DE LINDSAY.

1825. ÆT. 22.

[THE tale in which Lady Caroline figures under a fictitious guise was very crude and morbid, but not without a certain gloomy power. It was written not long after the Brighton letter, and entitled De Lindsay. It belongs to the author’s Byronic period; when, in obedience to the law which governs immature genius, he was working his way through a measure of imitation into marked originality. The idea or sentiment of the whole is sufficiently indicated by the motto prefixed to it: “Man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.” The narrative opens with the observation that

 

There is one feeling which is the earliest born in us, which accompanies us throughout life, and of which there is scarcely one amongst us who can say, “It has been realized according to my desire.” This feeling is the wish to be loved: loved to the full height and depth and fervor of the sentiment we imagine ourselves capable of embodying in a single passion. Who that has nicely weighed his own heart will not confess that he has never been entirely satisfied with the love given to him by the friend of his boyhood, the mistress of his youth, or the children of his age? And yet, while we reproach the affection bestowed on us for its languor or its weakness, we ourselves are open to the same charge. It would seem as if we all possessed within us certain immortal spiritual tendencies to love, which nothing human or earth-born can wholly excite, or wholly satisfy. These are the instincts which make us conscious of a power never to be exercised, a want never to be appeased; and with them we move through life mourning, resenting, or seeking to forget the irremediable loss of a felicity never possessed.

 

The hero of the story, Rupert de Lindsay, is then introduced as a man in whom this craving for a love beyond the ordinary loves of earth was so powerful and restless a passion, that it became in him the source of all the errors and vices which have usually their origin in the gross license of the senses.

 

He is an orphan of ancient family, and considerable possessions, with a person that could advance but slight pretension to attract, yet with an eager desire to please, and a taste the most delicate and refined. He had early learned the art to compensate by the graces of manner for the deficiencies of form. But Marmontel’s exquisite tale of Alcibiades was applicable to him. He was loved for his adventitious qualities, not for himself. And he knew it. One loved his fashion, another his fortune. A third listened to him out of pique at someone else; a fourth because she wished to decoy him from her friend. These adventures and discoveries brought to him disgust. They brought to him also, however, knowledge of the world; and nothing hardens the heart more than that knowledge of the world which is founded on a knowledge of its vices, made bitter by disappointment and suspicious by deceit. I saw him (says the narrator) just before he left England, and his mind was then sore and feverish. I saw him again on his return, after an absence of five years, and it was then callous and even. He had now reduced to a system the art of governing his own passions, and influencing those of others. He had reached the second stage of experience, when the deceived become the deceivers. To his indignation at the vices of human nature he added scorn for its weakness. Still, however, many good though irregular impulses lingered about his heart; and still the appeal, which if addressed to a principle would have been fruitless, could find him responsive when it was made to an affection. Few men of ability, who neither marry nor desire to marry, live much among the frivolities of the world after the age of twenty-eight — and De Lindsay, now near his thirtieth year, avoided the society he had once courted. He lived solely to satisfy his pleasures and to indulge his indolence. Women were his only pursuit, and to succeed in that pursuit was his only ambition.

The story then records some early incidents in the life of its hero, which serve to explain the gradual malformation of the character thus described. But there is only one of these descriptions which has any claim to resuscitation here. It is strictly autobiographical, as will be seen.

On the banks of Windermere, in the midst of that rich, half-southern scenery, which combines all the charms of wood and water, sky and mountain, Rupert regained for a while much of the purity of his boyhood. His occupations here were calm and thoughtful. The restless wanderings of the rivulet soothed him, from their very resemblance to the temper of his own mind. He began to feel that it was not the departure but the revolt of youth, not the triumph of his worse, but the continued struggle of his better, nature which had put him on such bitter terms with himself and the world around him. In his lonely boat upon the still blue waters of that romantic lake he poured forth to the midnight skies the sadness of a spirit dissatisfied with itself, and still capable, perhaps, of the happiness it sought, had the search been less self-conscious, less premeditated, less misguided. But in Rupert de Lindsay there was no fixed principle, no root of steady purpose beyond the gratification of his own sensations. He was not exactly a sensualist, but he had become the sybarite of an imaginative selfishness.

In his boyish days Rupert had formed a visionary, childish attachment to a person of singular talent and still more singular character, who lived in the neighborhood of his own estate. His mind was not unresponsive to the charm of virtue, though, from its susceptibility to excitement, it was easily fascinated by vice. He had been, in these boyish days, enchanted by some traits of benevolence in the conduct of Lady Melton. She exercised her benevolence in a manner somewhat eccentric, but the eccentricity gave to it a novelty and curious grace. The boy had expressed in some verses, after the fashion of Lord Thurlow, the feelings excited in him by the exhibition of this peculiarity in Lady Melton’s character; and, with the timid vanity of fifteen, he sent them to the lady of his lyre. The lady was not displeased with the offering, humble as it was; and from that moment there had existed between them a friendship, animated on Rupert’s part by a certain romantic feeling, which was no unlikely parent to love. Early circumstances had thrown a tinge of melancholy over the life and habits of Lady Melton. She went little into that mixed and general society in which De Lindsay had lately moved, and it was more than a year since he had seen her.

Before he left London, however, he had written to her, requesting some trifling favor, and her answer (full of the kindest and most flattering expressions) had reached him at the Lakes.

