the learning, Father, but true with regard

to the experience. I have been a pilgrim in many countries of Europe.”

“Indeed!” said the Hermit, eagerly. “Come with me to my home, and tell

me of the wonders you have seen.”

I assisted the Hermit to rise, and he walked slowly towards the cavern,

leaning upon my arm. Ob, how that light touch thrilled through my

frame! How I longed to cry, “Are you not the one whom I have loved,

and mourned, and believed buried in the tomb?” But I checked myself. We

moved on in silence. The Hermit’s hand was on the door of the cavern,

when he said, in a calm tone, but with evident effort, and turning his

face from me while he spoke:--

“And did your wanderings ever carry you into the farther regions of the

north? Did the fame of the great Czar ever lead you to the city he has

founded?”

“I am right! I am right!” thought I, as I answered, “In truth, holy

Father, I spent not a long time at Petersburg; but I am not a stranger

either to its wonders or its inhabitants.”

“Possibly, then, you may have met with the English favourite of the

Czar of whom I hear in my retreat that men have lately spoken somewhat

largely?” The Hermit paused again. We were now in a long, low passage,

almost in darkness. I scarcely saw him, yet I heard a convulsed movement

in his throat before he uttered the remainder of the sentence. “He is

called the Count Devereux.”

“Father,” said I, calmly, “I have both seen and known the man.”

“Ha!” said the Hermit, and he leaned for a moment against the wall;

“known him--and--how--how--I mean, where is he at this present time?”

“That, Father, is a difficult question respecting one who has led so

active a life. He was ambassador at the court of------just before I left

it.”

We had now passed the passage and gained a room of tolerable size; an

iron lamp burned within, and afforded a sufficient but somewhat dim

light. The Hermit, as I concluded my reply, sank down on a long stone

bench, beside a table of the same substance, and leaning his face on

his hand, so that the long, large sleeve he wore perfectly concealed his

features, said, “Pardon me; my breath is short, and my frame weak; I am

quite exhausted, but will speak to you more anon.”

I uttered a short answer, and drew a small wooden stool within a few

feet of the Hermit’s seat. After a brief silence he rose, placed wine,

bread, and preserved fruits before me and bade me eat. I seemed to

comply with his request, and the apparent diversion of my attention from

himself somewhat relieved the embarrassment under which he evidently

laboured.

“May I hope,” he said, “that were my commission to this--to the Count

Devereux--you would execute it faithfully and with speed? Yet stay: you

have a high mien, as of one above fortune, but your garb is rude and

poor; and if aught of gold could compensate your trouble, the Hermit has

other treasuries besides this cell.”

“I will do your bidding, Father, without robbing the poor. You wish,

then, that I should seek Morton Devereux; you wish that I should summon

him hither; you wish to see and to confer with him?”

“God of mercy forbid!” cried the Hermit, and with such a vehemence that

I was startled from the design of revealing myself, which I was on the

point of executing. “I would rather that these walls would crush me into

dust, or that this solid stone would crumble beneath my feet,--ay, even

into a bottomless pit, than meet the glance of Morton Devereux!”

“Is it even so?” said I, stooping over the wine-cup; “ye have been foes

then, I suspect. Well, it matters not: tell me your errand, and it shall

be done.”

“Done!” cried the Hermit, and a new and certainly a most natural

suspicion darted within him, “done! and--fool that I am!--who or what

are you that I should believe you take so keen an interest in the wishes

of a man utterly unknown to you? I tell you that my wish is that you

should cross seas and traverse lands until you find the man I have named

to you. Will a stranger do this, and without hire? No--no--I was a fool,

and will trust the monks, and give gold, and then my errand will be

sped.”

“Father, or rather brother,” said I, with a slow and firm voice, “for

you are of mine own age, and you have the passion and the infirmity

which make brethren of all mankind, I am one to whom all places are

alike: it matters not whether I visit a northern or a southern clime; I

have wealth, which is sufficient to smooth toil; I have leisure, which

makes occupation an enjoyment. More than this, I am one who in his

gayest and wildest moments has ever loved mankind, and would have

renounced at any time his own pleasure for the advantage of another. But

at this time, above all others, I am most disposed to forget myself, and

there is a passion in your words which leads me to hope that it may be a

great benefit which I can confer upon you.”

“You speak well,” said the Hermit, musingly, “and I may trust you; I

will consider yet a little longer, and to-morrow at this hour you shall

have my final answer. If you execute the charge I entrust to you, may

the blessing of a dying and most wretched man cleave to you forever! But

hush; the clock strikes: it is my hour of prayer.”

And, pointing to a huge black clock that hung opposite the door, and

indicated the hour of nine (according to our English mode of numbering

the hours), the Hermit fell on his knees, and, clasping his hands

tightly, bent his face over them in the attitude of humiliation and

devotion. I followed his example. After a few minutes he rose: “Once in

every three hours,” said he, with a ghastly expression, “for the last

twelve years have I bowed my soul in anguish before God, and risen to

feel that it was in vain: I am cursed without and within!”

“My Father, my Father, is this your faith in the mercies of the Redeemer

who died for man?”

“Talk not to me of faith!” cried the Hermit, wildly. “Ye laymen and

worldlings know nothing of its mysteries and its powers. But begone! the

dread hour is upon me, when my tongue is loosed and my brain darkened,

and I know not my words and shudder at my own thoughts. Begone! no human

being shall witness those moments: they are only for Heaven and my own

soul.”

So saying, this unhappy and strange being seized me by the arm and

dragged me towards the passage we had entered. I was in doubt whether

to yield to or contend with him; but there was a glare in his eye and

a flush upon his brow, which, while it betrayed the dreadful disease

of his mind, made me fear that resistance to his wishes might operate

dangerously upon a frame so feeble and reduced. I therefore mechanically

obeyed him. He opened again the entrance to his rugged home, and the

moonlight streamed wanly over his dark robes and spectral figure.

