 | The cavaliers of England, or, The times of the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 |  |
INTRODUCTION.
In the commencement of the seventeenth century, there stood
among the woody hills and romantic gorges which sweep southwardly
down from the bleak expanse of Dartmoor, one of those
fine old English halls, which, dating from the reign of the last
of the Tudors, united so much of modern comfort with so much
of antique architectural beauty. Many specimens of this style
of building are still found to be scattered throughout England,
with their broad terraces, their quaintly-sculptured porticoes,
their tall projecting oriels, their many stacks of richly decorated
chimneys, and their heraldic bearings adorning every salient
point, grotesquely carved in the red freestone, which is
their most usual, as indeed their most appropriate material.
No one, however, existed, it is probable, at that day, more perfect
in proportion to its size, or more admirably suited to its
wild and romantic site, than the manor-house of Widecomb-Under-Moor,
or, as it was more generally called, in its somewhat
sequestered neighborhood, the House in the Woods. Even
at the present time, that is a very rural and little-frequented district;
its woods are more extensive, its moorlands wilder, its
streams less often turned to purposes of manufacturing utility,
time of which I write, when all England, was, comparatively
speaking, an agricultural country — when miles and miles of
forest existed, where there now can scarcely be found acres —
when the communications even between the neighboring country
towns were difficult and tedious, and those between the
country and metropolis almost impracticable — the region of
Dartmoor and its surrounding woodlands was less known and
less frequented, except by its own inhabitants, rude for the most
part and uncultured as their native hills, than the prairies of the
far west, or the solitudes of the Rocky mountains.
The few gentry, and lords of manors who own estates, and
had their castellated or Elizabethan dwellings, scattered here
and there, at long intervals, among the sylvan scenery of that
lonely region, were for the greater part little superior in habits,
in refinement, and in mental culture, to the boors around them.
Stanch hunters and hard drinkers, up with the lark and abed
before the curfew, loyal to their king, kind and liberal to their
dependants, and devout before their God, they led obscure and
blameless lives, careless of the great world, a rumor of which
rarely wandered so far as to reach their ears, unknown to fame,
yet neither useless nor unhonored within the sphere of their
humble influence, marked by few faults and many unpretending
virtues.
To this general rule, however, the lords of Widecomb manor
had long been an exception. Endowed with larger territorial
possessions than most of their neighbors, connected with many
of the noblest families of the realm, the St. Aubyns of Widecomb
manor had, for several generations, held themselves high
above the squires of the vicinity, and the burghers of the circumjacent
towns. Not confining themselves to the remote limits
of their rural possessions, many of them had shone in the
court and in the camp; several had held offices of trust and
reign of the unfortunate Charles, the troubles between the king
and his parliament broke out at length into open war, the St.
Aubyn of that day, like many another gallant gentleman, emptied
his patrimonial coffers to replenish the exhausted treasury;
and melted his old plate and felled his older oaks, in order to
support the king's cause in the field, at the head of his own
regiment of horse.
Thence, when the good cause succumbed for a time, and
democratic license, hardly restrained by puritanic rigor, strode
rampant over the prerogative of England's crown, and the liberties
of England's people, fines, sequestrations, confiscations,
fell heavily on the confirmed malignancy, as it was then termed,
of the lord of Widecomb; and he might well esteem himself
fortunate, that he escaped beyond the seas with his head upon
his shoulders, although he certainly had not where to lay it.
Returning at the restoration with the second Charles, more
fortunate than many of his friends, Sir Miles St. Aubyn recovered
a considerable portion of his demesnes, which, though sequestrated,
had not been sold, and with these the old mansion,
now, alas! all too grand and stately for the diminished revenues
of its owner, and the shrunken estates which it overlooked.
It would not, perhaps, have been too late even then, for prudence
and economy, joined to a resolute will and energetic purpose,
to retrieve the shaken fortunes of the house; but having
recovered peace and a settled government, the people and the
court of England appear simultaneously to have lost their
senses. The overstrained and somewhat hypocritical morality
of the protectorate was succeeded by the wildest license, the
most extravagant debauchery; and in the orgies which followed
their restoration to their patrimonial honors, too many of the
gallant cavaliers discreditably squandered the last remnants of
so holy.