“Lady Melton,” said Rupert, “is exactly the woman I could love, and whose love would be a delightful combination of those graces of mind and heart which I have never yet found in another.” He wrote to her a long letter, obscurely hinting at his attachment, and suggesting thoughts well calculated to attract a woman of sentiment and genius. Ile was delighted, though not surprised, by the answer, from which he could draw no unfavorable augury. Letter produced letter; and, during his stay at the Lakes, the correspondence became regular on either side, getting gradually more tender on the part of the gentleman, and less reserved on the side of the lady.

When Rupert returned to his own county, he received from his fair correspondent a pressing invitation to spend a few clays with her at Melton Park. It was accepted with delight. Lady Melton was less beautiful than any of his previous loves; but her large, languishing eye, a lip which eloquently aided the magic of her glance, an exceedingly musical voice, and a form in whose delicate and fairy-like proportions a Phidias could have found no fault, invested her with a pervading, undefinable charm far more attractive to Rupert than the inanimate perfection of Lady Stanmore, or the sensual luxuriance of Mrs. Danvers Mountjoy.

Sir Henry Melton, the husband of this lady, was a man of rare intellectual powers and attainments, which he combined with a singular joyousuess of disposition, and the irresistible charm of a thoroughly large, fine, and frank nature, careless in the nobility of its character, and noble in the carelessness of its expression. (The likeness of this portrait to William Lamb is obvious. — L.)

The union of this couple had been, on both sides, a marriage of affection, but twelve years of it had left on each side little of the bridal tenderness remaining. Lady Melton, like most women of genius, was ever under the influence of her imagination. In a husband, however handsome, clever, and admirable, to whom she had been married twelve years, she found little left to excite this feverish propensity of her mind, and there was much to excite it in a youth who possessed the intellect of a man with more than the ordinary romance and sentiment of a boy.

To De Lindsay, therefore, the imagination of Lady Melton soon became violently attracted. Nor was he backward in returning the feelings with which she seemed to regard him. In the absence of Sir Henry, who was from home, there were only two or three intimate friends at Melton Park. They were too intimate, or too indifferent, to pay much attention to the manner in which their singular hostess whiled away her time. If one, less good-natured than the rest, referred to it, the others invariably replied, “Oh, it is only her way.” Truly it is a fine thing to have the reputation of eccentricity.

As yet there had been many hints on both sides, but no actual disclosure upon either side, of the sentiment which had grown up between Lady Melton and her young guest. Matters, however, were fast approaching their crisis. Every morning fresh flowers were on Rupert’s toilet-table. Every evening a note to him from Lady Melton glowed with the language of that vivid imagination which Rupert, in his ignorance, mistook for the language of the heart.

It happened one evening that the small party at Melton Park were engaged upon that homely game in which whispering is a necessary ceremony. When it came to the turn of Lady Melton to whisper into the ear of Rupert, a faint kiss accompanied the warm and thrilling breath which left his cheek on fire. The next morning, instead of the customary flowers, he received from her a note. It spoke of regret, shame, passion. “All levity,” it said, “even all happiness, is gone. Leave me, my beautiful and still beloved friend. Leave me again to the misery of my solitude.”

Fie on it! this was a note of the Imagination. I have said that Lady Melton had no heart in her love. Rupert did not think so. He demanded to sec her. She received him. He fell at her feet. He spoke of his passion; and sweet, from those sweet lips, was the acknowledgment he received in return.

And so he stayed at Melton Park. Day followed day, and still Rupert lingered. He loved, he was intoxicated, and he was happy. But never WAS the situation of a lover more singular in its character than his. He rode, he walked, he sat with his mistress. He was a privileged visitor to the secrecy of her boudoir; he was alone with her at all hours; he held her in his arms, and covered her with his kisses; he looked into the languors of her eyes, and felt the heave of her bosom; and (tell it not in Gath!) this was all.

What an illustration of the motto Beaucoup de bruit, peu de fruit! How it thus happened is a question which Rupert himself could not have answered. He only knew that whenever he assumed what seemed to be the natural privilege of his position, the lady fell on her knees, acknowledged the depth of her passion, declared that she should be miserable forever if she yielded to it, implored him not to forget this even though she might forget it herself; and, in short, played her part to such perfection that Rupert, who (like all lovers of the orthodox stamp) loved with rather more tenderness than passion, yielded to her persuasions, and forewent the chance of to-day in the confident hope of to-morrow.

That morrow never came, however. De Lindsay was summoned away to attend the death-bed of a female relation. What a scene when the lovers parted! What vows, what promises of constant correspondence, what overflowings of heart on the side of the hero, and of imagination on that of the heroine!

Throughout the wearisome confinement to which Rupert was now for many weeks condemned, not a day passed without the brightening consolation of a long letter from his Aspasia. And those letters, how brilliant they were in their wit, how glowing in their tenderness; and in each, how intellectual, how imaginative!