“Go,” said he, more mildly than before, “go, and forgive the vehemence

of one whose mind and heart alike are broken within him. Go, but return

to-morrow at sunset. Your air disposes me to trust you.”

So saying, he closed the door upon me, and I stood without the cavern

alone.

But did I return home? Did I hasten to press my couch in sleep and sweet

forgetfulness, while he was in that gloomy sepulture of the living, a

prey to anguish, and torn by the fangs of madness and a fierce disease?

No: on the damp grass, beneath the silent skies, I passed a night which

could scarcely have been less wretched than his own. My conjecture was

now and in full confirmed. Heavens! how I loved that man! how, from my

youngest years, had my soul’s fondest affections interlaced themselves

with him! with what anguish had I wept his imagined death! and now to

know that he lay within those walls, smitten from brain to heart with so

fearful and mysterious a curse,--to know, too, that he dreaded the sight

of me,--of me who would have laid down my life for his! the grave, which

I imagined his home, had been a mercy to a doom like this.

“He fears,” I murmured, and I wept as I said it, “to look on one who

would watch over, and soothe, and bear with him, with more than a

woman’s love! By what awful fate has this calamity fallen on one so

holy and so pure? or by what preordered destiny did I come to these

solitudes, to find at the same time a new charm for the earth and a

spell to change it again into a desert and a place of woe?”

All night I kept vigil by the cave, and listened if I could catch moan

or sound; but everything was silent: the thick walls of the rock kept

even the voice of despair from my ear. The day dawned, and I retired

among the trees, lest the Hermit might come out unawares and see me. At

sunrise I saw him appear for a few moments and again retire, and I then

hastened home, exhausted and wearied by the internal conflicts of the

night, to gather coolness and composure for the ensuing interview, which

I contemplated at once with eagerness and dread.

At the appointed hour I repaired to the cavern: the door was partially

closed; I opened it, hearing no answer to my knock, and walked gently

along the passage; but I now heard shrieks and groans and wild laughter

as I neared the rude chamber. I paused for a moment, and then in terror

and dismay entered the apartment. It was empty, but I saw near the clock

a small door, from within which the sounds that alarmed me proceeded. I

had no scruple in opening it, and found myself in the Hermit’s sleeping

chamber,--a small dark room, where, upon a straw pallet, lay the

wretched occupant in a state of frantic delirium. I stood mute and

horror-struck, while his exclamations of frenzy burst upon my ear.

“There--there!” he cried, “I have struck thee to the heart, and now I

will kneel, and kiss those white lips, and bathe my hands in that blood!

Ha!--do I hate thee?--hate--ay--hate,--abhor, detest! Have

you the beads there?--let me tell them. Yes, I will go to the

confessional--confess?--No, no--all the priests in the world could

not lift up a soul so heavy with guilt. Help--help--help! I am

falling--falling--there is the pit, and the fire, and the devils! Do you

hear them laugh?--I can laugh too!--ha! ha! ha! Hush, I have written it

all out, in a fair hand; he shall read it; and then, O God! what curses

he will heap upon my head! Blessed Saint Francis, hear me! Lazarus,

Lazarus, speak for me!”

Thus did the Hermit rave, while my flesh crept to hear him. I stood by

his bedside, and called on him, but he neither heard nor saw me. Upon

the ground, by the bed’s head, as if it had dropped from under

the pillow, was a packet seated and directed to myself. I knew the

handwriting at a glance, even though the letters were blotted and

irregular, and possibly traced in the first moment that his present

curse fell upon the writer. I placed the packet in my bosom; the

Hermit saw not the motion; he lay back on the bed, seemingly in utter

exhaustion. I turned away, and hastened to the monastery for assistance.

As I hurried through the passage, the Hermit’s shrieks again broke upon

me, with a fiercer vehemence than before. I flew from them, as if

they were sounds from the abyss of Hades. I flew till, breathless,

and half-senseless myself, I fell down exhausted by the gate of the

monastery.

The two most skilled in physic of the brethren were immediately

summoned, and they lost not a moment in accompanying me to the cavern.

All that evening, until midnight, the frenzy of the maniac seemed rather

to increase than abate. But at that hour, exactly indeed as the clock

struck twelve, he fell all at once into a deep sleep.

Then for the first time, but not till the weary brethren had at this

favourable symptom permitted themselves to return for a brief interval

to the monastery, to seek refreshment for themselves and to bring down

new medicines for the patient,--then, for the first time, I rose from

the Hermit’s couch by which I had hitherto kept watch, and repairing to

the outer chamber, took forth the packet superscribed with my name.

There, alone in that gray vault, and by the sepulchral light of the

single lamp, I read what follows:--

THE HERMIT’S MANUSCRIPT.

Morton Devereux, if ever this reach you, read it, shudder, and, whatever

your afflictions, bless God that you are not as I am. Do you remember

my prevailing characteristic as a boy? No, you do not. You will say

“devotion!” It was not! “Gentleness.” It was not: it was JEALOUSY! Now

does the truth flash on you? Yes, that was the disease that was in my

blood, and in my heart, and through whose ghastly medium every living

object was beheld. Did I love you? Yes, I loved you,--ay, almost with

a love equal to your own. I loved my mother; I loved Gerald; I loved

Montreuil. It was a part of my nature to love, and I did not resist the

impulse. You I loved better than all; but I was jealous of each. If my

mother caressed you or Gerald, if you opened your heart to either, it

stung me to the quick. I it was who said to my mother, “Caress him not,

or I shall think you love him better than me.” I it was who widened,

from my veriest childhood, the breach between Gerald and yourself. I

it was who gave to the childish reproach a venom, and to the childish

quarrel a barb. Was this love? Yes, it was love; but I could not endure

that ye should love one another as ye loved me. It delighted me when

one confided to my ear a complaint against the other, and said, “Aubrey,

this blow could not have come from thee!”

