 | The cavaliers of England, or, The times of the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 |  |
Dernon in the Dale;
OR,
THE PRICE OF BLOOD.
A
Sad Tradition of the North.
1745.
1. PART I.
That Parisina leaves her hall;
And it is not to gaze on the heavenly light,
That the lady walks in the shadow of night;
And if she sits in Este's bower,
'T is not for the sake of its full-blown flower.”
—Parisina.
In that remote and romantic district of old England, known
in the north country as Milbourne forest, which lies close on
the frontier of the three counties, Cumberland, Westmoreland,
and Yorkshire, there stood, in the middle of the eighteenth century,
a fine old baronial hall, surrounded by a grand, wild chase,
of which the deep and solemn woods alone remain to attest its
olden magnificence. About equi-distant from Appleby and Penrith,
both of which towns were divided from it by a space
above ten miles in length, of wild, open moors, and huge, heath-clad
fells, as they are called in that part of the world, the
manor-house stood in a deep, sequestered lap of land, bordered
on the south by a beautiful, rapid trout-stream — one of the tributaries
of the Eden — and commanded a striking view of the
huge, purple masses of Cross Fell to the north-eastward.
The little hamlet of Ousby adjoining the park on the northern
side, and the village of Edenhall, about five miles distant
to the westward, were the only human habitations in the neighborhood;
and as neither of these small places contained any
persons above the rank of peasants or small farmers, with the
exception of their respective vicars, it will be readily believed
that they contributed little to the society of the proprietors of
Vernon in the Vale — a family of high and ancient lineage,
from whose name their ancestral seat had derived its appellation.
Even at this day, that is a remote and wild region, traversed
by no great road, and, as it lies a little to the eastward of that
beautiful and much-visited tract, known as the Lake country,
seldom traversed except by the foot of the grouse-shooter, the
geologist, or the stray lover of the picturesque — the true “nympharum
fugientum amator” of the nineteenth century. If such
is the case even now, when all England is intersected by a
network of iron roads, and sped across in all directions with
almost winged speed by the marvellous power of machinery,
much more was it so a hundred years since, when travelling
was slow and tedious — when even the great highroads were
difficult and dangerous, and above all when it was the fashion
of the day for all, or nearly all, the great, the rich, and the noble
of the land to dwell permanently in the precincts of the
court, and to regard a sojourn on their estates in the country
much as a Russian would now look upon an exile to Siberia.
Up to the period of the great civil war of 1642, the nobles
and gentry of England had resided constantly on their estates
during the chief part of the year, among their tenantry parta-king
in their rustic sports, and possessing their affections, and
visiting the metropolis only for a short period, much as is the
case at present, during the session of the houses of parliament.
After the Restoration, however, the profligate and worthless
among other continental habits, the fashion of residing
permanently in the vicinity of the court, and visiting the country
only at long and uncertain intervals. During the successive
reigns of James the Second, the Dutch William, Anne,
and the first two monarchs of the house of Brunswick, this
foolish and injurious fashion continued to prevail; and it was
perhaps as much, as to any other cause, owing to the simple
habits, the love of rural life, and the quiet country-gentleman
tastes of the third George, that the aristocracy of England were
again seen to consult alike their dignity, their interest, and their
duty, by dwelling principally among their dependants and considering
their estates as their home.
A century ago, however, this was very far from being the
case; the country-gentlemen were illiterate and coarse-mannered,
hunters of foxes and swillers of punch, of whom Squire
Western may be regarded as the type, while the rudeness of
the resident clergy is scarcely exaggerated in the well-known
portrait of Parson Adams.
If a nobleman, in those days, retired to his country-seat, it
was, as they now-a-days retreat to the Continent, to economize
the relics of their damaged fortunes, and to languish for the
hour of revisiting the fumum et opes strepitumque Romæ, at the
termination of a long and weary banishment.
To this rule, as to all others, there were, however, exceptions;
and even in that day there were high-born and high-bred
men, habitual dwellers in the country, doing their duty to their
dependants, and an honor to their class, as English gentlemen
and landlords.
The greater number of these were, perhaps, at the time of
which I write, of what was then generally called the old religion;
for in those days of violent party strife and political animosity,
the Roman catholic gentry were, for the most part, out
and were supposed to be at least wavering in their allegiance
to that dynasty, if not openly attached to the king over the
water, who held their own religious faith.
Neglected, therefore, if not actually slighted by the powers
in London, obnoxious to insult and even violence from the bigoted
rabble of the metropolis, and shunned, in some degree, by
their own order of the adverse creed, it was natural enough
that the nobles and gentlemen attached to the Romish church,
who by the way were for the most part from the northern counties,
should prefer living honored and respected among their
tenantry and neighbors, a great number of whom were of their
own belief, to enduring scant courtesy, if not palpable affront,
at the court of St. James.
And many were the families throughout Yorkshire, Lancashire,
and Cumberland, as well as yet farther north, who had
set up their household gods permanently on the hearth-stones
of their own baronial halls, and passed their days in healthful
sports, and their evenings in elegant and dignified seclusion,
independent of the voice of venal senates, and careless of the
prejudices or the partialities of foreign monarchs. Pity it was,
that the injustice which was in truth done them, nurtured among
their class a spirit of disaffection, and even of personal dislike,
to the first monarchs of the house of Brunswick; who had indeed
no natural qualities, such as conciliate estranged affections,
and who as certainly made no artificial efforts to win the love
of any portion, and of this least of all, of their new subjects.
Pity it was, I say — not that the first and second Georges
should have failed to gain what they would not have valued if
possessed, but that the good, the nobly born, and the high-minded
of their people should have been led to cherish, year
after year, a vain and ill-starred affection for their banished
princes — princes of a line the most disastrous to their countries
the most selfish and ungrateful in prosperity, and in adversity
the most self-seeking, pertinacious and unbending of all sovereign
races.
Peace to their ashes! for if their crimes were great, their
sufferings were in proportion, heavy; and if, through them,
many, the best and truest of their followers, fell on the battle-field
— fell on the bloody scaffold — fell weary exiles upon a far
land's hated shore, they themselves likewise fattened the battle-field,
flooded the block, pined, far from crown and country,
faint and forgotten exiles.
But true it is, however lamentable, that in those days — and
in those only, for when else was it tried and found faithless —
the heart of England's catholic aristocracy was across the seas
with the outcast and the stranger, and awaited but the blast of
a foreign trumpet, ill-omened harbinger of a native monarch, to
leap to arms against the foreign family which filled the royal
chair of England.
And of this aristocracy the Vernons, of Vernon in the Vale,
were neither the lowest nor the least influential members. So
long as the banner of a Stuart had floated to a British breeze,
so long had their feet been in the stirrup, and their hands on
the hilt, beneath it.
Under the first and second Charles, Marston, and Naseby,
and Dunbar, and Worcester — under the second James, the
fatal waters of the Boyne, and the sad heights of Aghrim —
under the chevalier St George, Burnt Island, and Proud Preston,
had each and all seen the Vernon, of Vernon in the Vale,
in arms against the Parliament, the Dutch usurper, as the Jacobites
were wont to term him, or the intrusive house of Brunswick.
But though they had died by the sword, or by the axe,
in century after century; though sequestration and confiscation
had shorn the splendor of their fortunes —not for that had they
to the ill-fated house of Stuart; and not less fervently
did the fire of that disastrous loyalty burn in the breast of Reginald
Vernon, the last survivor of the family, in the year preceding
the unhappy '45, than it had burned in the cavalier of
the first fallen Charles.
Nay, if anything, it burned more fervently, and with a fiercer
blaze; for in his heart it had been fed by the blood of a father
butchered upon the cruel scaffold, and kept alive by the tears
of a half heart-broken mother, who had inculcated with his
first lessons, on his tender mind, the all-excelling virtue of loyalty
to the living king; the all-engrossing duty of vengeance
for the slain sire. And fully, fatally, had Reginald profited by
the teaching.
From a musing, melancholy, moody boy, full of strange
fancies and unboyish feelings, he had grown up into a dark,
brooding, gloomy, but most noble-minded man, who seemed
to live for himself the least of all men, and within himself the
most.
His father had perished after the '15 by all the possible refinements
of barbarity which the law in that day still denounced,
and popular opinion still sanctioned, against those guilty of high
treason. His mother had survived — though existing much
after the manner of that sainted queen
Died every day she lived”—
idea — or, to speak more correctly, with two moulded into one
— of everlasting faith to the house of Stuart, and of undying
hatred to the house of Hanover; and had then passed away to
join the lost comrade of her earthly joys, leaving her son to
brood over what he regarded as the double murder of his parents,
year a precocious man of full-grown intellect, and a premature
rebel of stern and obstinate resolution.