Such was the fate of Sir Miles St. Aubyn. The brave and
generous soldier of the first Charles sank into the selfish, dissipated
roysterer, under his unworthy successor. He never
visited again the beautiful oak-woods and sparkling waters of
his native place, but frittered away a frivolous and useless life
among the orgies of Alsatia and the revels of Whitehall; and
died, unfriended, and almost alone, leaving an only son, who
had scarce seen his father, the heir to his impoverished fortunes
and little honored name.
His son, who was born before the commencement of the
troubles, of a lady highly bred, and endowed as highly, who
died — as the highly endowed die but too often — in the first
prime of womanhood, was already a man when the restoration
brought his father back to his native land, though not to his
patrimonial estates or his paternal duties.
Miles St. Aubyn, the younger, had been educated during the
period of the civil war, and during the protracted absence of
his father, by a distant maternal relative, whose neutrality and
humble position alike protected him from persecution by either
of the hostile parties. He grew up, like his race, strong, active,
bold, and gallant; and if he had not received much of
that peculiar nurture which renders men graceful and courtly-mannered,
almost from their cradles, he was at least educated
under the influence of those traditional principles which make
them at the bottom, even if they lack something of external
polish, high-souled and honorable gentlemen.
After the restoration he was sent abroad, as was the habit
of the day, to push his fortunes with his sword in the Netherlands,
then, as in all ages of the world, the chosen battle-ground
of nations. There he served many years, if not with high distinction,
at least with credit to his name; and if he did not
winnings had already passed in Europe — he at least enjoyed
the advantage of mingling, during his adventurous career, with
the great, the noble, and the famous of the age. When, on his
return to his native land after his father's death, he turned his
sword into a ploughshare, and sought repose among the old
staghorned oaks at Widecomb, he was no longer the enthusiastic,
wild, and headstrong youth of twenty years before; but
a grave, polished, calm, accomplished man, with something of
Spanish dignity and sternness engrafted on the frankness of his
English character, and with the self-possession of one used
familiarly to courts and camps showing itself in every word
and motion.
He was a man moreover of worth, energy, and resolution,
and sitting down peacefully under the shadow of his own woods,
he applied himself quietly, but with an iron steadiness of purpose
that insured success, to retrieving in some degree the fortunes
of his race.
Soon after he returned he had taken unto himself a wife, not
perhaps very wisely chosen, from a family of descent prouder
and haughtier even than his own, and of fortunes if not as
much impoverished, at least so greatly diminished, as to render
the lady's dower a matter merely nominal. But it was an
old affection — a long promise, hallowed by love, and constancy,
and honor.
She was, moreover, a beautiful and charming creature, and,
so long as she lived, rendered the old soldier a very proud and
very happy husband, and when she died — which, most unhappily
for all concerned, was but a few months after giving birth
to an only son — left him so comfortless, and at the same time
so wedded to the memory of the dead, that he never so much
as envisaged the idea of a second marriage.
This gentleman it was, who, many long years after the death
in the old hall, which he had never quitted since he became
a widower; devoting his whole abilities to nursing his
dilapidated estates, and educating his only son, whom he regarded
with affection bordering on idolatry.
With the last Miles St. Aubyn, however, we shall have little
to do henceforth, for the soldier of the Netherlands had departed
so far from the traditions of his family — the eldest son of which
had for generations borne the same name of Miles — as to drop
that patrimonial appellation in the person of his son, whom he
had caused to be christened Jasper, after a beloved friend, a
brother of the lady, afterward his wife, who had fallen by his
side on a well-fought field in the Luxembourg.
What was the cause which induced the veteran, in other respects
so severe a stickler for ancient habitudes, to swerve from this
time-honored custom, it would be difficult to state; some of those
who knew him best, attributing it merely to the desire of perpetuating
the memory of his best friend in the person of his
only child; while others ascribed it to a sort of superstitious
feeling, which, attaching the continued decline of the house to
the continual recurrence of the patronymic, looked forward in
some degree to a revival of its honors with a new name to its
lord.
Whatever might have been the cause, the consequences of
this deviation from old family usage, as prognosticated by the
dependants of Widecomb, and the superstitious inhabitants of
the neighboring woods and wolds, were anything but likely to
better the fortunes of the lords of the manor; for not a few of
them asserted, with undoubting faith, that the last St. Aubyn
had seen the light of day, and that in the same generation
which had seen the extinction of the old name the old race
should itself pass away. Nor did they lack some sage authority
to which they might refer for confirmation of their dark
one of those ancient saws, which were so common a century or
two ago in the rural districts of England, as connected with the
fortunes of the old houses; and which were referred to some
Mother Shipton, or other equally infallible soothsayer of the
county, whose dicta to the vulgar minds of the feudal tenantry
were confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ.