Montreuil early perceived my bias of temper: he might have corrected it

and with ease. I was not evil in disposition; I was insensible of my own

vice. Had its malignity been revealed to me, I should have recoiled in

horror. Montreuil had a vast power over me; he could mould me at his

will. Montreuil, I repeat, might have saved me, and thyself, and a third

being, better and purer than either of us was, even in our cradles.

Montreuil did not: he had an object to serve, and he sacrificed our

whole house to it. He found me one day weeping over a dog that I had

killed. “Why did you destroy it?” he said; and I answered, “Because it

loved Morton better than me!” And the priest said, “Thou didst right,

Aubrey!” Yes, from that time he took advantage of my infirmity, and

could rouse or calm all my passions in proportion as he irritated or

soothed it.

You know this man’s object during the latter period of his residence

with us: it was the restoration of the House of Stuart. He was

alternately the spy and the agitator in that cause. Among more

comprehensive plans for effecting this object, was that of securing the

heirs to the great wealth and popular name of Sir William Devereux. This

was only a minor mesh in the intricate web of his schemes; but it is the

character of the man to take exactly the same pains, and pursue the same

laborious intrigues, for a small object as for a great one. His first

impression, on entering our house, was in favour of Gerald; and I

believe he really likes him to this day better than either of us.

Partly your sarcasms, partly Gerald’s disputes with you, partly

my representations,--for I was jealous even of the love of

Montreuil,--prepossessed him against you. He thought, too, that Gerald

had more talent to serve his purposes than yourself and more facility in

being moulded to them; and he believed our uncle’s partiality to you far

from being unalienable. I have said that, at the latter period of his

residence with us, he was an agent of the exiled cause. At the time I

_now_ speak of, he had not entered into the great political scheme which

engrossed him afterwards. He was merely a restless and aspiring priest,

whose whole hope, object, ambition, was the advancement of his order.

He knew that whoever inherited, or whoever shared, my uncle’s wealth,

could, under legitimate regulation, promote _any_ end which the heads

of that order might select; and he wished therefore to gain the mastery

over us all. Intrigue was essentially woven with his genius, and by

intrigue only did he ever seek to arrive at _any_ end he had in view.*

He soon obtained a mysterious and pervading power over Gerald and

myself. Your temper at once irritated him, and made him despair of

obtaining an ascendant over one who, though he testified in childhood

none of the talents for which he has since been noted, testified,

nevertheless, a shrewd, penetrating, and sarcastic power of

observation and detection. You, therefore, he resolved to leave to the

irregularities of your own nature, confident that they would yield him

the opportunity of detaching your uncle from you and ultimately securing

to Gerald his estates.

* It will be observed that Aubrey frequently repeats former assertions;

this is one of the most customary traits of insanity.--ED.

The trial at school first altered his intentions. He imagined that

he then saw in you powers which might be rendered availing to him: he

conquered his pride--a great feature in his character--and he resolved

to seek your affection. Your subsequent regularity of habits and success

in study confirmed him in his resolution; and when he learned from my

uncle’s own lips that the Devereux estates would devolve on you, he

thought that it would be easier to secure your affection to him than

to divert that affection which my uncle had conceived for you. At this

time, I repeat, he had no particular object in view; none, at least,

beyond that of obtaining for the interest of his order the direction of

great wealth and some political influence. Some time after--I know not

exactly when, but before we returned to take our permanent abode at

Devereux Court--a share in the grand political intrigue which was then

in so many branches carried on throughout England, and even Europe, was

confided to Montreuil.

In this I believe he was the servant of his order, rather than

immediately of the exiled House; and I have since heard that even at

that day he had acquired a great reputation among the professors of

the former. You, Morton, he decoyed not into this scheme before he left

England: he had not acquired a sufficient influence over you to trust

you with the disclosure. To Gerald and myself he was more confidential.

Gerald eagerly embraced his projects through a spirit of enterprise;

I through a spirit of awe and of religion. RELIGION! Yes,--then,--long

after,--now,--when my heart was and is the home of all withering and

evil passions, Religion reigned,--reigns, over me a despot and a tyrant.

Its terrors haunt me at this hour; they people the earth and the air

with shapes of ghastly menace! They--Heaven pardon me! what would my

madness utter? Madness?--madness? Ay, _that_ is the real scourge, the

real fire, the real torture, the real hell, of this fair earth!

Montreuil, then, by different pleas, won over Gerald and myself. He left

us, but engaged us in constant correspondence. “Aubrey,” he said,

before he departed, and when he saw that I was wounded by his apparent

cordiality towards you and Gerald--“Aubrey,” he said, soothing me on

this point, “think not that I trust Gerald or the arrogant Morton as I

trust you. _You_ have my real heart and my real trust. It is necessary

to the execution of this project, so important to the interests of

religion and so agreeable to the will of Heaven, that we should secure

all co-operators: but they, your brothers, Aubrey, are the tools of that

mighty design; you are its friend.” Thus it was that, at all times when

he irritated too sorely the vice of my nature, he flattered it into

seconding his views; and thus, instead of conquering my evil passions,

he conquered by them. Curses--No, no, no!--I _will_ be calm.

We returned to Devereux Court, and we grew from boyhood into youth.