Old people, however tough, cannot exist forever. Rupert’s relation died at last. He had attended her with unrelaxing care. He even lamented her death, with a grief quite sincere in its vehemence, for two days, though she did not leave him a farthing, and had been more peevish and disagreeable than she would have had any right to be if she had left him thousands. When the days of mourning were over he returned to Melton. He was received with all the former kindness; but at moments there was a wandering coldness in Lady Melton’s manner which he was unable to account for. He was soon to be enlightened, however, as to the cause of it. The flowers no longer bloomed as before upon his table every morning; and with the flowers the first fragrance of love had departed. The evenings brought him no sweet writings breathing of perfume and passion. All loves of the imagination are short-lived. Lady Melton’s was already on the wane. Sad and disappointed, Rupert again left her. He had some business to settle at his own place. He promised to return in a fortnight. He wrote to her the day after his departure a letter, so warm and devoted that it produced a momentary effect. The reply to it was as passionate as in the early days of Lady Melton’s affection for him. “I was too inattentive, too gloomy,” thought he; “when next we meet, I will exert all my powers of entertainment, and put forth all the eloquence of my love.” And at the end of the fortnight he returned to Melton.

There was a ball that night in the neighborhood. A large party had assembled at Melton to attend it. Rupert did not see Lady Melton before dinner. The carriages were at the door when he entered the drawingroom. “I shall go with her,” he thought. But no: she had made a different arrangement. He went to the ball with a gouty General, an elderly Parson, and a little girl. Lady Melton was handed to her carriage by Sir Frederick Summers, a man celebrated for the cut of his coat and the beauty of his person. Upon Sir Frederick’s arm she entered the ballroom. To Sir Frederick’s words, for the rest of the evening, she listened, and on Sir Frederick’s looks she fed her own. For the first time the vain and haughty Rupert felt the humiliation of witnessing the triumph of a successful rival. How ho longed for some unlucky squire to tread upon his foot! He would have given worlds for an affront to punish. It is so provoking to be in a passion, and to have at hand nobody on whom to vent it. All things, however, have an end — even the duration of balls at which one is horribly bored. That night was to Rupert de Lindsay a night of moral storm and darkness. The passions which slumbered in his indolent nature had been violently roused. He rose at dawn, travelled all day and all the following night without rest or food, till he found himself upon a narrow bed in the inn of a small country town, with a raging fever. The loss of thirty ounces of blood cured alike the fever and the passion which had caused it. And so ended Rupert’s fifth amour. The lady might have held her young lover forever, had she wished it, in a chain of iron; but it was the freedom of her own fancy, rather than the fidelity of his devotion, that she eared to retain. And in this she did well, if it be well to follow the law of one’s own nature. For to her affection was no sufficient or enduring source of happiness; and if she did not find happiness in the variety and enthusiasm of her brief attachments, at least she would have found it nowhere else. Kind, generous, and richly gifted, graceful alike in every motion of her form and every impulse of her mind, Lady Melton was drawn into all the errors and all the misfortunes of her life (of the latter, indeed, at a later period of her life she had many from which Rupert, had he lived, would perhaps have suffered much to save her) by that brilliant but betraying imagination which to a woman is the most dangerous and yet the most delightful gift.

Years passed away. They were passed by Rupert in pursuits as vague, variable, and aimless as those of his earliest youth. He went abroad, settling nowhere, and everywhere unstable in his humor, unsatisfied in the indulgence of his wasted desires. At one time he lived as a solitary, “poring on the brook that babbled by at another he was the gayest reveller at some dissipated Court; now plunging into wild excesses, now toiling at intellectual labor which had no definite or useful purpose; the masterspirit of those who surrounded him, but still the subservient slave of his own unregulated passions. At length he returned to England with a person improved, an intellect developed, a heart corrupted. Latterly his life had been passed in that kind of licentiousness which is, of all, the most vitiating and the most alluring. Refined in his amours, as in all his tastes and pleasures, he had been in turn the deceived and the deceiver, and had learned from each experience to think ill of human nature, to ridicule virtue, to find no meanness in treachery, and to recognize no evil in sin. Yet, amidst all the pleasures and passions which had hardened his heart and debased his nature, he still sighed, as he had sighed at fifteen, for the love he had never found: a love pure, yet passionate, intense, yet enduring, a love virginal, vivid, transcending affection and transfiguring desire. Such a love he had perhaps become more capable of inspiring, from all the evil accomplishments which had rendered him less worthy to possess it. Such a love had been the dream of his ardent boyhood: it was still the vision of his aimless manhood. A voluptuary in habit, a cynic in principle, an adept in that sinister skill which reduces sentiment to a science, in recesses of his nature unpenetrated by the vices of his life, he still cherished a passionate wish for such a love; and the time now came when that wish was destined to receive fulfilment.

In a small village not far from London there dwelt a family of the name of Warner. The father, piously christened Ebenezer Ephraim, was a merchant, a bigot, and a saint. The brother, more simply named James, was a rake, a boxer, and a good fellow. But she, the daughter, who bore the chaste, sweet name of Mary, what man is good enough to describe her? Simple, modest, beautiful in form, more beautiful in heart, of a temper tender rather than gay, saddened by the gloom which hung about the home of her childhood, yet softened by a serene charity of soul which took from its own sadness only a tenderer sympathy for others; ignorant of sin even in thought; loving all things with an innocent love that even sweetened and beautified what in that poor narrow life of hers was neither beautiful nor sweet, Mary Warner moved among her coarse and sullen kindred an unthanked, sanctifying presence, lovely and fair as Faith’s white image passing over thorns upon its earthly pilgrimage to heaven.