The prophecy in question was certainly exceeding old; and
had been handed down through many generations, by direct oral
tradition, among a race of men wholly illiterate and uneducated;
to whom perhaps alone, owing to the long expatriation of
the late and present lords of the manor, it was now familiar;
although in past times it had doubtless been accredited by the
family to which it related.
It ran as follows, and, not being deficient in a sort of wild
harmony and rugged solemnity, produced, by no means unnaturally,
a powerful effect on the minds of hearers, when recited
in awe-stricken tones and with a bended brow beside some feebly-glimmering
hearth, in the lulls of the tempest haply raving
without, among the leafless trees, under the starless night. It
ran as follows, and, universally believed by the vassals of the
house, it remains for us to see how far its predictions were confirmed
by events, and how far it influenced or foretold the
course of passion, or the course of fate —
The cradle shall rock on the oaken floor,
And St. Aubyn rule, where he ruled of yore.
“But when Miles departs from the olden race,
The cradle shall rock by the hearth no more,
Nor St. Aubyn rule, where he ruled of yore.”
Thus far it has been necessary for us to tread back the path
of departed generations, and to retrace the fortunes of the Widecomb
have to narrate hereafter, and very much of the character of
the principal personage, to whom our tale relates, have a direct
relation to these precedents, and would have been to a certain
degree incomprehensible but for this retrogression. If it obtain
no other end, it will serve at least to explain how, amid
scenes so rural and sequestered, and dwelling almost in solitude,
among neighbors so rugged and uncivilized, there should
have been found a family, deprived of all advantages of intercommunication
with equals or superiors in intellect or demeanor,
and even unassisted by the humanizing influence of familiar
female society, which had yet maintained, as if traditionally, all
the principles, all the ideas, and all the habitudes of the brightest
schools of knightly courtesy and gentlemanly bearing, all
the graces and easy dignity of courts, among the remote solitudes
of the country.
At the time when our narrative commences, the soldier of
the Netherlands, Sir Miles St. Aubyn — for though he cared
not to bear a foreign title, he had been stricken a knight banneret
on a bloody battle-field of Flanders — had fallen long into
the sere, the yellow leaf; and though his cheek was still ruddy
as a winter pippin, his eye bright and clear, and his foot firm
as ever, his hair was as white as the drifted snow; his arm had
lost its nervous power; and if his mind was still sane, and his
body sound, he was now more addicted to sit beside the glowing
hearth in winter, or to bask in the summer sunshine, poring
over some old chronicle or antique legend, than to wake the
echoes of the oak-woods with his bugle-born, or to rouse the
heathcock from the heathy moorland with his blythe springers.
Not so, however, the child of his heart, Jasper. The boy
on whom such anxious pains had been bestowed, on whom
hopes so intense reposed, had reached his seventeenth summer.
Like all his race, he was unusually tall, and admirably formed,
having mingled with any persons of vulgar station or unpolished
demeanor, he was, as if by nature, graceful and easy.
His manners, although proud, and marked by something of that
stern dignity which we have mentioned as a characteristic of
the father, but which in one so youthful appeared strange and
out of place, were ever those of a high and perfect gentleman.
His features were marked with all the ancestral beauties, which
may be traced in unmixed races through so many generations;
and as it was a matter of notorious truth, that from the date of
the conquest, no drop of Saxon or of Celtic blood had been infused
into the pure Norman stream which flowed through the
veins of the proud St. Aubyns, it was no marvel that after the
lapse of so many ages the youthful Jasper should display, in
both face and form, the characteristic lines and coloring peculiar
to the noblest tribe of men that has ever issued from the great
northern hive of nations. Accordingly, he had the rich dark
chestnut hair, not curled, but waving in loose clusters; the clear
gray eye; the aquiline nose; the keen and fiery look; the resolute
mouth, and the iron jaw, which in all ages have belonged
to the descendant of the Northman. While the spare yet
sinewy frame, the deep, round chest, thin flanks, and limbs
long and muscular and singularly agile, were not less perfect
indications of his blood than the sharp eagle-like expression of
the bold countenance.