I loved you then, Morton. Ah! what would I not give now for one pure

feeling, such as I felt in your love? Do you remember the day on which

you had extorted from my uncle his consent to your leaving us for the

pleasures and pomps of London? Do you remember the evening of that day,

when I came to seek you, and we sat down on a little mound, and talked

over your projects, and you spoke then to me of my devotion and my purer

and colder feelings? Morton, at that very moment my veins burned with

passion!--at that very moment my heart was feeding the vulture fated to

live and prey within it forever! Thrice did I resolve to confide in you,

as we then sat together, and thrice did my evil genius forbid it. You

seemed, even in your affection to me, so wholly engrossed with your own

hopes; you seemed so little to regret leaving me; you stung, so often

and so deeply, in our short conference, that feeling which made

me desire to monopolize all things in those I loved, that I said

inly,--“Why should I bare my heart to one who can so little understand

it?” And so we turned home, and you dreamed not of that which was then

within me, and which was destined to be your curse and mine.

Not many weeks previous to that night, I had seen one whom to see was to

love! Love!--I tell you, Morton, that _that_ word is expressive of soft

and fond emotion, and there should be another expressive of all that is

fierce and dark and unrelenting in the human heart!--all that seems most

like the deadliest and the blackest hate, and yet is not hate! I

saw this being, and from that moment my real nature, which had slept

hitherto, awoke! I remember well it was one evening in the beginning of

summer that I first saw her. She sat alore in the little garden beside

the cottage door, and I paused, and, unseen, looked over the slight

fence that separated us, and fed my eyes with a loveliness that I

thought till then only twilight or the stars could wear! From that

evening I came, night after night, to watch her from the same spot; and

every time I beheld her the poison entered deeper and deeper into

my system. At length I had an opportunity of being known to her, of

speaking to her, of hearing her speak, of touching the ground she had

hallowed, of entering the home where she dwelt!

I must explain: I said that both Gerald and myself corresponded

privately with Montreuil; we were both bound over to secrecy with regard

to you; and this, my temper and Gerald’s coolness with you rendered an

easy obligation to both;--I say my temper, for I loved to think I had

a secret not known to another; and I carried this reserve even to

the degree of concealing from Gerald himself the greater part of the

correspondence between me and the Abbe. In his correspondence with each

of us, Montreuil acted with his usual skill; to Gerald, as the elder in

years, the more prone to enterprise, and the manlier in aspect and in

character, was allotted whatever object was of real trust or importance.

Gerald it was who, under pretence of pursuing his accustomed sports,

conferred with the various agents of intrigue who from time to time

visited our coast; and to me the Abbe gave words of endearment and

affected the language of more entire trust. “Whatever,” he would say,

“in our present half mellowed projects, is exposed to danger, but

does not promise reward, I entrust to Gerald; hereafter, far higher

employment, under far safer and surer auspices, will be yours. We are

the heads: be ours the nobler occupation to plan; and let us leave

to inferior natures the vain and perilous triumph to execute what we

design.”

All this I readily assented to; for, despite my acquiescence in

Montreuil’s wishes, I loved not enterprise, or rather I hated whatever

roused me from the dreamy and abstracted indolence which was most dear

to my temperament. Sometimes, however, with a great show of confidence,

Montreuil would request me to execute some quiet and unimportant

commission; and of this nature was one I received while I was thus,

unknown even to the object, steeping my soul in the first intoxication

of love. The plots then carried on by certain ecclesiastics I need

not say extended, in one linked chain, over the greater part of the

Continent. Spain, in especial, was the theatre of these intrigues;

and among the tools employed in executing them were some who, though

banished from that country, still, by the rank they had held in it,

carried a certain importance in their very names. Foremost of these

was the father of the woman I loved; and foremost, in whatever promised

occupation to a restless mind, he was always certain to be.

Montreuil now commissioned me to seek out a certain Barnard (an

underling in those secret practices or services, for which he afterwards

suffered, and who was then in that part of the country), and to

communicate to him some messages of which he was to be the bearer to

this Spaniard. A thought flashed upon me--Montreuil’s letter mentioned,

accidentally, that the Spaniard had never hitherto seen Barnard: could I

not personate the latter, deliver the messages myself, and thus win that

introduction to the daughter which I so burningly desired, and which,

from the close reserve of the father’s habits, I might not otherwise

effect? The plan was open to two objections: one, that I was known

personally in the town in the environs of which the Spaniard lived, and

he might therefore very soon discover who I really was; the other that

I was not in possession of all the information which Barnard might

possess, and which the Spaniard might wish to learn; but these

objections had not much weight with me. To the first, I said inly, “I

will oppose the most constant caution; I will go always on foot and

alone; I will never be seen in the town itself; and even should the

Spaniard, who seems rarely to stir abroad, and who, possibly, does not

speak our language,--even should he learn by accident that Barnard is

only another name for Aubrey Devereux, it will not be before I have

gained my object; nor, perhaps, before the time when I myself may wish

to acknowledge my identity.” To the second objection I saw a yet more

ready answer. “I will acquaint Montreuil at once,” I said, “with my

intention; I will claim his connivance as a proof of his confidence, and

as an essay of my own genius of intrigue.” I did so; the priest, perhaps

delighted to involve me so deeply, and to find me so ardent in his

project, consented. Fortunately, as I before said, Barnard was an

underling,--young, unknown, and obscure. My youth, therefore, was not

so great a foe to my assumed disguise as it might otherwise have been.

Montreuil supplied all requisite information. I tried (for the first

time, with a beating heart and a tremulous voice) the imposition! it

succeeded; I continued it. Yes, Morton, yes!--pour forth upon me your

bitterest execration, in me, in your brother, in the brother so dear

to you,--in the brother whom you imagined so passionless, so pure; so

sinless,--behold that Barnard, the lover, the idolatrous lover--the foe,

the deadly foe,--of Isora d’Alvarez!