Notwithstanding, however, the almost continual preoccupation
of his inner being with this one fatal sentiment, he had
found time to cultivate not only the faculties but the graces of
both mind and body to the utmost, so that there were, perhaps,
at that day, few men in the kingdom more perfectly finished
than Reginald Vernon, in all accomplishments of a gentleman
and cavalier of honor. In all sports and exercises, he was
pre-eminent above all his peers, though, it was observed, that
he ever seemed to partake in them without pleasure, and to excel
in them without triumph. As a horseman and a mighty
hunter, he was unexcelled in the north country, the home then,
as now, of sylvan exercises, and the school for skill in the
field-sports. In the use of the sword, the masters-at-arms of
Italy and Spain confessed him facile princeps. As a marksman
and mountaineer, the land of fells and tarns, of the red
deer and the eagle, proclaimed him its chiefest glory.
Add to this, that he was “a scholar, and a ripe and good one,”
that the lore of the old, and the language of the modern world,
were both familiar to him as his mother-tongue — that in the
exact sciences he was no slender proficient, and that in the
theory, at least, of the art of war, he had been pronounced by
competent authorities, a stragetist second to none in Europe.
Of a fine person, and a noble countenance, although the last
was colored by an habitual gloom which clouded the light of
the expressive eye, and saddened the sweet smile which it
could not otherwise impair — of a lineage which the noblest
could not undervalue, of wealth amply sufficient for the largest
wishes — for by great efforts of powerful friends, the attainder
had been reversed, and the confiscation of his paternal property
remitted, while a long minority had repaired the havoc of past
what fortune fairer than that of Reginald Vernon.
Yet, in his own eyes, all these advantages were as nothing
— or, if anything, as means only for the attainment of an end,
and that end vengeance. Hence, at all hours, amid all occupations,
his attention would at times flag, his eye would become
abstracted, his mind would flee far away — forward, ever forward,
grasping at the intangible, pursuing the unattainable.
In the summer of the year '45, he had arrived at his thirty-seventh
year, and his superb and unimpaired manhood gave
promise of a long life of utility — for, despite his preoccupation
and abstraction, his life was eminently useful — and of a green
old age and honored exit from this world of probation. By
the tenantry, and the poor of his neighborhood, he was more
than loved, he was almost worshipped, and justly was he so esteemed,
for as proud as Lucifer himself to his superiors, he
was humble as the lowliest to his inferiors, courteous to every
one, kind to the deserving, charitable to all who needed it —
the truest and most devoted of friends — the most generous and
considerate of landlords — the most indulgent, apart from weakness,
of fathers — and of husbands the most constant, and most
unalterable in his calm, grave tenderness. For he had been
wedded some four years to a lady of rare beauty, noble birth,
and exquisite accomplishment, although many years his junior,
and even at that day a minor. For he was the father of two
beautiful, bright children, an heir to the father's virtue, an
heiress to the mother's beauty.
And yet this marriage, which might have been looked upon
as likely to be the crowning act of happiness to his life, which
might have been expected to exert influences the most beneficial
on his character, and perhaps, even to conquer the morbid
thirst for vengeance, and attune his diseased spirit to a better
and more wholesome character of sentiment, was perhaps, in
aggravated what a different union might have relieved, if not
cured.
Agnes d'Esterre, was, as I have stated, very young, very
beautiful, and as accomplished a girl as any in the court of
George the Second. For, although she was of a Roman catholic
family, and not very remotely connected with her husband's
race, her line had carefully held themselves aloof from all partisan
politics, and had, indeed, owing to some hereditary disgust
at the Stuarts, been so far opposed to their restoration to
the throne, as to hold themselves entirely neutral, when neutrality
was considered by the more zealous Romanists, as little
short of treason.
Thus sprung, and thus endowed with all the graces that
charm in a court and fascinate in society, Agnes d'Esterre had
been, for nearly two years, the bright, particular star of the
Hanoverian court of St. James, and had been somewhat too
conspicuous for her love of admiration, and something which
her friends called gayety, but which the world at large had set
down to the score of levity, when she was suddenly called upon
in compliance with one of those old family contracts which
were still at that time in vogue, to give up the gay frivolities
of the metropolis, and the court, and to take in exchange the
noble gravity and decorous dignity belonging to the wife of Sir
Reginald Vernon, of Vernon in the Vale, to whom she had actually
been affianced before she was herself born, and while
he was but a boy scaling the craigs of Skiddaw and Ilellvellyn,
to harry the eyry of the eagle, or luring the bright trout with
the gaudy fly, from the clear expanse of Derwentwater, or the
swift ripples of the Eden.
It had been observed, during the last season of her unmarried
life, that, in spite of her girlish humor for gayety and
change, and of her volatile and coquettish love for admiration,
in the course of every fall with young Bentinck Gisborough,
of late one of the king's pages, and now a dashing cornet in
the crack corps of that day, Honeywood's dragoons; and that
his charger was sure to be reined up beside the window of her
coach in the park; and his gorgeous uniform regularly seen by
her side in the avenues of the hall, or the pavilions of Ranelagh.
The quidnuncs of the town were already beginning to whisper
sly inuendoes, and the gossips to say sharp, spiteful sayings,
amid their becks and wreathed smiles, about the true love-tale
that would ere long be told concerning the rich and beautiful
coquette, and the young, penniless coxcomb. And it was
already a matter of surmise how Marmaduke d'Esterre, the
strictest of Romanists, and the closest-fisted of millionaires,
would be likely to regard the alliance of his sole heiress with
her penniless cousin, within the forbidden degrees, and protestant
of the most orthodox and jealous lineage.
All this, however, was brought to an end by the appearance
on the stage of Sir Reginald, in the character of a precontracted
suitor, nobler both in birth and appearance, handsomer, richer,
more accomplished than his gay rival the cornet, and in every
way his superior, in both all that becomes a man and in all
that is most apt to win a woman, unless it were for the single
drawback of the habitual gloom of the fair, broad brow, the unsmiling
sadness of the grave, serene features.
Yet when it was announced that Agnes was the affianced
bride of this dignified and handsome gentleman, in whose very
gravity and gloom there was mingled something of Spanish
chivalry and grandeur, no surprise was manifested by any one
at the perfect composure with which she abandoned the old
lover and accommodated herself to the new bridegroom. Nor
did this absence of wonder on the part of the public arise so
or good faith, as from the general consent that there
were few girls who would be likely to object to the fortune and
title of Sir Reginald Vernon, particularly when these were
united to a person so superior in all qualities, physical and
moral.
The marriage, like all other matters of the like nature, was
a nine days' wonder; and then the world ceased wondering at
what was in nowise wonderful; while the parties who were
the most concerned, having been married, like the dog which
bit the duke of Buckingham, settled in the country, and were
speedily forgotten by the gossips and quidnuncs of the court.
For above three years that happy oblivion continued, during
which period the time wore onward peacefully and calmly in the
sweet shades and among the wild mountain scenery of Vernon
in the Vale. During those tranquil days the two fair children
of which I have spoken were born to Sir Reginald Vernon;
and at times, when he looked upon the innocent, bland brow
and smiling lips of his first-born, a gladder and more hopeful
light would shine over the grave, dark features of the father,
and sometimes he would seem to doubt and to debate within
himself the virtue and the wisdom of that pursuit of vengeance
which had been impressed upon him as the first of duties, and
which he had ever heretofore hugged to his bosom as his soul's
darling idol.
Perhaps, at this period and crisis of his life, had deep and
earnest sympathy come to the aid of his paternal doubts and
fears, had the tearful entreaties of a devoted and doting wife
been thrown into the scale in addition to the apprehensions of
a father for his son's welfare, the balance might have been restored,
and the partisan have been subdued to the part of the
Christian, of the patriot, and of the man.
But that sympathy came not, those entreaties were not uttered,
position over, the light and gay Agnes d'Esterre, the belle of a
court and the cynosure of all eyes, soon grew weary of her
grave and somewhat solitary dignity, weary of playing the
Lady Bountiful to the uncultivated rustics, weary to death of
the grand Elizabethan halls and gorgeously-stained oriels of the
Vernon manor-house, of the wide sloping lawns and sweeping
forests of the chase, of the vast purple masses of the moorland
fells, inhabited only by the heath-cock, the hill-fox, and the
roe.