Trained in his early boyhood to all those exercises of activity
and strength, which were in those days held essential to
the gentleman, it needs not to say that Jasper St. Aubyn could
ride, swim, fence, shoot, run, leap, pitch the bar, and go through
every manœuvre of the salle d' armes, the tilt-yard, and the manége,
with equal grace and power. Nor had his lighter accomplishments
been neglected; for the age of his father and grandfather,
if profligate and dissolute even to debauchery, was still
lute or sing tastefully, was as much expected from the cavalier
as to have a firm foot in the stirrup, or a strong and supple
wrist with the backsword and rapier.
His mind had been richly stored also, if not very sagely
trained and regulated. For Sir Miles, in the course of his irregular
and adventurous life, had read much more than he had
meditated; had picked up much more of learning than he had
of philosophy; and what philosophy he had belonged much
more to the cold self-reliance of the camp than to the sounder
tenets of the schools.
While filling his son's mind, therefore, with much curious
lore of all sorts; while making him a master of many tongues,
and laying before him books of all kinds, the old banneret had
taken little pains — perhaps he would not have succeeded had
he taken more — to point the lessons which the books contained;
to draw deductions from the facts which he inculcated;
or to direct the course of the young man's opinions.
Self-taught himself, or taught only in the hard school of experience,
and having himself arrived at sound principles of conduct,
he never seemed to recollect that the boy would run
through no such ordeal, and reap no such lessons; nor did he
ever reflect that the deductions which he had himself drawn
from certain facts, acquired in one way, and under one set of
circumstances, would probably be entirely different from those
at which another would arrive, when his data were acquired in
a very different manner, and under circumstances altogether
diverse and dissimilar.
Thence it came that Jasper St. Aubyn, at the age of seventeen
years, was in all qualities of body thoroughly trained and
disciplined; and in all mental faculties perfectly educated, but
entirely untrained, uncorrected, and unchastened.
In manner, he was a perfect gentleman; in body, he was a
what, our reader will perhaps inquire, what could he have been
more; or what more could education have effected in his behalf?
Much — very much — good friend.
For as there is an education of the body, and an education
of the brain, so is there also an education of the heart. And
that is an education which men rarely have the faculty of imparting,
and which few men ever have obtained, who have not
enjoyed the inestimable advantage of female nurture during their
youth, as well as their childhood; unless they have learned it
in the course of painful years, from those severe and bitter
teachers, those chasteners and purifiers of the heart — sorrow
and suffering, which two constitute experience.
This, then, was the education in which Jasper St. Aubyn
was altogether deficient; which Sir Miles had never so much
as attempted to impart to him; and which, had he endeavored,
he probably would have failed, to bestow.
We do not mean to say that the boy was heartless — boys
rarely are so, we might almost say never — nor that the impulses
of his heart were toward evil rather than good; far from it.
His heart, like all young and untainted hearts, was full of noble
impulses — but they were impulses; full of fresh springing
generous desires, of gracious sympathies and lofty aspirations
— but he had not one principle — he never had been taught to
question one impulse, before acting upon it — he never had
learned to check one desire, to doubt the genuineness of one
sympathy, to moderate the eagerness of one aspiration. He
never had been brought to suspect that there were such virtues
as self-control, or self-devotion; such vices as selfishness or
self-abandonment — in a word, he never had so much as heard,
Were wisdom, in the scorn of consepuence”—
he was; and thereafter, what we propose to show you.
At the time when the youthful heir had attained his seventeenth
year, the great object of his father's life was accomplished;
the fortunes of the family were so far at least retrieved,
that if the St. Aubyns no longer aspired, as of old, to be the
first or wealthiest family of the county, they were at least able
to maintain the household on that footing of generous liberality
and hospitable ease which has been at all times the pride and
passion of the English country gentleman.
For many years Sir Miles had undergone the severest privations,
and it was only by the endurance of actual poverty within
doors, that he was enabled to maintain that footing abroad, without
which he could scarcely have preserved his position in society.
For many years the park had been neglected, the gardens
overrun with weeds and brambles, the courts grass-grown, and
the house itself dilapidated, literally from the impossibility of
supporting domestics sufficiently numerous to perform the necessary
labors of the estate.
During much of this period it was to the beasts of the forest,
the fowl of the moorland, and the fish of the streams, that the
household of Widecomb had looked for their support; nor did
the table of the banneret himself boast any liquor more generous
than that afforded by the ale-vats of March and October.
Throughout the whole of this dark and difficult time, however,
the stout old soldier had never suffered one particle of
that ceremonial, which he deemed essential as well to the formation
as the preservation of the character of a true gentleman
to be relaxed or neglected by his diminished household.