Here the manuscript was defaced for some pages by incoherent and

meaningless ravings. It seemed as if one of his dark fits of frenzy had

at that time come over the writer. At length, in a more firm and clear

character than that immediately preceding it, the manuscript continued

as follows:--

I loved her, but even then it was with a fierce and ominous love

(ominous of what it became). Often in the still evenings, when we stood

together watching the sun set; when my tongue trembled, but did not

dare to speak; when all soft and sweet thoughts filled the heart and

glistened in the eye of that most sensitive and fairy being; when my own

brow perhaps seemed to reflect the same emotions,--feelings which I even

shuddered to conceive raged within me. Had we stood together in those

moments upon the brink of a precipice, I could have wound my arms around

her and leaped with her into the abyss. Everything but one nursed my

passion; nature, solitude, early dreams, all kindled and fed that fire:

Religion only combated it; I knew it was a crime to love any of earth’s

creatures as I loved. I used the scourge and the fast;* I wept hot,

burning tears; I prayed, and the intensity of my prayer appalled even

myself, as it rose from my maddened heart, in the depth and stillness

of the lone night: but the flame burned higher and more scorchingly from

the opposition; nay, it was the very knowledge that my love was criminal

that made it assume so fearful and dark a shape. “Thou art the cause of

my downfall from Heaven!” I muttered, when I looked upon Isora’s calm

face: “thou feelest it not, and I could destroy thee and myself,--myself

the criminal, thee the cause of the crime!”

* I need not point out to the novel-reader how completely the character

of Aubrey has been stolen in a certain celebrated French romance. But

the writer I allude to is not so unmerciful as M. de Balzac, who has

pillaged scenes in “The Disowned” with a most gratifying politeness.

It must have been that my eyes betrayed my feelings that Isora loved me

not, that she shrank from me even at the first: why else should I not

have called forth the same sentiments which she gave to you? Was not my

form cast in a mould as fair as yours? did not my voice whisper in as

sweet a tone? did I not love her with as wild a love? Why should she not

have loved me? I was the first whom she behold: she would--ay, perhaps

she would have loved me, if you had not come and marred all. Curse

yourself, then, that you were my rival! curse yourself that you made

my heart as a furnace, and smote my brain with frenzy; curse--O sweet

Virgin, forgive me!--I know not,--I know not what my tongue utters or my

hand traces!

You came, then, Morton, you came; you knew her; you loved her; she loved

you. I learned that you had gained admittance to the cottage, and

the moment I learned it, I looked on Isora, and felt my fate, as by

intuition: I saw at once that she was prepared to love you; I saw the

very moment when that love kindled from conception into form; I saw--and

at that moment my eyes reeled and my ears rang as with the sound of a

rushing sea, and I thought I felt a cord snap within my brain, which has

never been united again.

Once only, after your introduction to the cottage, did I think of

confiding to you my love and rivalship; you remember one night when we

met by the castle cave, and when your kindness touched and softened

me despite of myself. The day after that night I sought you, with the

intention of communicating to you all; and while I was yet struggling

with my embarrassment and the suffocating tide of my emotions, you

premeditated me by giving me _your_ confidence. Engrossed by your own

feelings, you were not observant of mine; and as you dwelt and dilated

upon your love for Isora, all emotions, save those of agony and of fury,

vanished from my breast. I did not answer you then at any length, for

I was too agitated to trust to prolix speech; but by the next day I

had recovered myself, and I resolved, as far as I was able, to play the

hypocrite, “he cannot love her as I do!” I said; “perhaps I may, without

disclosure of my rivalship and without sin in the attempt, detach him

from her by reason.” Fraught with this idea, I collected myself, sought

you, remonstrated with you, represented the worldly folly of your

love, and uttered all that prudence preaches--in vain, when it preaches

against passion!

Let me be brief. I saw that I made no impression on you; I stifled my

wrath; I continued to visit and watch Isora. I timed my opportunities

well: my constant knowledge of your motions allowed me to do that;

besides, I represented to the Spaniard the necessity, through political

motives, of concealing myself from you; hence, we never encountered each

other. One evening, Alvarez had gone out to meet one of his countrymen

and confederates. I found Isora alone, in the most sequestered part

of the garden; her loveliness, and her exceeding gentleness of manner,

melted me. For the first time audibly my heart spoke out, and I told

her of my idolatry. Idolatry! ay, _that_ is the only word, since it

signifies both worship and guilt! She heard me timidly, gently, coldly.

She spoke; and I found confirmed from her own lips what my reason had

before told me,--that there was no hope for me. The iron that entered

also roused my heart. “Enough!” I cried fiercely, “you love this Morton

Devereux, and for him I am scorned.” Isora blushed and trembled, and

all my senses fled from me. I scarcely know in what words my rage and my

despair clothed themselves: but I know that I divulged myself to her; I

know that I told her I was the brother, the rival, the enemy of the man

she loved,--I know that I uttered the fiercest and the wildest menaces

and execrations,--I know that my vehemence so overpowered and terrified

her that her mind was scarcely less clouded--less lost, rather--than my

own. At that moment the sound of your horse’s hoofs was heard. Isora’s

eyes brightened and her mien grew firm. “He comes,” she said, “and he

will protect me!” “Hark!” I said, sinking my voice, and, as my drawn

sword flashed in one hand, the other grasped her arm with a savage

force,--“hark, woman!” I said,--and an oath of the blackest fury

accompanied my threats,--“swear that you will never divulge to Morton

Devereux who is his real rival, that you will never declare to him nor

to any one else that the false Barnard and the true Aubrey Devereux

are the same,--swear this, or I swear [and I repeated, with a solemn

vehemence, that dread oath] that I will stay here; that I will confront

my rival; that, the moment he beholds me, I will plunge this sword in

his bosom; and that, before I perish myself, I will hasten to the

town, and will utter there a secret which will send your father to the

gallows: now, your choice?”