In the adjustment of a passing amour with the wife of an officer in the — Regiment (who, then absent in Ireland, had left his not disconsolate 6pouse to wear the willow in the village of T.), Rupert first met Mary Warner. Chance favored him. He entered one day the cottage of a poor man whose wants had been relieved by his inconsistent charity. He found Miss Warner there, employed in the same charitable office. The opportunity was not neglected. He addressed her, accompanied her to the door of her home, used every art to please a young, unwakened heart, and in that object he succeeded. Unfortunately for Mary, she had no one among her relations capable of guiding her conduct or winning her confidence. Her father was absorbed in the occupations of his trade and the visions of his creed. The repellent austerity of his manner, which belied the real warmth of his affections, unfitted him to replace the care of the anxious and tender mother whom Mary had lost in infancy. Nor was that loss repaired by anything in the coarser habits and harsher nature of the fraternal rake, boxer, and good fellow. Thus in that gentle, trustful heart those who should have developed, had repressed the warmth of its natural affections. Mary’s nature was a loving one, and found in everything some claim upon the tenderness which no discouragement could permanently check and no restraint entirely conceal. But there was a vast treasure of tenderness as yet ungiven to others, unguessed even by herself, beneath the quiet surface of that shrinking, modest character. It is not surprising, therefore, that De Lindsay, who possessed every fascination of manner that the gifts of experience can add to those of nature, and who devoted them all with consummate skill to the employment of the strongest and deepest passion he had ever felt, should so soon have acquired a dangerous sway over the movements of a heart too innocent for suspicion, when for the first time it experienced the inexpressible luxury of being loved. In all her daily walks, which had hitherto been lonely ones, Rupert contrived to join her; and in his tone towards her there was an inarticulate supplication, a respectful tenderness, she felt no inclination, and knew no reason, to rebuff. Mary had in her no great supply of what is called dignity; and even of girlish, innocent coquetry she had none. Firmness, courage, and endurance to suffer, were hers in a high degree. But she was wholly without the Eve-born instincts which prompt or reconcile a woman to the infliction of suffering. At first, some vague, confused fear of impropriety in this companionship had mingled, in a faint, indefinite way, with the distinct, indubitable happiness it brought her. But, from the peculiar nature of her education, she was unable to trace this hovering shadow to any substantial, intelligible cause. If her thought followed it, it seemed to fade away in the clear consciousness of an innocent delight. Nor could she find in the simplicity of her experience any motive, and still less any means, to repel addresses so humble, so diffident, or resist a voice which only spoke to her in music. It is needless to trace the details of a process so simple. Mary at last awakened to the full knowledge of her own heart; and Rupert felt, for the first time in his life, that he was loved as he desired.

“Never,” said he, “will I betray this affection: she has trusted in me, and she shall not be deceived. Innocent and happy, she has given me all I care for in this world. Misery and guilt she shall never learn from me.” Thus her innocence was reflected even from the soiled mirror of a soul on which life had cast no images that pass away without leaving some stain behind them; and Rupert’s heart was purified while it breathed in the atmosphere of hers. So weeks passed away, until De Lindsay was suddenly recalled by urgent business to his estate. He spoke to Mary of his departure, and her quivering lip and tearful eye were to him ineffable delights. Yet, when he pressed her to his heart, her innocence of guilt was her protection from it. In the chronicle of all his sins (and they were many) may this be remembered in mitigation of the unknown sentence which no earthly judge can now revoke.

Day went by after day upon its unreturning course into eternity. Every morning came the same gentle tap at the post-office window in the little village; every morning the same light step returned gayly homeward through the meadows; every morning the same soft eyes, suffused with happy tears, sparkled over treasured lines the heart so faithfully recorded. Every morning of the week but one — for Monday was a day which could bring no letter to Mary, and all that day her step was listless and her spirit dejected. She did not seek to struggle with her love. It was her life; and she lived it with a thankful heart, that made no bargain with the future. She read over and over again every word of the few books he had given her. Daily she paced the paths which his presence had made fairy-land; and daily passed the house where he had lodged, that she might look up at the window where he had once looked down upon her.

Meanwhile, Rupert was finding that where farmers are not left to settle their own leases, and agents to provide as they please for their own little families, the possession of landed property is no sinecure, he had lived abroad like a prince, and his estate had not fared the better for his absence. He now inquired into the exact profits of his property.  He renewed old leases upon new terms; discharged his bailiff; shut up the drives through his park which the whole neighborhood had found more convenient than the turnpike road; let off ten poachers and warned off ten gentlemen; and, as the natural consequence of these acts of economy and inspection, he became the most unpopular man in the county.

One day he had been surveying some timber intended for the axe. The weather was truly English, and changed suddenly from heat into rain. A change of clothes was quite out of Rupert’s ordinary habits, and a fever of a very severe nature, which ended in delirium, was the result. For some weeks Rupert was on the verge of the grave. The devil and the doctor do not always agree; for, as the proverb saith, there is no friendship amongst the wicked. In this case the doctor was ultimately victorious, and his patient recovered.

“Give me fresh air,” said the invalid, as soon as he was able to resume his power of commanding, “and bring me whatever letters have come during my illness.”