Personally, he was at all times clad point device; nor did he
ever fail in being mounted, himself and at least one attendant,
as became a cavalier of honor. The hours of the early dinner,
duly by the clang of trumpets, even when there were no guests
to be summoned, save the old banneret and his motherless
child, and perhaps the only visiter for years at Widecomb
manor, the gray-haired vicar of the village, who had served
years before as chaplain of an English regiment in the Low
Countries, with Sir Miles. Nor was the pewter tankard, containing
at the best but toast and ale, stirred with a sprig of rosemary,
handed around the board with less solemnity than had it
been a silver hanap mantling with the first vintages of Burgundy
or Xeres.
Thus it was that, as Jasper advanced gradually toward years
of manhood, the fortunes of the house improving in proportion
to his growth, seeing no alteration in the routine of the household,
he scarcely was aware that any change had taken place
in more essential points.
The eye and ear of the child had been taken by the banners,
the trumpets, and the glittering board, and his fancy riveted by
the solemnity and grave decorum which characterized the meals
partaken in the great hall; and naturally enough he never knew
that the pewter platters and tankards had been exchanged, since
those days, for plate of silver, and the strong ale converted into
claret or canary.
The consequence of this was simply that he found himself a
youth of seventeen, surrounded by all the means and appliances
of luxury, with servants, horses, hounds, and falcons at his
command, the leading personage, beyond all comparison, of the
neighborhood, highly-born, handsome, well-bred, and accomplished.
All this, by the way, was entirely uncorrected by any
memory of past sufferings or sorrows, either on his own part or
on that of his family, or by any knowledge of the privations and
exertions on the part of Sir Miles, by which this present affluence
had been purchased; and he became, naturally enough,
in his manner, and not a little intolerant and inconsiderate
as to the opinions and feelings of others. He then presented
in a word, the not unusual picture of an arrogant, self-sufficient,
proud and fiery youth, with many generous and noble
points, and many high qualities, which, duly cultivated, might
have rendered him a good, a happy, and perhaps even a great
man; but which, untrained as they were, and suffered to run
up into a rank and unpruned overgrowth, were but too likely to
degenerate themselves into vices, and to render him at some
future day a tormentor of himself, and an opposer of others.
Now, however, he was a general favorite, for largely endowed
with animal spirits, indulged in every wish that his fancy could
form, never crossed in the least particular, it was rarely that
his violent temper would display itself, or his innate selfishness
rise conspicuous above the superficial face of good-nature and
somewhat careless affability, which he presented to the general
observer.
It was, perhaps, unfortunate for Jasper, no less than for those
who were in after-days connected with him, whether for good
or evil, that, at this critical period of his adolescence, when the
character of the man is developed from the accidents of boyhood,
in proportion as his increasing years and altered habits
and pursuits led him to be more abroad, and cast him in some
degree into the world, the advancing years and growing infirmities
of his father kept him closer to the library and the hall.
So that at the very time when his expanding mind and nascent
passions most needed sage advice and moderate coercion,
or at least wary guidance, he was abandoned almost entirely to
his own direction. The first outbreaks, therefore, of evil principles,
the germs of a masterful will, the seeds of fierce and
fiery passions, and, above all, the growing recklessness with
regard to the feelings and the rights of others, which could
he accompanied his son abroad, and which, if noticed, would
surely have been repressed, were allowed to increase hourly
by self-indulgence and the want of restraint, unknown and unsuspected
to the youth himself, for whom one day they were
to be the cause of so many and so bitter trials.
But it is now time that, turning from this brief retrospect of
previous events, and this short analysis of the early constitution
of the mind of him whose singular career is to form the subject
of this narrative, we should introduce our reader to the
scene of action, and to the person whose adventures in after-life
will perhaps excuse the space which has necessarily been
allotted to the antecedents of the first marked event which befell
him, and from which all the rest took their rise in a train
of connection, which, although difficult to trace by a casual observer,
was in reality close and perfect.
The manor-house of Widecomb, such as it has been slightly
sketched above, stood on a broad flat terrace, paved with slabs
of red freestone, and adorned with a massive balustrade of the
same material, interspersed with grotesque images at the points
where it was reached from the esplanade below, by three or
four flights of broad and easy steps.
The mansion itself was large, and singularly picturesque,
but the beauties of the building were as nothing to those of the
scenery which it overlooked.