For a little while the novelty of a mother's care, the claims
of the helpless innocent, flesh of her flesh, and bone of her
bone, awakened the latent sentiments of her woman's heart,
and of love for her babe, there was born a sort of love for her
babe's father. But the sentiment was evanescent, the love was
not genuine, and when the freshness of the plaything had passed
away, the tedium and the loathing of the place, the time and
the things around her, returned with tenfold force, and she began
to regard herself as an exile from the land of promise, as
an imprisoned slave to the whims of a tyrannic husband, as a
much-injured, much-to-be-pitied woman.
At first in the very gravity and gloom of her noble husband's
brow, in the sweet sadness of his voice, his smile, his expression,
in the chivalrous stateliness of his serene and calm deportment,
in the total absence of all passion, of anything everyday,
or low, or little, in his hearing, there was something
which had touched her, something of mystery which had
aroused her curiosity, of majesty which had kindled her admiration,
of mournfulness which had called forth her sympathy.
But as she saw it day by day, unchanged, impassive, regular,
and calm as the career of the moon in a cold, cloudless sky,
this, too, began to weary her, and ere long it came to pass, that
had she asked herself of what she was most weary, of the
the sunlit windows sweeping across them slowly hour by hour;
of the huge oaks like mighty gnomons casting their long, dark
umbrages from west to east, across the dial of the smooth,
grassy park; of the gleams of light and purple mist, alternating
with one another over the glens and gulleys of Cross Fell; of
the regular routine and unexciting tranquillity of a country life,
with few neighbors, few amusements, and neither balls nor
drums, scandal nor dissipation; or of the constant, sad, serene,
yet ever-kind, ever-attentive husband, she would have been,
perforce, compelled to own that of all the accessories of Vernon
in the Vale, the most wearisome to her light and unresponsive
spirit was the great, tranquil, sustained character of Sir
Reginald.
In her light, frivolous nature, there was no touch of romance,
though she would have been most indignant had she been told
so, for she delighted to fancy herself the most impulsive and
sympathetic of characters — there was nothing capable of feeling
any grand or deep impression — of understanding or appreciating
anything above ordinary standards of humanity. Hers
was a truly every-day worldly nature — she could have measured
the colossal frame of the Æthiop Memnon, with the tape
of a Finsbury man-milliner, and gauged the mystic head of the
Egyptian sphynx, with reference to the duchess of Kendal's
last new ear-rings.
What, in the name of all that is almost divine in human nature,
had such as she to do, that she should wed with such a
one as Vernon!
She should have been the wife of Bentinck Gisborough; the
painted butterfly, of the gilded reptile — and he, the noble and
the doomed, he should have walked solitary in the solemnity of
his dark career, or should have been won from it by the quickening
communion of a high and sympathizing soul.
But there was no sympathy, no communion of motives or of
thoughts between them, farther than those of everyday existence.
How should there have been any other — the one of the
earth, all earthy — the other, of the spirit — but, alas! of what
spirit — all too spiritual!
And yet, unlike as they were, ill-matched and incongruous
in all things, they had by no means, during the brief space of
their wedded life, become estranged or cold. No quarrel had
ever broken the quiet tenor of their lives, nor had any marked
indifference grown up between them.
The lady, although frivolous and light-minded, was light-hearted
also, and good-natured — easily pleased as she was
wearied easily; and he was all too gentle, and too generous, too
regardful of her slightest wishes, too indulgent to her childlike
follies, that she could purposely or deliberately do anything to
annoy him. Indeed, there was something engaging in the very
frivolity of the young wife, something in her utter thoughtlessness
and abandonment to the whim of the present moment,
which so strongly suggested to a superior mind the want of a
guardian and protector for one so innocent and artless, as to
create a sort of claim on the affections, similar to that felt by a
powerful and athletic man toward a beautiful and sportive child.
And such in a great degree, was the feeling of Sir Reginald
Vernon toward the young, petted, and spoiled beauty whom he
had taken in an evil hour, obedient to the will of his dead parents,
to be the partner of his life and the mother of his children.
He, perhaps, even loved her the more in that he could
the less esteem her — loved her with a sort of paternal affection,
leading to much endearment, many caresses, but to no
confidence, no interchange of opinions, no community of sentiments.
And thus he never suspected that she was discontented with
her changed sphere? that she absolutely loathed the quiet of
cultivation of her garden, the care of her birds, the duties of
her maternity, about all of which he saw her for the moment
interested and apparently happy, lacked the variety and the intensity
to fix her volatile and restless tastes. But leaving her
to the pursuit of the trifles, which, as he believed, amply engrossed
and occupied her every wish and sentiment, he went
his own way, wandering alone in deep, abstracted thought under
his groves of immemorial oak, or rambling over the wild fells,
carabine in hand, rather as an excuse for solitude, than in pursuit
of game, or poring over ponderous tomes of casuistry, or
of the art strategetical, in his dark, open library.
Thus had three years elapsed, since he had wedded the fair
Agnes D'Esterre. The eldest son, a bright, noble boy, whose
dark locks and eagle eye, undimmed by the sadness of maturity
and thought, were all the father's, while the resplendent smile
and unwearied glee were of the mother's spirit, was in his second
year, running already on firm, fleet limbs, and even now beginning
to syllable his first few words in that broken dialect so
sweet to a parent's ear. His second, a daughter, a wee satin-skinned,
rosy, blue-eyed thing, with the golden curls and peach-like
bloom of Agnes, clung still to the nurse's bosom, nor had
essayed its tiny feet as yet, on the hard surface of this thorny
world. But at this period a strange alteration took place in the
mood and deportment no less of Sir Reginald, than of his
lady.
With the arrival of the winter of 1644, there began to spread
throughout the people of England, and of the north especially,
one of those singular bruits or rumors, which, scarcely even
meriting the name of rumors, so unformed and indistinct are
they, yet frequently arouse a nation's expectations to the highest
pitch; and for the most part as surely indicate some coming
convulsion or phenomenon in the political world, as does the
approach of the earthquake, the outburst of the volcano. Thus
was it, through that long and dreary winter; and although the
court sat unmoved, and drank and gamed at St. James, careless
alike, and fearless of the coming storm, the people of the rural
districts talked darkly of great changes, and portentous troubles,
changes of dynasties, and troublous times of war. And though
they knew not what it was they feared, they trembled and
shook in their inmost souls; and heard strange voices in the
winds; and saw wondrous apparitions in the moonlight of autumnal
eves, or among the mists of wintry mornings, apparitions
of marching regiments, and charging squadrons, with colors on
the wind, and music in the air, on lonely heaths and wilds inaccessible
to the foot of man.
At this time it was, that Sir Reginald Vernon shook off, as
if by magic, the gloom and abstraction which had characterized
his demeanor, and became, on a sudden, quick-witted, energetic,
active, both of mind and body, and seemed to be possessed
altogether by a kind of eager, enthusiastical excitement,
wholly at variance with his usual habits.
He, who had scarce for years absented himself for a night
from his own roof, who had scarcely gone beyond the boundaries
of his own demesnes, ten times in as many years, unless
in pursuit of the chase, was now much abroad — at first for
hours, then for days, and at last for weeks, and even months at
a time Twice he made distant journeys, once as far northward
as to the wild country of the Clans, beyond the highland
line in Scotland, and once on a visit to some of the great catholic
families in Cheshire.
He was constantly now in the company of the neighboring
gentry, was often seen at fair and market, and all casual collections
of the country people; and it began to be observed that
Sir Reginald Vernon from having been a student of books, had
Muses, had become a courtier of the people's favor.
About this time, his horses, about the breed, beauty, and condition
of which, he had been at all times solicitous, were greatly
increased in number, and either personally, or by his agents, he
purchased every sound, young, well-bred animal of sufficient
bone and substance, till his own stables contained above a hundred
excellent cattle, and more than twice that number were
distributed, nominally as their own property, among the granges
and halls of the tenantry and neighboring yeomen.
To account as it were for this, Sir Reginald now set on foot
a pack of staghounds, and a fine mew of hawks, to fly which
latter, a train of German falconers were brought to Vernon in
the Vale, as well as several French riding-masters, to break
the young animals to the manege; and it was noticed that all
these men were grayheaded, mustached, weather-beaten-veterans,
many of them with scarred visages, and all with a singularly
military port, and a great habit of bearing weapons.
Thereafter, grand hunting-matches, such as had never been
heard of before, became the order of the day. Matches at
which the gentry of all the adjoining counties were often present
with their mounted followers, to the number of three or four
hundred horse. And, though it was noted only at the time to
be admired by the rustics, great evolutions were often performed
in driving the open country, and everything was done at sound
of bugle, and with fanfares of French horns.