From the pile of paper spoiled by fashionable friends, country cousins, county magistrates, and tradesmen who take the liberty to remind you of the trifle which has escaped your recollection, the first letter that came under the sick man’s hand was from the Irish officer’s wife who had been the cause of his visit to the village of T., and thus, indirectly, the origin of his acquaintance with Mary Warner. In this letter the lady informed him that her husband had returned from Ireland, and learned from some good-natured friend how his absence had been abused. Unhappily for all concerned, this roan loved his wife, valued his honor, and was of that unfashionable temperament which never, forgives an injury. Twice during Rupert’s illness he had sent his Achates to Lindsay Castle. And the idea that the man who had wronged him might perhaps “depart this life” without the aid of his bullet had so enraged him that he appeared to be a little touched in the head. His excitement was uncontrollable. He rambled about the country in prolonged paroxysms, sometimes of grief, sometimes of rage, weeping, gesticulating, and muttering incoherent oaths of vengeance. He shunned all society, and Bat for hours gazing vacantly on a pistol which was constantly in his hand. All these interesting circumstances the unhappy fair one (who had picked up her information second-hand, for she was now an alien from the conjugal bed and board) detailed to Rupert with considerable pathos.

“Now, then, for Mary’s letters,” murmured the invalid. “No red-hot Irishman there, I trust.” And Rupert took up a heap of letters he had selected from the rest, as a child, who searches for sweetmeats after swallowing a black dose. Over the first three or four of them his face beamed; but presently it darkened, and his lips and brows contracted. He opened another, read a few lines, and, leaping from the sofa as a man leaps when he has been shot through the heart, exclaimed to his bewildered attendant, “Four horses to the carriage, and bring it round immediately! Do you hear? Too ill, you say? Never so well in my life. Not another word or.... the carriage instantly — and the swiftest roadsters — I must be at T. before five this evening. Sharp! There’s not a moment to lose.”

And the order was obeyed.

To return to Mary, however. The letters on which she lived in Rupert’s absence had suddenly ceased. What could be the cause? Was he faithless — forgetful — ill? Alas! whatever the cause, the consequence was equally terrible to her. “Are you quite sure there are none?” she asked every, morning at the office, with a voice so mournful that the gruff postman turned to look again before he shut the lattice and extinguished the last hope. Her colour faded, her strength failed. She passed whole hours in tears, reading again and again every syllable of the letters she already possessed, or pouring forth in letters of her own, to her absent, unresponsive friend, all the love and bitterness of her soul. ([No one can fail to recognize the original of Mary Warner. In this paragraph the parts of the lovers are reversed; and in the sickening expectation with which Mary watched for the letter that never came, the author of the talc transferred to her what had happened to himself. — L.] ) “He must be ill!” she said to herself at last. “Never else could he have been so cruel.” She could bear that idea no longer. “I will go to him, soothe him, nurse him. Who else can love him, watch him, wait on him, as I?” And the tenderness of her nature overcame its modesty. She selected a few clothes, made them into a little bundle, which she could carry in her hand, and with it stole away one morning early, in the twilight, from the house. “If he should despise me!” she thought. And she was almost about to return, when, in the silence of the dim skies and empty fields, she was startled and terror-struck by the loud, harsh voice of her brother.

Mr. James Warner had watched for several days, with a solicitude not wholly affectionate, the altered habits and appearance of his sister. Ile resolved to discover the cause of them, and this he had done. During her absence he had entered her room and opened her desk. In it he found a letter she had just written to Rupert on the subject of her design. He did not reveal to Mary the result of his fraternal investigations; but he watched her more narrowly, was up betimes that morning, saw her leave the house, followed her, and saved her. There was no mercy, however, and no gentleness in the rescue. James Warner, when he had replaced his sister under the custody of the parental roof, improved the occasion according to his lights, and after the fashion of his nature. He reviled her in the coarsest and most brutal language; denounced her to her father; and, after having effectually deprived her of the means of correspondence or escape, he entered the room which was henceforth to be her prison, and gave vent to the exultation with which he contemplated her heart-broken shame and impotent despair. Then, in a glow of virtuous satisfaction, Mr. James Warner mounted his yellow stanhope and took his way to the Fives Court. Bat these were trifling misfortunes compared with those which still awaited the unhappy girl.

There lived in the village of T. one Zacharias Johnson, a godly man and a rich. Zacharias Johnson was, moreover, a saint of the same chapel as Ebenezer Ephraim Warner. His voice was the most nasal, his holding-forth the most unctuous, his aspect the most sinister, and his vesture the most threadbare, of all that sacred tribe. To the eye of this man there was something comely in the person of Mary Warner. He liked her beauty, for he was a sensualist; he liked her gentleness, for he was a coward; and her money, for he was a merchant. He proposed for the daughter to the father and the son. The possession of her he looked upon as a concluding blessing sure to follow the assent of her two relations. To Ebenezer he spoke of godliness and scrip, of the delightfulness of living together in unity, and of the large receipts of his flourishing counting-house. To James he spoke the language of kindness and the world. He knew that young men had expenses. He should feel too happy to furnish Mr. James with something for his innocent amusements, if he might hope for Mr. James’s influence over his worthy father. The sum was specified, and the consent was sold.

Amongst the many mysterious domestic phenomena which the inquirer seldom takes the trouble to account for, must be reckoned the magical power so often possessed by a junior branch over the main stem of a family, in spite of the contrary and perverse direction of the aforesaid branch. James Warner had acquired, and he exercised, a powerful influence over the paternal patriarch, although the father and the son had not a single sentiment or habit in common. But James had a vigorous and unshackled, his father a weak and priest-ridden, mind. In domestic life it is the mind which is the master.