It was built on the last and lowest slope of one of those romantic
spurs which tread southerly from the wild and heathery
heights of Dartmoor. And although the broad and beautifully-kept
lawn was embosomed in a very woody and sylvan chase,
full of deep glens and tangled dingles, which was in turn framed
on three sides by the deep oak-woods, covering all the rounded
hills in the rear of the estate, and to the right and left hand,
yet as the land continued to fall toward the south for many and
the great hall, and of the fine old library, situated on either
hand of the entrance and armory, over a wide expanse of richly-cultivated
country, with more than one navigable river winding
among the woods and corn-fields, and many a village steeple
glittering among the hedgerows, until in the far distance it
was bounded by a blue, hazy line, which seemed to melt into
the sky, but which was in truth—though not to be distinguished
as such, unless by a practised eye—the British channel.
The hall itself, and even the southern verge of the chase,
which bounded the estate in that direction, lay, however, at a
considerable distance from the cultivated country, and was divided
from it by a vast broken chasm, with banks so precipitous
and rocky that no road had ever been carried through it,
while its great width had deterred men from the idea of bridging
it. Through this strange and terrific gorge there rushed
an impetuous and powerful torrent, broken by many falls and
rapids, with many a deep and limpid pool between them, favorite
haunts of the large salmon and sea-trout which abounded in
its waters. This brook, for it scarcely can be called a river,
although, after the rains of autumn or the melting snows of
spring, it sent down an immense volume of dark, rust-colored
water, with a roar that could be heard for miles, to the distant
Tamar, swept down the hills in a series of cascades from the
right hand, or western side of the park, until it reached the
brink of the chasm we have described, lying at right angles to
its former course, down which it plunged into an impetuous fall
and rapid of nearly three hundred feet, and rushed thence eastearly
away, walled on each side by the precipitous rock, until
some five miles thence it was crossed at a deep and somewhat
dangerous ford, by the only great road which traversed that
district, and by which alone strangers could reach the hall and
its beautiful demesnes.
To the westward or right hand side of the chase the country
was entirely wild and savage, covered with thick woods, interspersed
with lonely heaths, and intersected by hundreds of
clear brawling rills. To the eastward, however, although much
broken by forest-ground, there was a wide range of rich pasture-fields
and meadows, divided by great overgrown hawthorn
hedges, each hedge almost a thicket, and penetrated by numerous
lanes and horse-roads, buried between deep banks, and
overcanopied by foliage, that, even at noonday, was almost
impenetrable to the sunshine.
Here and there lay scattered among the fields and woods,
innumerable farm-houses and granges, the abodes of small free-holders,
once tenants and vassals of the great St. Aubyns; and,
at about six miles from the hall, nestled in a green valley,
through which ran a clear, bright trout-stream to join the turbulent
torrent, stood the little market-town of Widecomb-Under-Moor,
from their unalienated property in which the family of
St. Aubyn derived the most valuable portion of their income.
Over the whole of this pleasant aud peaceful tract, whether
it was still owned by themselves, or had passed into the hands
of the free yeomanry, the lords of Widecomb still held manorial
rights, and the few feudal privileges which had survived the
revolution; and through the whole of it, Sir Miles St. Aubyn
was regarded with unmixed love and veneration, while the boy
Jasper was looked upon almost as a son in every family, though
some old men would shake their heads doubtfully, and mutter
sage but unregarded saws concerning his present disposition
and future prospects; and some old grandames would prognosticate
disasters, horrors, and even crimes, as hanging over his
career, in consequence, perhaps, of the inauspicious change in
the patronymic of his race.
They were a happy and an unsophisticated race that inhabited
those lonely glens. Sufficiently well provided to be above
so far removed from the necessity of labor as to have incurred
vicious ambitions — moderate, frugal, and industrious, they
lived uncorrupted, and died happy in their unlearned innocence.
It was the boast of the district, that bars and locks were appendages
to doors entirely unusual and useless; that the cage
of Widecomb had not held a tenant since the days of stiff old
Oliver; and that no deed of violence or blood had ever tainted
those calm vales with horror.
Alas! how soon was that boast to be annulled; how soon
were the details of a dread, domestic tragedy, full of dark horrors,
to render the very name of Widecomb a terror, and to invest
the beauteous scenery with images of superstitious awe
and hatred. But we must not anticipate, nor seek as yet to
penetrate the secrets of that destiny, which even during the
morn of promising young life, seemed to overhang the house—
Expect its evening prey.”
| The cavaliers of England, or, The times of the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 | |