Morton, you have often praised, my uncle has often jested at, the

womanish softness of my face. There have been moments when I have seen

that face in the glass, and known it not, but started in wild affright,

and fancied that I beheld a demon; perhaps in that moment this change

was over it. Slowly Isora gazed upon me; slowly blanched into the hues

of death grew her cheek and lip; slowly that lip uttered the oath I

enjoined. I released my gripe, and she fell to the earth suddenly, and

stunned as if struck by lightning. I stayed not to look on what I had

done; I heard your step advance; I fled by a path that led from the

garden to the beach; and I reached my home without retaining a single

recollection of the space I had traversed to attain it.

Despite the night I passed--a night which I will leave you to imagine--I

rose the next morning with a burning interest to learn from you what

had passed after my flight, and with a power, peculiar to the stormiest

passions, of an outward composure while I listened to the recital. I saw

that I was safe; and I heard, with a joy so rapturous that I question

whether even Isora’s assent to my love would have given me an equal

transport, that she had rejected you. I uttered some advice to you

commonplace enough: it displeased you, and we separated.

That evening, to my surprise, I was privately visited by Montreuil.

He had some designs in hand which brought him from France into the

neighbourhood, but which made him desirous of concealment. He soon

drew from me my secret; it is marvellous, indeed, what power he had of

penetrating, ruling, moulding, my feelings and my thoughts. He wished,

at that time, a communication to be made and a letter to be given to

Alvarez. I could not execute this commission personally; for you had

informed me of your intention of watching if you could not discover or

meet with Barnard, and I knew you were absent from home on that very

purpose. Nor was Montreuil himself desirous of incurring the risk of

being seen by you,--you over whom, sooner or later, he then trusted to

obtain a power equal to that which he held over your brothers. Gerald

then was chosen to execute the commission. He did so; he met Alvarez for

the first and only time on the beach, by the town of------. You saw him,

and imagined you beheld the real Barnard.

But I anticipate; for you did not inform me of that occurrence, nor

the inference you drew from it, till afterwards. You returned, however,

after witnessing that meeting, and for two days your passions

(passions which, intense and fierce as mine, show that, under similar

circumstances, you might have been equally guilty) terminated in fever.

You were confined to your bed for three or four days; meanwhile I took

advantage of the event. Montreuil suggested a plan which I readily

embraced. I sought the Spaniard, and told him in confidence that you

were a suitor--but a suitor upon the most dishonourable terms--to his

daughter. I told him, moreover, that you had detected his schemes, and,

in order to deprive Isora of protection and abate any obstacles arising

from her pride, meant to betray him to the Government. I told him that

his best and most prudent, nay, his only chance of safety for Isora and

himself was to leave his present home and take refuge in the vast mazes

of the metropolis. I told him not to betray to you his knowledge of

your criminal intentions, lest it might needlessly exasperate you. I

furnished him wherewithal to repay you the sum which you had lent him,

and by which you had commenced his acquaintance; and I dictated to him

the very terms of the note in which the sum was to be inclosed. After

this I felt happy. You were separated from Isora: she might forget you;

you might forget her. I was possessed of the secret of her father’s

present retreat: I might seek it at my pleasure, and ultimately--so hope

whispered--prosper in my love.

Some time afterwards you mentioned your suspicions of Gerald; I did not

corroborate, but I did not seek to destroy them. “They already hate

each other,” I said; “can the hate be greater? meanwhile, let it divert

suspicion from me!” Gerald knew of the agency of the real Barnard,

though he did not know that I had assumed the name of that person. When

you taxed him with his knowledge of the man, he was naturally confused.

You interpreted that confusion into the fact of being your rival, while

in truth it arose from his belief that you had possessed yourself of

his political schemes. Montreuil, who had lurked chiefly in the islet

opposite “the Castle Cave,” had returned to France on the same day

that Alvarez repaired to London. Previous to this, we had held some

conferences together upon my love. At first he had opposed and reasoned

with it; but, startled and astonished by the intensity with which it

possessed me, he gave way to my vehemence at last.

I have said that I had adopted his advice in one instance. The fact of

having received his advice,--the advice of one so pious, so free from

human passion, so devoted to one object, which appeared to him the cause

of Religion; advice, too, in a love so fiery and overwhelming, that fact

made me think myself less criminal than I had done before. He advised me

yet further. “Do not seek Isora,” he said, “till some time has elapsed;

till her new-born love for your brother has died away; till the

impression of fear you have caused in her is somewhat effaced; till time

and absence, too, have done their work in the mind of Morton, and you

will no longer have for your rival one who is not only a brother, but a

man of a fierce, resolute, and unrelenting temper.”

I yielded to this advice: partly because it promised so fair; partly

because I was not systematically vicious, and I wished, if possible,

to do away with our rivalship; and principally, because I knew, in the

meanwhile, that if I was deprived of her presence, so also were you; and

jealousy with me was a far more intolerable and engrossing passion than

the very love from which it sprang. So time passed on: you affected to

have conquered your attachment; you affected to take pleasure in levity

and the idlest pursuits of worldly men. I saw deeper into your heart;

for the moment I entertained the passion of love in my own breast, my

eyes became gifted with a second vision to penetrate the most mysterious

and hoarded secrets in the love of others.