Even before Mary’s acquaintance with Rupert, Zacharias Johnson had once or twice urged his suit to Ebenezer. But as the least hint of it to Mary occasioned her a pang which went to the really kind heart of the old man; as, moreover, he was fond of her society and had no wish to lose it, and, above all, as Mr. James had not yet held those conferences with Zacharias which resulted in the alliance of their interests, the proposal seemed to Mr. Warner, like a lawsuit to the Lord Chancellor, as something to be discussed rather than decided.

Unfortunately for Mary, however, just about the time when her intercepted flight had exposed her to her father’s resentment, Zacharias had made a convert of her brother. James took advantage of his opportunity. He worked upon his father’s grief and anger. He stimulated the old man’s mercantile respect for money, and his religious devotion to his sect. He obtained at last from Ebenezer a promise to enforce the marriage. Having secured his promise, he silenced the father’s returning scruples, and fortified his endurance of the scenes which followed with the weeping and wretched daughter, until at last the day was fixed for the consummation of the sacrifice. It would be too painful to describe that series of minute yet inhuman persecutions which is far from uncommon in the secret records of any system of domestic authority founded on injustice. The system itself, like all tyrannies, tends to defeat the object for which it is enforced; for it generally ends in revolt from the oppression with which it begins. But in this case there was no active revolt — nothing but irremediable misery.

Mary was too gentle to resist. Her prayers became stilled. Her tears ceased to flow. Her despair was like the incubus of an evil dream, which paralyzes the nerves of motion while those of sensation remain acutely active under the burden of a torture the victim can make no effort to shake off. She managed at last, however, three days before the one fixed for her miserable marriage, to write a line to Rupert and get it conveyed to the post-office. —

“Save me!” it said; “I ask not by what means — I care not for what end. Save me, I implore you, my only guardian angel! I shall not trouble you long. God knows, this is no romantic appeal. I feel that I am dying. Only let me die unseparated from you — you who first taught me to live. Be near me — teach me to die. Take from me the bitterness of death. Of all the terrors of the fate to which they compel me, nothing is so dreadful as the thought that I may no longer think of you and love you as I do. My hand is so cold I can scarcely hold the pen. My head is on fire. I think I should go mad if it were not for the thought that you could no longer love me. I hear my father’s step. Oh Rupert, on Friday next! Remember. Save me! save me!”

But the fatal Friday came, and Rupert came not. They dressed her in her bridal dress; and her father went up-stairs to summon her to the room below, where the few guests invited to the wedding were already assembled. When he kissed her cheek, it was so deathly cold and pale that his heart smote him. She turned towards him. Her lips moved, but she could not speak. “My child,” said the old man, “have you not one word for your father?”

With a shudder which shook her whole frame like the convulsion that disperses trance, “Is it too late?” she cried: “can you not, will you not, preserve me from this awful fate?”

There were signs of relenting in her father’s eyes. But at that moment James Warner entered the room. His keen intelligence had foreseen the danger to his plans. He eyed his father and his sister without speaking to either of them. There was no need for him to say a word. The old man’s countenance relapsed into an expression of mournful stolidity.

“God forgive you!” said Mary; and, half alive, the girl descended with the two men to the little gloomy ground-floor chamber which was the state apartment of the Warner establishment.

At a small table of black mahogany two maiden saints were sitting. They were prim and stately, starched and whaleboned without and within, withered and fossilized at heart by a selfish bigotry and the ice of sixty winters. As Mary entered the room the two old spinsters came forward slowly and noiselessly, kissed the bride’s unshrinking cheek, and, without a word of blessing, returned to their former seats, where they resumed their former posture. There was so little appearance of life in the three persons of that silent action, the two caressing and the one caressed, that it looked like a supernatural salutation between three graves — two old ones and a new. The bridegroom sat at one corner of the chilly fireplace. His attire on this occasion was more gaudy than the customary habit of his sect, and it gave a grotesque, unnatural simulacrum of gayety to his lean figure and saturnine face.

When the bride entered there was a faint smirk on his greasy lip, an atrocious twinkle in his half-shut, sinister eyes. With a sort of preparatory shuffle, as if he were hastily getting into marching order his straggling, ill-assorted limbs, he rose up, pulled down his long yellow waistcoat, made a solemn genuflexion, and, like the maiden saints, returned in silence to his seat. Opposite to the bridegroom sat a little lank-haired boy, about twelve years old, mumbling a damp lump of heavy cake, and eying with a subdued, spiritless glance the whole dismal group, till at length his attention was riveted by a large slate-colored cat, which was sleeping on the hearth-rug. He seemed to examine this creature with preternatural interest, and apparently wished but feared to awaken it by a suppressed ejaculation of “Puss!” On the window-seat at the farther end of the room sat, with folded arms and an abstracted air, a tall, military-looking man, apparently about forty years of age. He, too, rose slowly, made a low bow to Mary, eyed her for a moment with a strange look of deep, sorrowful interest, sighed, muttered something inaudibly to himself, and relapsed into absolute immobility, his back leaning against the dark wainscot, his head drooped, his eyes fixed upon the ground.

This man was Colonel Monkton — the husband of the woman who had allured Rupert to T., and from whom he had recently received so ominous an account of her liege lord. Monkton had long known Zacharias; and, always inclined to a serious turn of mind, he had lately been endeavoring to derive consolation from the doctrines of that enthusiast. On hearing from Zacharias (for the saint had no false notions of delicacy) that he was about to bring into the pale of matrimony a lamb which had nearly fallen a victim to the wolf that had invaded his own fold, Monkton expressed so warm an interest in the matter, and so earnest a desire to see the reclaimed one, that Zacharias had invited him to share the bridal cheer.