Great football plays were also held, by both Sir Reginald and
other gentry, in their parks, at which the rural population were
gathered, sometimes to the number of a thousand, and then
were taught to march orderly to and from the dinner-tents, and
were once or twice set to practise with firearms provided for
the purpose, at targets in the chase.
Thus far, all was done openly and aboveboard, but it was
well known to the initiated few, that on every moonlight night
regular drills were held of troops of horse, and companies of
foot, in every park for miles around; that all the tenantry and
households of the catholic gentry were regularly enrolled, and
mustered under arms; and that twice or three times in every
month grand parades of battalions and squadrons were called
together, in the loneliest places among the hills, at the dead
hour of midnight. And these moonlight musters it was, these
bands of men hurrying to their trysting-places, or returning at
the dead of night, or in the mists of morning, that were construed
by the superstitious hinds of Cumberland and Durham
into arrays of shadowy apparitions, portentous of coming evil.
And portentous of evil they in truth were; for of a surety
they were the harbingers of civil war, the cruelest and most
frightful of all earthly evils; the tokens that, ere another year
should have run its round, the banner of the Stuarts would be
abroad on the winds of England, and the clash of arms and the
din of preparation resounding from Land's End to Cape Wrath.
And this it was which had aroused Reginald Vernon from his
life of dreams, and hurried him at once headlong into a life of
action. And then was it seen how wondrously he had prepared
himself during that period of seeming inaction, how he
had sharpened his faculties, and filed his spirit to the keenest
edge, for the emergency which he had long foreseen; how he
had girded up the loins of his soul for the pursuit of that vengeance,
the scent of which had been for years before hot in his
nostrils.
At once he stood forth — not among, but above all his co-religionist
conspirators, not only as the shrewdest and the wisest
plotter, but as the undoubted man of action, the undeniable
leader, the manifest and confessed chief of the rising.
Still, though he had been closeted for many days with his
deeds of trust, and alienating property — perhaps to put it out
of reach of forfeiture or confiscation, Sir Reginald put no trust
in the wife of his bosom.
At times his eye would dwell anxiously on her beautiful
young face, and his features would work with the internal strife,
and his lips would move as though he were about to disclose
his hidden griefs; but then again he would shake his head, and
mutter a few faint words to himself, and walk aside without
casting off his burthen.
Perhaps he feared to trust her discretion with the fate of
thousands; perhaps he dreaded to involve her in the perils of
his enterprise, for the laws of treason and misprison in those
days were awful instruments, which had no respect of person
or of sex; nor would the axe of the executioner have spared
the white neck of the delicate and tender lady, more than that
of the harnessed veteran.
And she — she too was changed. Hitherto, she had been
weary only; weary of her home, her life, her companion.
Hitherto she loathed only her pursuits, and the place to which
she held herself condemned as a captive; without, as yet, loathing
him to whom her lot had so unmeetly linked her.
She had regarded him, at first, with a sort of mysterious admiration,
not all unmixed with fear, as if of a superior being,
this custom and companionship had, in the earlier years of
their union, been converted, with the aid of his unvarying kindness
and attention, into a sort of calm and tranquil liking, wholly
passionless, it is true, and unfervent, and even superficial, but
at the same time honest and sincere.
Usage, however, his uniform stateliness, and his want of
sympathy with her pleasures, or of confidence in her powers
of consolation, had converted this faint liking into total indifference.
She ceased to love, yet did not hate him. She
may seem, to learn to hate him.
But now there was a change! She saw the man energetical,
alive, awake, active, full of enthusiasm, full of excitement,
interest, daring! Had he been always thus, she could—
What? alas! woman, what?
And now this very awakening up to action, and spirit-stirring
thoughts and deeds, was an insult — a proof that his indifference
to her and her pursuits was not, as she had believed, constitutional,
and not to be amended, but studied, personal, intentional
— the child of contempt, of scorn. And what will a woman
not endure, rather than a man's scorn, and that man a husband.
Meanwhile the days rolled onward; the snows of winter
melted into the lap of spring, and the sunshine of '45 clothed
the uplands and vales of England with fresh verdure, alas! to
be more redly watered than with the genial dews of heaven, or
ere the frosts should sere one blade of the meadow-grass, one
leaf of the woodland shade. And, with the summer, rumor
waxed more rife, and the advent of the Stuarts was bruited
through the land, but scarce believed of any, while the court
sat secure in London, in reckless or obtuse tranquillity.
In the north all things went on as before, Sir Reginald even
more actively employed than during the past autumn, and
rarely now at home, save for a few hours in the early morning,
after which he would still ride forth, not to return until the
night was far advanced toward another day, and the stars paling
in the streaky skies, his lady lighter and more gay and reckless
than her wont.
For in the early part of that eventful summer, a squadron of
Honeywood's dragoons marched into Carlisle, and there took up
their quarters; and in that squadron was Bentinck Gisborough,
now elevated to the rank of captain. He was a cousin, as I
said, of Agnes, and his two sisters — they were orphans, had
of Vernon in the Vale, where they were received cordially
by Sir Reginald, who was pleased to secure female
companionship for his young wife, and that of her own connections,
during the continuance of the strife which he knew was
at hand, and his own absence with the army.
Carlisle was not so far distant, nor the garrison duties of
that day, when military discipline was relaxed and slovenly, so
onerous, but that Bentinck Gisborough was a frequent visiter
at the manor-house. And being a gay, good-humored youth,
who followed his own careless pleasures, scarcely appearing
to notice anything that was going on around him, Sir Reginald
was rather pleased than otherwise, to see him often at his
house — the more so, that the presence of a king's officer in
his family was a sort of guaranty for his loyalty, in those days,
of general distrust, and effectually prevented any suspicion of
his movements or intentions.
The young officer rode out with the ladies, or loitered with
them in the gardens, tuned their spinets, and sang duets with
his fair cousin, once his flame; and appeared to pay no attention
to the movements of his active host, unless when he was
invited to join him in the chase, or to partake of a day's shooting
on the hills — invitations which he never failed to accept,
and to enliven so effectually by his frank temper and ready
wit, that he became ere long almost as much a favorite with
Sir Reginald, as with his gay ladye; and all at Vernon in the
Vale, while the atmosphere was in that nursing calm abroad,
which ever portends a loud convulsion, “went,” in the words
of the poet, “merry as a marriage-bell.”
How long, alas! should that merriment continue. It was
the evening of a lovely day in June, and the heat which had
been almost oppressive had subsided into a fresh, sweet softness,
tempered by the falling dews, and redolent of the refreshed
was quieter that evening than its wont, for Sir Reginald had
ridden forth in the morning, followed by two servants, intending
to be absent for a week or more in Durham, and Bentinck
Gisborough, who had been an inmate during the last three
weeks, had accompanied him a few miles on his way, at the
end of which he was to strike off for Carlisle to rejoin his regiment,
so that the ladies had been left alone during the day, and
had grown perhaps a little weary of each other, for they had
separated early in the afternoon and retired to their own chambers,
and now the Ladies Lucy and Maud Gisborough, tall,
elegant and handsome girls, were lounging upon the terrace
before the door, playing with a leash of beautiful Italian greyhounds,
and wondering where in the world was Agnes Vernon.
And where was Agnes Vernon?
At the northwestern angle of the park there is a deep and
most romantic glen, feathered with yews and other graceful
evergreens on the farther bank, and divided from the chase by
a long hill of young oak plantations, intersected with walks
and pleasure drives, forming the most beautiful part of the
grounds, as commanding many views of the falls and rapids of
the swift, clear mountain torrent which rushes through the
wild boar's cleugh, as the glen is named from a tradition that
the last of those fierce animals slain in the north country there
held his secret lair.
On this tumultuous stream there is one fine cataract, known,
from the foamy whiteness of its waters, as the “Gray Mare's
Tail,” leaping, in a fine arch of fifty feet, over a sheer limestone
rock, on the very verge of which, overlooking the shoot of the
fall, and the foam brine at its foot, stood a small, gothic hermitage,
or summer-house, overshadowed by a superb gnarled oak
of many a century's growth.
In this lone hermitage, on that sweet evening, after the summer
had sunk dim and drear over the shaggy glen, sate the young
lady of the manor alone, apparently expectant, listening for
some sound, which she could scarce hope to hear above the
rush and roar of the falling waters.