Two circumstances of importance happened before you left Devereux

Court for London; the one was the introduction to your service of Jean

Desmarais, the second was your breach with Montreuil. I speak now of

the first. A very early friend did the priest possess, born in the same

village as himself and in the same rank of life; he had received a good

education and possessed natural genius. At a time when, from some fraud

in a situation of trust which he had held in a French nobleman’s

family, he was in destitute and desperate circumstances, it occurred

to Montreuil to provide for him by placing him in our family. Some

accidental and frivolous remark of yours which I had repeated in my

correspondence with Montreuil as illustrative of your manner, and your

affected pursuits at that time, presented an opportunity to a plan

before conceived. Desmarais came to England in a smuggler’s vessel,

presented himself to you as a servant, and was accepted. In this plan

Montreuil had two views: first, that of securing Desmarais a place in

England, tolerably profitable to himself and convenient for any plot or

scheme which Montreuil might require of him in this country; secondly,

that of setting a perpetual and most adroit spy upon all your motions.

As to the second occurrence to which I have referred; namely, your

breach with Montreuil--

Here Aubrey, with the same terrible distinctness which had characterized

his previous details and which shed a double horror over the contrast of

the darker and more frantic passages in the manuscript, related what the

reader will remember Oswald had narrated before, respecting the letter

he had brought from Madame de Balzac. It seems that Montreuil’s abrupt

appearance in the hall had been caused by Desmarais, who had recognized

Oswald, on his dismounting at the gate, and had previously known that

he was in the employment of the Jansenistical _intriguante_ Madame de

Balzac.

Aubrey proceeded then to say that Montreuil, invested with far more

direct authority and power than he had been hitherto in the projects of

that wise order whose doctrines he had so darkly perverted, repaired to

London; and that, soon after my departure for the same place, Gerald and

Aubrey left Devereux Court in company with each other; but Gerald,

whom very trifling things diverted from any project, however important,

returned to Devereux Court to accomplish the prosecution of some rustic

_amour_, without even reaching London. Aubrey, on the contrary, had

proceeded to the metropolis, sought the suburb in which Alvarez lived,

procured, in order to avoid any probable chance of meeting me, a lodging

in the same obscure quarter, and had renewed his suit to Isora. The

reader is already in possession of the ill success which attended it.

Aubrey had at last confessed his real name to the father. The Spaniard

was dazzled by the prospect of so honourable an alliance for his

daughter. From both came Isora’s persecution, but in both was it

resisted. Passing over passages in the manuscript of the most stormy

incoherence and the most gloomy passion, I come to what follows--

I learned then from Desmarais that you had taken away her and the dying

father, that you had placed them in a safe and honourable home. That

man, so implicitly the creature of Montreuil, or rather of his own

interest, with which Montreuil was identified, was easily induced to

betray you also to me,--me whom he imagined, moreover, utterly the

tool of the priest, and of whose torturing interest in this peculiar

disclosure he was not at that time aware. I visited Isora in her new

abode, and again and again she trembled beneath my rage. Then, for

the second time, I attempted force. Ha! ha! Morton, I think I see you

now!--I think I hear your muttered curse! Curse on! When you read this I

shall be beyond your vengeance, beyond human power. And yet I think if

I were mere clay; if I were the mere senseless heap of ashes that

the grave covers; if I were not the thing that must live forever and

forever, far away in unimagined worlds, where nought that has earth’s

life can come,--I should tremble beneath the sod as your foot pressed

and your execration rang over it. A second time I attempted force; a

second time I was repulsed by the same means,--by a woman’s hand and a

woman’s dagger. But I knew that I had one hold over Isora from which,

while she loved you, I could never be driven: I knew that by threatening

your _life_, I could command her will and terrify her into compliance

with my own. I made her reiterate her vow of concealment; and I

discovered, by some words dropping from her fear, that she believed

you already suspected me, and had been withheld by her entreaties from

seeking me out. I questioned her more, and soon perceived that it was

(as indeed I knew before) Gerald whom you suspected, not me; but I did

not tell this to Isora. I suffered her to cherish a mistake profitable

to my disguise; but I saw at once that it might betray me, if you ever

met and conferred at length with Gerald upon this point, and I exacted

from Isora a pledge that she would effectually and forever bind you

not to breathe a single suspicion to him. When I had left the room, I

returned once more to warn her against uniting herself with you. Wretch,

selfish, accursed wretch that you were, why did you suffer her to

transgress that warning?

I fled from the house, as a fiend flies from a being whom he has

possessed. I returned at night to look up at the window, and linger by

the door, and keep watch beside the home which held Isora. Such, in her

former abode, had been my nightly wont. I had no evil thought nor foul

intent in this customary vigil,--no, not one! Strangely enough, with the

tempestuous and overwhelming emotions which constituted the greater

part of my love was mingled--though subdued and latent--a stream of the

softest, yea, I might add almost of the holiest tenderness. Often after

one of those outpourings of rage and menace and despair, I would fly

to some quiet spot and weep till all the hardness of my heart was wept

away. And often in those nightly vigils I would pause by the door and

murmur, “This shelter, denied not to the beggar and the beggar’s child,

this would you deny to me if you could dream that I was so near you. And

yet, had you loved me, instead of lavishing upon me all your hatred and

your contempt,--had you loved me, I would have served and worshipped you

as man knows not worship or service. You shudder at my vehemence now: I

could not then have breathed a whisper to wound you. You tremble now at

the fierceness of my breast: you would then rather have marvelled at its

softness.”

I was already at my old watch when you encountered me: you addressed me;

I answered not; you approached me, and I fled. Fled there--there was the

shame, and the sting of my sentiments towards you. I am not naturally

afraid of danger, though my nerves are sometimes weak and have sometimes

shrunk from it. I have known something of peril in late years when my

frame has been bowed and broken--perils by storms at sea, and the knives

of robbers upon land--and I have looked upon it with a quiet eye.