Such was the conclave assembled to celebrate the nuptials, of Mary Warner. Never was a wedding party more ominous in its aspect.

“We will have,” said the father (and his voice trembled), “one drop of spiritual comfort before we repair to the House of God. James, reach me the Holy Book.”

The Bible was brought forth, and laid upon the table. All, as by a simultaneous mechanical impulse, sank upon their knees. The old man read, with deep feeling, some portions of the Scriptures adapted to the day. The wedding guests listened to the reader in profound silence. Then he stood up, and began an extempore and fervent discourse. The attention of his audience was heartfelt. Even the lank-haired boy exhibited symptoms of intelligent and breathless interest.

“O beneficent Father,” said Ebenezer, as he approached the conclusion of his discourse (which had insensibly become the utterance of prayer), “we do indeed bow before Thee with humble and stricken hearts. the evil spirit hath been among us; and she who was the pride and delight of our eyes hath forgotten Thee for a while. But shall she not return unto the ways Thou hast appointed for Thy children? And shall we not once more walk together in the happy communion of Thy pardoning grace? Melt, O Heavenly Father, the hardness of that heart which hath rejected Thy ways to follow after strange idols. Smite Thou, not in wrath, but mercy, the rock whose springs have withered, and set free the healing waters of repentance. And now, O Father, let Thy merciful and strengthening hand be also stretched forth unto this Thy stricken servant.” (Here the old man looked at Monkton.) “For upon his head the same affliction hath fallen, and his peace the same serpent hath destroyed.”

Monkton’s sobs were audible. Ebenezer continued with increasing fervor.

“Let not all Thy waves and storms go over us. Give, we beseech Thee, unto him we pray for, the comforts of Thy Holy Spirit. Wean him from the sins and worldly vanities of his earlier days. And both to him, and to her who is now about to enter upon a new path of duty, vouchsafe that peace which the world cannot give, or the world’s children take away. From evil suffer good to come. And, though the voice of gladness be mute among us, and the sounds of bridal rejoicing heard not within our walls, yet grant, O gracious and pitying Parent, whose love, though it reprove Thy children for their sins, yet redeems them when they stray, and uplifts them when they fall, grant that to us this day may be the beginning of a new life devoted to virtue, to happiness, and to Thee!”

There was a sob in the last accents of the old man’s voice. They were followed by a long and deep silence. Even the saintly spinsters seemed affected. Monkton had returned to the window in silent but vehement emotion; and, throwing it open, he leaned out as if for breath. Mary resumed her seat, and there she sat as before — speechless, motionless. At length James Warner said (and, though his harsh voice was softened almost to a whisper, the sound of it broke that silence like an unlooked-for and unnatural interruption), “I think, father, it is time to go. The carriages must be coming.” He turned to the open window and looked out impatiently. Presently he exclaimed, “Here they are!” And then in a half-inquiring tone of displeased surprise, “No,” he added, “that sounds like four horses.”

Almost in the same moment, as James Warner turned again to the window, a rush of hoofs and rattling of wheels were distinctly audible from the road outside. The sound increased, and suddenly stopped at the gate of Warner’s house. The whole party, even Mary, started to their feet, and looked at each other. There was a noise in the hall; the sound of a swift step along the passage; the door was violently flung open; and, so wan, so emaciated, so cadaverous in form and aspect, that only the eyes of affection could then have recognized him without hesitation, Rupert de Lindsay burst into the room.

‘ “Thank Heaven,” he cried, “I am not too late!” And, in mingled fondness and defence, he flung his sheltering arm about the slender, trembling form of Mary Warner; who with a wild cry had thrown herself upon his bosom, and was clinging there with the desperate mechanical tenacity of a spent swimmer, when he clutches the rock to which the last effort of his strength has borne him.

Rupert’s glance swept round the room with a swift, menacing gleam in it, which softened as it rested on the face of Ebenezer Warner. “Old man,” he said, “I have done you a wrong. I will repair it. Give me your daughter as my wife. What to mine are the claims of her intended husband? Is he rich? My wealth trebles his. Does he love her? I love her more, ten thousand fold. Does she love him? Look at this wasted cheek, this stricken form, which shudders at the very mention of his name. Are these the tokens of her love? Does she love me? You know that she does. Each and all of you, you know it; and may Heaven forsake me, if by me she is ever forsaken. Give me my wife. Mine she is already, by every right that is sacred in the sight of heaven: the right to repair a wrong, to prevent a crime, to save a life, to rescue from irreparable ruin the most innocent of victims!”

“Avaunt, blasphemer!” cried Zacharias; and Ebenezer Warner, quivering with indignation, gasped “Begone!” The two old ladies looked upon Rupert as if they were about to treat him as Cleopatra treated her pearl, and dissolve him in vinegar.

All this while, Monkton (who, from the moment when Rupert burst into the room, had instinctively recognized the long-sought author of all his calamities) was leaning in a sullen, vigilant attitude against the sideboard. The only viand which graced that board was the remnant of the doughy cake lately cut for the repast of the lank-haired boy; and on the plate beside it lay the table-knife with which it had been cut: a knife worn sharp, and pointed by long use. Monkton took up the knife, examined it, and kept it in his hand, but said nothing. - James Warner now advanced towards De Lindsay, and attempted to tear from his arm the girl, who still clung to it convulsively.