She was very young, slender and graceful as a fairy, and
with her soft blue eyes and long floating golden ringlets, and
white dress, with no ornament but a long scarf of deep green
sendal, she might well have been taken, in that superstitious
day, and that simple neighborhood, for a spirit of the wild wood,
or the stream, a thing intangible and aerial, almost divine.
But there was light in those blue eyes that was not of the
spirit, a hot flush on those fair cheeks that spoke volumes of
earthly passion, a smile on those parted lips, all too voluptuous
for anything above mortality.
She was listening with the very ears of her soul — it is — it
is! There was a rustle among the foliage, a rush as of stones
spurned by a climber's heel, down the steep gully's side, a
footstep on the threshold.
With a faint cry she sprang forward, and was caught in the
arms, was clasped to the bosom of a man.
Alas, alas! for Agnes! — that man was not Reginald Vernon.
2. PART II.
To covet there another's bride;
And she to lay her guilty head
A husband's trusting heart beside!”
—Parisina.
“Ah! Bentinck, have you come at last?”
“Sweet, sweetest Agnes.”
The moon, robed with her soft, silver light, rose above the
tree-tops in her full-orbed glory; edging the fresh luxuriant
verdure with a fringe of mellow lustre, and checkering the
smooth, grassy lawns with long gleams and alternate shadows.
The nightingale sings not in wide woodlands of the north, but
the jarring cry of the night-hawk, and the plaintive hooting
of the distant owls, blended themselves with the near murmur
of the waterfall, and with the low, soft music of the western
wind among the tree-tops, and formed a sweet and soothing
melody, replete with the calm tenderness of moral associations.
But the guilty pair saw not the tender light tipping the green
with silver, or glittering in diamond showers upon the spray of
the clear cascade; they heard not the cadences of the water
and the breeze, nor heeded the cry of the nocturnal birds.
Brighter to him was the unholy fire that beamed from her
blue eyes, and sweeter the low murmur of her passionate expressions,
than all the lights of heaven, than all the hymns of
angels, could they have resounded in his ears deafened by crime
and hardened against all diviner sentiments, by the defilement
of an evil earthly passion.
It is a mistake to believe that the wicked are not happy in
the first transport of their wickedness, and they are both false
moralists and unwise teachers, who would have us to believe
otherwise.
There is indeed to the guilty, as there is to all of human
mould, and in a greater degree than to the calm and virtuous
who tread the paths of moderation, the drop of bitterness which
still arises, as the poet of nature sang, in the mid fount of every
human pleasure, stinging them like a thorn among the
sweetest flowers.
It is when the hour of reaction has arrived, when the nerves
are relaxed and unstrung by the very violence and fury of their
own excitement; when the head aches and the hand trembles,
overdone and outworn by the very excess of enjoyment; when
the spirit, failing, exhausted, yet yearns with a sick and morbid
craving, wearied and insatiate of passion, for some fresher excitement,
fiercer stimulant; it is then that the punishment commences
which is the inseparable consequence of sin; it is then
that conscience resumes her power over the shuddering mind;
that the vulture-talons of the fury retribution pierces to the very
heart of the miserable sinner.
But for Agnes and Bentinck, thoughtless and young trangressors,
the hour of anguish had not yet arrived; nor that
strange hatred of the wicked, one against the other, which so
constantly succeeds to the decline of unholy passion.
They were yet quaffing the first drops of that beverage, the
dregs of which are bitterness, and loathing, and despair; and
in their self-deception, they fancied that one thing alone was
wanting to their happiness, the power of displaying to each
other, before the eyes of the whole world, their deep fondness
of being each to the other, at all times, and in all places, openly
and without reproval, all in all.
Nor did they fail — as when did the human heart ever fail of
lay the blame on fate, on the world, on anything, except their
own corrupt and wilful natures.
And, in truth, as is oftentimes the case, there was some slight
show of justice in their reclamations against the world, as they
called the society of the court-circle of St. James. For it is
true that they had loved in youth, to the utmost extent perhaps
of which their frivolous and slight natures were capable of loving;
and the affections of the very young, if not of that depth
and ardor which characterize the passions of more advanced
life, are yet marked by a freshness, and unselfishness, and a
quick fervor, which make them pass for more than they are
really worth, even with the professors, who over-estimate the
violence, owing to the newness of the emotion.
Hence it is that so often those who have been divided or kept
asunder by chance, by the rules of social position, or by some
violence done to the feelings, return in after-life, as the French
proverb says we always do, to their past loves, and that with a
violence which breaks all bonds, and overleaps all obstacles;
whereas had they been suffered to take their own course, and
had no restraint been put upon their actions, the early and unstable
fancy or predilection would have worn itself out, which
contradiction alone has magnified into a mighty and absorbing
passion.
Thus had it been with Agnes d'Esterre and Bentinck Gisborough,
had Reginald Vernon never been sent by his evil destiny
to claim the hand of his unconsciously-betrothed bride, in
an unhappy hour, and one fraught with misery or shame to all
whom it concerned. For so light was the character of the
vain, spoiled beauty, as was proved by the ease with which she
consented to fulfil the contract, and the favorable ear which she
lent to Reginald's addresses, and so very a coxcomb was the
young dragoon, that ere a second season had elapsed, it is ten
thought of each other more.
But as it was, when amid the lonely shades of Vernon in
the Vale, and in the uncongenial atmosphere of her husband's
calm and abstracted society, Agnes began to cast a regretful
glance to the gayeties and frivolities of London; to contrast
the light-hearted mirth and merry companionship of the gay,
handsome, fashionable cornet, with the tranquil and melancholy
dignity of Vernon; and above all, to regard it as the despite
of fate, and not the operation of her own free will, that had
given her as an unresponsive wife to the arms of the sad, silent
conspirator; she soon learned to exaggerate in her own
thoughts the love she had felt for Gisborough; to brood over
the destiny which had separated them; to pine in secret for the
absent hero of her fancy's love.
In the solitude and seclusion in which she lived, with no associate
of her own rank, by whose companionship to lighten
the monotony of her weary existence, with no sympathizing
friend, or young monitor, on whose affection she might rely,
she nursed and cherished her thick, teeming fancies, till she
had persuaded herself into the belief that she was the most
miserable of her sex, an unloved wife of a cold, misanthropic,
and hard-hearted husband, and the passionate adorer of an idolized
and idolizing lover.
By slow degrees she grew to despise and loathe a character
too great and noble for her comprehension; she came to regard
Sir Reginald as the bar betwixt herself and happiness, to feel
weariness for his society, aversion for his person, and something
not far removed from actual hatred for the man whom she
had sworn to love and honor.
Tranquil in his character, calm in his very affections, never
ardent even in the warmest of his feelings, it is easy to imagine
that Sir Reginald was the last person to discover the coldness
was no society to call forth her coquetry with others, there were
no causes by which to excite his jealousy or distrust; and so
long as he saw her always beautiful, always graceful, and always,
at least in outward semblance, gay — for gayety was an
inborn quality of her nature — he thought of her only as a very
fair and gentle mistress of his household, and loved her rather
as the mother of his children and the partner of his home, with
the grave and chaste affection of a pious philosopher, than as
she desired to be loved, with the passion of an ardent and adoring
lover.
When the fatal year of the rebellion came — that rebellion so
disastrous to the catholic and tory aristocracy of England — for
the Romanist was then the farthest in the world removed from
the radical — and when Sir Reginald Vernon broke out from
his repose of moody disaffection, into the activity and eagerness
of rebel preparation; when his days were passed in his
study, planning the means whence to support the sinews of the
war, or by which to avert the consequences of defeat, and half
his nights in the saddle, reviewing his tenantry and mustering
his yeomen into service, he had even less leisure than before
to observe, and less reason to suspect the aversion of his wife.
And she, when she saw the eagerness, the enthusiasm, the spirit,
nay, the passion, which he could expend on an object that aroused
his interest, and stirred his soul to its depths, was not perhaps
all unjustly mortified and galled at being sensible of her own
inability to kindle him to life; looked upon herself as a woman
scorned; began to detest the neglecter of her charms, and to
meditate the woman's revenge by the medium of the very beauty
which she conceived to be undervalued.
Bentinck arrived, as I have said, a welcome guest to the confiding
and pure-hearted husband, and a long-desired and ready
accomplice in her vengeance to the wilful and wicked wife.
Agnes Vernon fell not, nor was seduced into the paths of
vice; headlong, yet with her eyes wide open, she rushed into
the abyss of sin and shame, and revelled in the very consciousness
of infamy, which to her warped and distorted vision, appeared
in the light of a just revenge.