But you, Morton Devereux, you I always feared. I had seen from your

childhood others whose nature was far stronger than mine yield and

recoil at yours; I had seen the giant and bold strength of Gerald quail

before your bent brow; I had seen even the hardy pride of Montreuil

baffled by your curled lip and the stern sarcasm of your glance; I had

seen you, too, in your wild moments of ungoverned rage, and I knew that

if earth held one whose passions were fiercer than my own it was you.

But your passions were sustained even in their fiercest excess; your

passions were the mere weapons of your mind: my passions were the

torturers and the tyrants of mine. Your passions seconded your will;

mine blinded and overwhelmed it. From my infancy, even while I loved you

most, you awed me; and years, in deepening the impression, had made it

indelible. I could not confront the thought of your knowing all, and of

meeting you after that knowledge. And this fear, while it unnerved me at

some moments, at others only maddened my ferocity the more by the stings

of shame and self-contempt.

I fled from you: you pursued; you gained upon me; you remember how I was

preserved. I dashed through the inebriated revellers who obstructed your

path, and reached my own lodging, which was close at hand; for the same

day on which I learned Isora’s change of residence I changed my own

in order to be near it. Did I feel joy for my escape? No: I could have

gnawed the very flesh from my bones in the agony of my shame. “I could

brave,” I said, “I could threat, I could offer violence to the woman who

rejected me, and yet I could not face the rival for whom I am scorned!”

At that moment a resolution flashed across my mind, exactly as if a

train of living fire had been driven before it. Morton, I resolved to

murder you, and in that very hour! A pistol lay on my table; I took it,

concealed it about my person, and repaired to the shelter of a large

portico, beside which I knew that you must pass to your own home in the

same street. Scarcely three minutes had elapsed between the reaching my

house and the leaving it on this errand. I knew, for I had heard

swords clash, that you would be detained some time in the street by the

rioters; I thought it probable also that you might still continue the

search for me; and I knew even that, had you hastened at once to your

home, you could scarcely have reached it before I reached my shelter.

I hurried on; I arrived at the spot; I screened myself and awaited your

coming. You came, borne in the arms of two men; others followed in the

rear; I saw your face destitute of the hue and aspect of life, and your

clothes streaming with blood. I was horror-stricken. I joined the crowd;

I learned that you had been stabbed, and it was feared mortally.

I did not return home: no, I went into the fields, and lay out all

night, and lifted up my heart to God, and wept aloud, and peace fell

upon me,--at least, what was peace compared to the tempestuous darkness

which had before reigned in my breast. The sight of you, bleeding

and insensible,--you, against whom I had harboured a fratricide’s

purpose,--had stricken, as it were, the weapon from my hand and the

madness from my mind. I shuddered at what I had escaped; I blessed God

for my deliverance; and with the gratitude and the awe came repentance;

and repentance brought a resolution to fly, since I could not wrestle

with my mighty and dread temptation: the moment that resolution was

formed, it was as if an incubus were taken from my breast. Even the next

morning I did not return home: my anxiety for you was such that I forgot

all caution; I went to your house myself; I saw one of your servants to

whom I was personally unknown. I inquired respecting you, and learned

that your wound had not been mortal, and that the servant had overheard

one of the medical attendants say you were not even in danger.

At this news I felt the serpent stir again within me, but I resolved to

crush it at the first: I would not even expose myself to the temptation

of passing by Isora’s house; I went straight in search of my horse; I

mounted, and fled resolutely from the scene of my soul’s peril. “I will

go,” I said, “to the home of our childhood; I will surround myself

by the mute tokens of the early love which my brother bore me; I

will think,--while penance and prayer cleanse my soul from its black

guilt,--I will think that I am also making a sacrifice to that brother.”

I returned then to Devereux Court, and I resolved to forego all

hope--all persecution--of Isora! My brother--my brother, my heart yearns

to you at this moment, even though years and distance, and, above all,

my own crimes, place a gulf between us which I may never pass; it yearns

to you when I think of those quiet shades, and the scenes where, pure

and unsullied, we wandered together, when life was all verdure and

freshness, and we dreamed not of what was to come! If even now my heart

yearns to you, Morton, when I think of that home and those days, believe

that it had some softness and some mercy for you then. Yes, I repeat,

I resolved to subdue my own emotions, and interpose no longer between

Isora and yourself. Full of this determination, and utterly melted

towards you, I wrote you a long letter; such as we would have written

to each other in our first youth. Two days after that letter all my new

purposes were swept away, and the whole soil of evil thoughts which they

had covered, not destroyed, rose again as the tide flowed from it, black

and rugged as before.

The very night on which I had writ that letter, came Montreuil secretly

to my chamber. He had been accustomed to visit Gerald by stealth and

at sudden moments; and there was something almost supernatural in the

manner in which he seemed to pass from place to place, unmolested and

unseen. He had now conceived a villanous project; and he had visited

Devereux Court in order to ascertain the likelihood of its success;

he there found that it was necessary to involve me in his scheme. My

uncle’s physician had said privately that Sir William could not live

many months longer. Either from Gerald or my mother Montreuil learned

this fact; and he was resolved, if possible, that, the family estates

should not glide from all chance of his influence over them into your

possession. Montreuil was literally as poor as the rigid law of his

order enjoins its disciples to be; all his schemes required the disposal

of large sums, and in no private source could he hope for such pecuniary

power as he was likely to find in the coffers of any member of our

family, yourself only excepted. It was this man’s boast to want, and

yet to command, all things; and he was now determined that if any craft,

resolution, or guilt could occasion the transfer of my uncle’s wealth

from you to Gerald or to myself, it should not be wanting.