“Ah, is it so?” cried Rupert; and, with an effort almost supernatural in one so lately stricken to the point of death, he dashed James Warner to the ground, caught up Mary in one arm, pushed Zacharias with the other into the laps of the two old ladies, sprang through the door, and with a light step bore away his treasured burden.

“Follow him! follow him!” cried Ebenezer Warner, in an agony of helpless consternation. “Will no one save my daughter from that man?” And he wrung his hands, without moving; for the old man’s bewilderment seemed to have left him incapable of action.

“I will save her,” said Monkton, who appeared to be the only person in the room still perfectly self-possessed. And, with the knife in his hand, he followed De Lindsay down the passage, swiftly indeed, but apparently undisturbed by any violent emotion. Monkton came upon the object of his pursuit just as Rupert had lifted Mary (who was completely insensible) into his carriage, and was placing his own foot upon the step of it. Rupert at that moment was overflowing with exuberant gayety. Fever and weakness, followed by a swift succession of the most vehement emotions — surprise, grief, anxiety, hope, love — in their intensest form, had strung his sensitive nerves to the highest pitch of hysterical susceptibility. The apparent completeness of his success, the sudden reaction from the desperation of despair the rapture of victory, had more than exhilarated, they had filled with intoxication, his wasted frame and excited spirit. With the exultation of a boy he was singing to himself —

“She is won, we are gone over brake, bush and scaur,” when the hand of Monkton was laid upon his shoulder.

“Your name is De Lindsay, I think?” said the soldier.

“At your service,” answered Rupert gayly, as he endeavored to free himself from the unceremonious grasp which tightened as he spoke.

“Take this, then, into your evil heart!” cried Monkton. And he plunged the knife twice into the bosom of the adulterer.

Rupert staggered and fell. Monkton stood over him. The soldier’s eye brightened with a light fiercer even and more horrible than that of hatred, for it was lit by insanity. He brandished the blade still reeking with the heart’s blood of his betrayer. “Look at me,” he said. “I am Henry Monkton. Do you know me now?”

“It is just,” murmured the dying man. In the dust where it had fallen the body of Rupert writhed feebly. Monkton set his foot on it. The next moment it was still forever.

Mary recovered from her swoon, to see before her the corpse of her lover, soiled, disfigured, horrible; to be dragged across it by her brother into her former prison; and to relapse with one low moan into insensibility. For two days she lingered through torturing intervals of incoherent consciousness, falling from one fit into another. On the evening of the third day, the wicked had ceased from troubling, and the weary one was at rest.

It is not my purpose to trace to their end the lives of the remaining actors in this drama of real life. I ask not the readers of it to follow with me the brief passage of the broken-hearted father to his grave; to enter the jail in which the last days of James Warner were wretchedly consumed; or to witness the acquittal of Henry Monkton on the plea of insanity. The catastrophe of my story is unconcerned with the fate of its survivors. There was no romance in the burial of the lovers. Death united not those whom life had put asunder.

In the small churchyard of her native village, the brief inscription is still fresh upon the simple stone that marks the grave of Mary Warner. But already along the daily course of human passions and events no trace of what she was remains. The tale of her sorrows is unknown, the beauty of her life unrecorded. No footstep lingers where she lies. No mourner visits that spot. No stranger asks whose dust is laid beneath it.

And they opened for Rupert de Lindsay the scutcheoned vaults of his knightly fathers; and there, amid the bannered pomp of heraldic vanity, they laid him in his palled and gorgeous coffin. I attempt not to extract a moral from his life. It was the vain chase of a flying shadow that rested not till it slept in the impenetrable darkness of a tomb, to which its inmate brought no honor won, and from which he sought no promise fulfilled.

 

The portion of the tale which refers to Lady Melton and several particulars in the description of Mary Warner can alone be regarded as strictly autobiographical. For, in all essentials, nothing could be more dissimilar to my father’s own character, at any period of his life, than the one assigned by him to Rupert de Lindsay. Yet it is not, perhaps, altogether fanciful to believe that, in this sketch of a wasted life, his imagination warningly presented to his reason an exaggerated image of what his own might become without the resolute observance of principles, and steady cultivation of qualities, which effectually counteracted in himself the epicureanism of sentiment, unrestrained by any such influences, in the character of De Lindsay.

To return, however, to Lady Caroline Lamb. Her identity with the “Lady Clara” of Lionel Hastings, and the “Lady Melton” of De Lindsay, and the exactness with which, in both stories, my father has followed his autobiographical account of the accident at the Hoo races and the presentation of his boyish verses, all manifest how forcibly she must have impressed his imagination. It will be seen a little later that some features of her character reappear in the portrait of Lady Bellenden, one of the personages who figure in the unfinished and unpublished novel of Greville, which was begun after the publication of The Disowned. The picture drawn of Lady Bellenden shows that his final impression of her, as embodied in his fictions, was, on the whole, a not unkindly one. Lady Caroline’s own portrait of my father in his boyhood (that odd little drawing mentioned in his Autobiography, of a child upon a rock, surrounded by waves and clouds; symbolical, we may suppose, of the contrast between his nature and the sad conditions of life) is no inapt token of the intercourse between them. The subjoined engraving is a copy of it.]