It will scarce be believed, except by those who have studied
the depths of the human heart, and learned to know, what the
Mantuan poet sang, “furens quid fæmina possit,” that it was
with difficulty Gisborough could prevail upon her so far to veil
her guilt, as to avoid her husband's eye, and that she actually
grieved, at times, that her revenge was incomplete, so long as
Reginald was unacquainted with her infamy.
It is probable that fear only of his desperate wrath — for she
well knew the intensity of anger of which his calm, resolute,
deep soul was capable — and the unwillingness to sacrifice her
luxurious state and high position, alone prevented this infamous,
and almost insane wretch from willingly and knowingly betraying
herself.
But of late a fresher and stronger inducement was added to
her reasons for avoiding a premature discovery of her guilt.
She had become aware of the reason of her husband's altered
demeanor, had learned the full extent of his complicity in
the rebellion which was on the eve of breaking out, and had
exerted her every power of fascination and persuasion to fix
him in his fatal purpose, even to the lavishing upon him of
those Delilah-like caresses which revolted her as she bestowed
them.
She learned, moreover, that in his anxiety to avoid the confiscation
of his property and the beggaring of herself and his
children in case of failure, he had actually alienated the whole
of his estates, transferring them legally and for a valuable consideration,
to three trustees, of whom — marvellous infatuation! —
Bentinck Gisborough was one, for her benefit and that of his
the thought, to which the hope was indeed the father, that he
might find a red grave on the battle-field, and she have it in her
power to bestow upon that lover, to whom she had already
given herself, her hand, together with her own and her children's
fortune.
To do Bentinck Gisborough mere justice, he was ignorant
of this refinement of domestic treason. Perhaps, had he been
aware of it, it might so far have revolted all his better feelings,
as to lead him to break off the connection with Agnes, and to
escape her fascinations.
Well for him had it been to do so.
But with the woman's wicked craft, she had foreseen that
the confession of her morbid motives would disgust the hair-brained
and daring spirit, which even in its worst points, had
nothing in it of the mercenary or the calculating, and had concealed
them from him carefully, well knowing that he could be
wrought upon to commit deeds for the secure possession of her
person, from which he would have recoiled if suggested for the
attainment of pecuniary advantage.
She had disclosed to him, as a matter of course, the intentions
of her husband, and made him acquainted with the imminence
of the rebellion. But information thus obtained, he was
too honorable to reveal to the government, even if he had not
been well content to let matters take their course. For he had
no conception of the extent of the ramifications of the conspiracy,
of the general nature of the discontents against the Hanoverian
government, or of the great chances which really existed
at that moment for the success of a Jacobite insurrection.
He did not believe for a moment, that the movement would be
more formidable than that of the rebellion of '15, which had been
put down almost without an effort, and its ashes drenched though
not extinguished in the blood of its gallant but misguided leaders.
He was convinced that a single battle in the north of England,
would crush the insurrection, and as his own regiment of
horse was quartered at Carlisle, and was of consequence likely
to be among the first engaged, he hoped to have an opportunity
of measuring swords with the man whom he regarded as
his enemy, and the wrongful possessor of his own intended
bride rather than as one whom he was wronging in the tenderest
point of honor.
The present meeting of the guilty pair was chiefly for the
discussion of projects, the laying of plans, the betrayal of the
husband's last secret by his abandoned wife.
The prince — for of princely birth he was, though outcast from
his father's realm, not by his own but by his father's vices — the
prince had landed in the wilds of Moidart, and unfurled the
standard of rebellion over the heads of seven adherents only,
but those made of the stuff which almost supplies the want of
armies. The clans were rushing to arms, Lochiel, Keppoch,
and Glencarry, had belted on the broadsword, and slung the
targe upon the shoulder. The gentry of the northern counties,
already ripe for insurrection, would be in arms within six days
at farthest, and in a week from that same day, Reginald Vernon
would set foot in stirrup, and unsheathe his father's sword, in
the vain hope to avenge the death of that father.
I do not mean to assert, for I do not believe it to be true,
that direct earthly retribution always or often follows the sinner
to “overtake him when he leasts expects it,” or that He to
whom eternity is as to-day, is so prompt to strike, that his vengeance
is manifest here below. It is, as I regard it, a poor,
and presumptuous, and unphilosophical morality, which looks
for the punishment of the guilty in this world, by direct Divine
agency — which sees the judgment of God in the flash of the
lightning's bolt, or hears the voice of his anger in the thunder's
roar. “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” are as much words
I will repay, saith the Lord.” And repay he will, of a surety,
and good measure, yea, pressed down and running over — but
when, let him say, who can pronounce whence the wind comes
and whither it goes in its path of devastation.
But there is another way, in which sure retribution does follow
crime and overtake it, even here on earth, and that way
the philosopher is prompt to observe and sure to mark. That
way is the way of nature, the common course of things, the
general law of the universe. For that law has decreed, more
immutably than that of the Medes and Persians, that as surely
as there is sin, so surely shall there be satiety; and he who
shows this as the consequence of vice, is a wise teacher and a
good, because he is a true one.
Now that the blow was actually struck, and when intelligence
sent to the government could in nowise arrest the outbreak,
or anticipate the full disclosure of the conspirator's overt
guilt and open action, she prevailed upon Gisborough to write
to his father by a special messenger to London, warning him
fully of all that had occurred, so to obtain the credit of zeal for
the powers that were, and to avoid the suspicion of being privy
to the secrets of the rebels.
Next to this she obtained his promise — though many a caress
was lavished ere she prevailed in this — to inform Honeywood
of the movement of the catholic gentry of the northern
counties, and to induce him to act promptly for the suppression
of the rising, by striking instantly and in force at the levy of
cavalry which would be made at Vernon in the Vale, on the
seventh day thereafter.
“Come yourself, Bentinck,” she said, “come yourself, my
own beloved, brave Bentinck, with your gallant squadrons, and
let your own good sword work the deliverance of your Agnes.
Let my eyes look upon his fall, sweet at any hand, but doubly
will hail, will bless the day, which shall make me yours altogether
and for ever.”
“Can you be more mine than you are now, my own Agnes?”
cried the young man eagerly.
“Only in this, my Bentinck, that I shall then be yours before
the face of the world, before the face of my Maker, who
never meant me for the wife of that cold-blooded, haughty
despot.”
“Sweet Agnes,” cried the soldier; “Heaven send it, as you
say; and I will slay him!”
“And I say, never! adulterer and murderer, never!” said a
harsh voice without, in deep, hoarse, grating accents, but yet
with something feminine in the manner and intonation. Instinctively
the soldier's hand fell to the hilt of his sword, and
the next instant he stood without the little building, on the
small, open esplanade, on which, save a small space under the
shadow of the oak-tree, the full moonbeams dwelt lovingly, so
that for fifty yards around, all was as bright as day.
There was no braver man than Bentinck Gisborough, in that
island of the brave, whereon he had his birth; and with all the
national courage of his breed, all the hereditary courage of the
race, and that last cause for courage added — the instinct, quod
etiam timidos fortes facit, which prompts the wren to do battle
for its partner — the defence of the woman prompting him —
he sprang forth, expecting to do battle on the instant with a resolved
and mortal foe.
But the blood turned stagnant in his veins, and the hair
seemed to bristle on his head, as he gazed on the sward around
him, and found nothing — no sign of human life — no form, no
sound, no footstep, although no time had elaspsed for flight,
although no covert was within reach for the shelter of a human
within ten paces of the door.
To circle round the building, the oak-tree, to examine its
leafy canopy, and every trifling hollow of its gnarled trunk, was
but a moment's work, but it was all in vain. There was no
one present, or within ear-shot of anything less than a halloo;
although the words which had reached his ear, were not spoken
much above the usual tone of conversation, and although
they implied that all the low whispers of their guilty schemes
had been overheard by the speaker.
There was no one present; and after all, the young soldier
had naught to do but to return to the pale and trembling Agnes,
and explain how fruitless had been his exertions to find the intruder,
and ask of her if it could have been imagination that
had presented the strange sounds to their senses.
“No more than this, our meeting is imagination,” she replied,
“my Bentinck. But what matters it? Had it been he,
you should have slain him now and here, and that had been the
end of it. For the rest, he is in the toils, and he can not escape
them, for all he be brave, wise, and wary; and if we have
been observed, I care not even if the observer tell him. It will
but add a pang to an existence, the term of which is already
fixed, and which may not be much prolonged by any means.
So, tell him, listener, if you will,” she added, raising her soft
and musical voice to a pitch all unwonted, and stepping to the
door with an impudence of bearing, which, had it been less
guilty, had been almost sublime: “Tell him that you have
heard Agnes d'Esterre — for Agnes Vernon I am not — assure
her Gisborough, with all the truth of earnest love, that she was
his, and his alone. Tell him that, secret spy — tell him that
— and you will but serve my purpose, torturing him with tidings
that shall avail him nothing!”
“Hush! Agnes. Hush! beloved one,” cried the young
and unwomanly defiance. “These are wild, whirling words,
and such, in truth, avail nothing, if they even mean anything.”
“Mean anything! Mean anything, do you say, Bentinck
Gisborough? What should they mean, but that I hate him
deeply, deadly? hate him more even than I love you! hate him
so utterly that his death would bring me no pleasure, if he die
fancying that I love him.”
“Oh! do not, Agnes, do not say such words, if you love me
— even if they be true; say them not, my own Agnes.”
“If I love you,” she exclaimed; “if they be true! Have I
not given you proof that I love you, and will I not prove that
they are true, to the very letter? But if you love not to hear
me, I am silent. Once more, then, go your way, with blessings
on your head, and fail me not, I implore you, this day week,
my own Bentinck. For of precious truth! I do believe, that
if he survive that day, I shall die even of his odious life!” At
length, she tore herself away, and darted through the dim, wild
woods, homeward — homeward — half-fearful, half-rejoicing in
the partial discovery of her treason.
He stood for a moment, gazing after her beautiful, elastic
figure, till he lost sight of her among the trees, and then with
a deep drawn sigh, he turned away, bounded down the near
side of the steep ravine, leaped from stone to stone across the
channel of the noisy stream, and appeared indistinctly a moment
afterward among the shrubbery on the farther bank, scaling the
steep acclivity.
Five minutes afterward, the clang of a distant horse's tramp
was heard sounding on the rocky brow of the hill, at a hard
gallop, and then there was silence.
A moment or two passed, and then a sort of trap or shutter
was raised in the stylobate, or substructure of the hermitage, the
floor of which was elevated some two feet above the surface of
which a secret door had been constructed, giving access
to a vault or cellar underneath the building.
From this aperture, there now emerged cautiously and slowly
the head and then the whole person of a tall, gaunt, and rawboned
woman, apparently of very great age, for her dark, sallow
skin was fretted with so many wrinkles, that at first sight, she
struck the observer as having been tattooed after the fashion of
the Australasian savages, and her hair, which was cut short
round the head, like a man's, was as white as the driven snow
of winter, as were her shaggy pendant eyebrows, likewise, and
her long, thin lashes, from beneath which a pair of small, black
piercing eyes gleamed out with a spiteful, venomous sparkle,
like that of some vicious reptile.
Her face, however, in spite of this ominous and threatening
eye, was decidedly intellectual, full of thought, and not unbenevolent
in its general character, although decidedly its most
distinctive feature was the firm resolution expressed by the thin,
compressed lips, and the bony angular jaw.
In figure, she was very tall, and although gaunt and emaciated
by age, rather than privation, her limbs were sinewy and
muscular, more than is usual among women, and her hands
especially were as large and almost as strong as a man's. The
dress of this singular and masculine looking female consisted
of a petticoat of the common russet serge, which constituted
the usual country wear, with a sort of coarse, half-manlike jerkin
or doublet over it, made of bright blue cloth, with tight sleeves
and a high collar, this unwonted garment descending nearly to
the hips. Above this again she wore a long and voluminous
scarf of scarlet duffle, disposed about her gaunt and angular
person, much after the fashion of a highlander's plaid. On her
head she had a Scottish bonnet, and in her sinewy hand she
carried a stout pike-staff of some five feet in length, with a
weapon, for there were two protuberances closely resembling
the form of pistol butts, clearly visible at the waist of her blue
jacket; and the black leathern scabbard of what was undoubtedly
a long knife, protruded below its hem.
Her legs were covered by blue woollen stockings, with large
scarlet clocks, and her feet protected by stout brogues of untanned
hide, which, strong as they were, gave evidence of
much hard usage and long travel.
As she emerged from her place of concealment, which she
did warily and slowly, closing the trapdoor securely after her
so that no trace was left to unfamiliar eyes of the existence of
the secret vault, that woman stood and gazed anxiously in the
direction which Agnes had taken in her flight, and then listened
if she might judge aught of the lover's whereabout from the
sound of his distant horse-hoofs. But there was neither sound
nor sight to guide her, and satisfied as it would seem, that she
was entirely alone, she gave way to the full force of her indignation
and disquiet, dashing her pike-staff violently upon the
rocky soil, and gnashing her teeth in the bitterness of her rage.
“Accursed wanton,” she exclaimed, “foul, soulless, sensual
wretch! False Delilah! accursed Jezebel — may the fate of
Jezebel be thine; may dogs eat thee yet alive, and may thy
name perish utterly from among thy people; and it is to such
as thee that wise men intrust their honor! that prudent men
confide the fate of mighty enterprises, the fortunes of their best
and dearest friends. It is to insure the being kissed in luxurious
chambers by thy curled darling that a great, a royal undertaking
must be cast to the winds — that the blood of the noble,
and the faithful, and the brave, shall dye the moorlands with a
ruddier hue than the bloom of their purplest heather. Out on
it! out on it! that after all the doings, all the sufferings of our
church, our people, and our lawful king, the lust of a titled
wisdom of the wisest, the bravery of the bravest, and change
the course of dynasties, the fate of nations! Out on it! out on
it? So young, so delicate to look upon, and yet so shameless,
and so daring, and of so resolute and bold a spirit. But, by
the faith of my fathers! I will thwart her, or she shall rue the
day when she dared to hatch domestic treason, and plot murder
under trust. But I will thwart her.”
She spoke rapidly, and in a low, muttered tone, but with fierce
emphasis, and fiery eyes full of vindictive anger; and as she
ended her soliloquy, she too plunged into the deep woods, in a
direction nearly parallel to that taken by Agnes Vernon, but
pointing more directly toward the manor-house; and was
speedily lost amid the shadowy glades, while the little summer-house
was left all silent and untenanted, amid the cold, clear
moonlight, and the calm stillness of the summer-honse.
Meanwhile the wretched woman hastened with fleet steps
homeward. She had already threaded the greater part of the
woodland path which led somewhat circuitously through the
plantings to the open park, and she might see already the
moonlight sleeping calm and serene on the smooth grassy lawns,
beyond the opening of the bowery walks in which she stood
secluded, as if within a vault of solid verdure, when a quick,
sudden rustling of the bushes, violently parted by the passage
of some body in quick motion, startled and in some sort alarmed
her. But almost instantly she rallied from her half-conceived
apprehension, as she reflected how near she was to the house,
and how little chance there was of any real danger within the
precincts of her own park.
The sound, moreover, ceased as suddenly as it commenced,
and she laughed with a low, musical laugh at her own fruitless
fear, muttering to herself: “It was a deer only, or perhaps a
timorous hare or rabbit startled from its form, and I, fool that I
can reach me here.”
“Adulteress and liar!” exclaimed the hoarse voice which
she had heard before, now close at her elbow; and at the same
instant that tall, gaunt, sinewy woman started from the thick
coppice and confronted her, barring her homeward path, and
bending on her eyes of deadly and revengeful wrath.
“Adulteress and liar!” she repeated, clutching the delicate
and slender wrist of Agnes in her own vulture-like, iron talons,
while with the other hand she drew a pistol from her girdle,
cocked it, and levelled it within a hand's breadth of her head.
“There is danger here; and even here shall God's vengeance
find thee. Down on thy knees, I say, down on thy knees,
wanton, down on thy knees, accursed murderess of thy wedded
lord, and make thy peace with Heaven, for with the things of
earth thou hast done for ever.”
“What have I done to thee, that thou shouldst slay me — me
who have never seen thee before, much less wronged thee?”
asked Agnes, faltering now in mortal terror, for she recognised
in the harsh, croaking tones which she now heard, the voice
which had broken off her guilty interview with Bentinck in the
hermitage, and doubted not that this singular and terrible old
woman was cognizant of all her crimes, and capable of revealing
all her hidden projects.
“Much!” — cried the fierce old enthusiast, “much hast thou
done already against my cause — for the cause of the true church
and the rightful king is mine — much hast thou done already,
traitress and murderess, and much more wilt do, if I cut not
off at once thy crimes, and thy thread of being. Wilt thou
pray, woman, wilt thou pray, I say, or wilt thou die in thine
impenitence, and so go down to hell with all thy sins rankling
on thy soul, unconfessed and unshriven?”
“It is too late!” replied the wretched girl, now terribly
the strange woman to be mad, and perhaps fancied that
by boldness she could overawe her. “It is too late! — but if
it were not so, and I were all that thou hast called me, who
constituted thee mine accuser, my judge, and my executioner?”
“He who made all things, who seeth all things, and who
hath set his law on high, that all who run may read it, even
the law of blood for blood. Pray, I say, pray, adulteress, for
this day thou diest.”
Agnes Vernon closed her eyes in despair, expecting to receive
the death-shot in her face from the close levelled weapon
of the fanatic, when the shrill, savage bay of a deer greyhound
smote her ear with tidings of near help, and at the same time
the voices of men nigh at hand.
Hitherto she had been silent, fearing by her cries, that she
should only irritate the maniac and precipitate her action, without
procuring assistance, but now she screamed aloud in mortal
terror, for the click of the pistol lock had fallen on her sharpened
ear, and she felt that she had, indeed, but an instant to
live, if aid came not.
“It is my lady's voice,” cried one of the men, a keeper, or
wood-ranger. “Forward, Hugh, forward, Gregory, to the old
horn-beam walk.” But swiftly as they hurried forward, they
would have come too late, had not a swifter foot and more
vigorous ally rushed to the rescue.
With a repeated yell, a large wire-haired, dun-colored deer
hound burst through the coppice, and springing at the woman's
arm, caught the sleeve of the coarse jacket which she wore,
in his strong teeth. He bore down her hand, and the levelled
weapon which went off harmlessly in the struggle; when the
enthusiast, seeing that she could not effect her purpose, turned
to escape, and Agnes, who by no means desired her capture,
called off the dog, as if for her own protection.
“In God's name, my lady, what has harmed thee?” cried a
rough woodman, bursting upon the scene, with his loaded musketoon
in his hand; “we were out seeking thee, even now.”
A highly ornamented bracelet had fallen from her arm in the
struggle, and lay on the green sward at her feet, glittering in a
stray moonbeam, which had found its way through a chink in
the verdant arch overhead, and this suggested to her quick wit
a ready answer.
“A robber — a ruffian!” she replied; “a strong, armed man,
disguised as a woman. See, he tore off my jewels, and would
have murdered me, but for my brave and faithful Bran,” and
therewith she caressed the great, rough dog, which, in truth,
had preserved her. “Follow him quickly, Hugh, and see you
shoot him dead at once! Seek not to make him prisoner, he
is a desperate villain, and it will cost life to secure him. Shoot
him dead, I say, on the sight. I will be your warranty, and
you, Gregory, go with me home. I had lost my way in the
wilderness, and got belated, when this rude wretch assaulted
me, and would have slain me.”
The men scarcely paused to hear her out; two of them
plunging into the underwood in pursuit, while the third accompanied
her toward the hall, leading the fierce hound in a leash,
and carrying his carabine cocked in the other hand.
Before they had gained the open park, the loud report of
one, and then of a second shot, came ringing from the woodlands,
and a thrill of mingled horror and exultation, rushed
through her veins, as she muttered between her teeth — “Now!
now! they have dealt with her, and I have well escaped this
peril, and the witness of my shame lives no longer.”
But the guilty woman reckoned without her host, for she
had not long arrived at the hall, before the men returned, saying
that they had failed to apprehend or kill the fugitive, owing
to the darkness of the woods, and his speed of foot, although
wounded, since they had found much blood both on the
leaves of the bushes, and on the ground, where they had fired.
Be that, however, as it might, no more was heard of the
stranger; and on the third day thereafter Sir Reginald returned,
absorbed as usual in the details of the rebellion, and all unsuspicious
of his faithless wife; and then, over the heads of the
plotters and counterplotters, the days rolled on serene and tranquil,
toward the appointed time, and toward that end, which
though many fancied they could see, one alone saw and knew,
and He, from the beginning.
3. PART III.
That the blow may be both swift and steady
Feels if the axe be sharp and true
Since he set its edge anew.”
— Parisina.
Swiftly, indeed, those brief days fled away; and not a
thought of trouble or regret came over the strong mind of Sir
Reginald Vernon.
His part was taken, his line had been laid down from the beginning,
and acting as he did on what he was convinced to be
the road of duty, he was not the man to shrink at the moment
of execution.
He was, moreover, so thoroughly satisfied that the cause of
the Stuarts would prevail, and “the king enjoy his own again,”
that he was untouched by those anxious and sad forebodings
which often almost shake the firmness of the bravest breasts,
when setting forth upon some desperate or dubious enterprise.
He had, it is true, taken precautions in case of the failure of
this done, except some natural doubts regarding the chances of
his own life, on which he looked, as brave men ever will look,
sanguinely, he was prepared to set forth on a campaign against
the established government, with as little dread concerning his
return home, as if he were about to ride out only on a hunting
match.
Between himself and Agnes, there had never existed any
very rapturous or romantic relations, and these had long, in so
far as they ever had existed, subsided into the mere commonplaces
of every-day, decorous, married life. The wily girl had,
moreover, affected so much enthusiasm for the cause of church
and king, the better to confirm him in the prosecution of his
mad schemes, that it cost her little to veil her delight at his departure,
under the disguise of zealous eagerness for the restoration
of the right line.
And never, perhaps, had the unhappy and doomed man so
much admired the beautiful being to whom he was so fatally
linked as when he saw her, on the eve of his departure, with
the white rose in her beautiful fair hair, the chosen emblem of
their party, infusing hope and courage into the meanest of the
tenantry, and adding fresh spirit to the ardor and enthusiasm
of the catholic gentry by her brilliancy, her beauty, and her
indomitable spirits.
Perhaps, indeed, it was fortunate for the guilty woman, that
from the instant of her husband's return home to that of his departure,
the hall was one constant scene of tumult and excitement,
for had it been otherwise it would have been difficult indeed,
for her to have maintained the disguise she had adopted,
or to have blinded her husband, unsuspicious as he was to the
real motives of her joy.
But he was accompanied when he came by a large party of
the Jacobite gentry, and others kept flocking in continually to
be thrown aside altogether, since it was known that the prince
had beaten the first force of regulars sent against him, and captured
Perth, and been promoted regent of England, Ireland,
and Scotland.
Honeywood's dragoons, the only troops in that part of the
country capable of opposing them on their first rising, had, it was
well known, got their route, and marched to reinforce Cope, who
was moving northward to defend Edinburgh, unless Charles Edward
should intercept him; and this fact, added to the prestige
of a first success already gained by the rebels, decided them on
rising instantly, and raising the standard of rebellion, while the
absence of all regular troops, and the dissafection of the northern
militia, should the lord lieutenant attempt to call them out,
set aside all apprehension of their being interrupted, until such
time as their raw levies should be disciplined.
On the appointed morning, therefore, among the flourish of
trumpets, the discharges of a few light field-pieces, and reiterated
shouts of “God save King James,” the white standard
was hoisted, and civil war proclaimed — God grant it may be
for the last time — in England. Above a thousand men were
collected under arms, of whom nearly half were horse, admirably
mounted, thoroughly equipped, and familiar with the management
of their horses, though rather as grooms and huntsmen
than as dragoons or troopers. Still they formed as good a material
as could be desired for the composition of a light cavalry
corps, they were officered by gentlemen, many of whom had
served, and all of whom were skilful in the use of their weapons.
They were full of spirit, and confident in their prowess,
and the valor of their leaders.
Many ladies were present, most of whom, like the fair hostess,
had donned the white rose for Stuart, and wore white
cockades at their bosoms; nor though the ladies Lucy and
were personally attached to the reigning dynasty, did they disdain
to look upon the muster, although they had not assumed
the emblems of the party, much less to talk soft nonsense and
make sweet eyes at the younger and handsomer of the tory
leaders.
Thus matters stood at Vernon in the Vale, on the morning
of the celebrated rising of the '45; and although Agnes was
apprized already that her hopes of betraying and cutting off the
whole party, together with her hated husband, had been thwarted
by the unavoidable call of the dragoons to the north, she
was yet in unusual spirits, for she had no belief in the possibility
of success to the rebels' cause; no fear that Sir Reginald
would escape either the soldier's sword, or the headsman's axe;
and little cared she by which he should fall, so his death should
restore her to liberty.
And hence, never did she look lovelier, or move more gracefully,
or speak more charmingly, than when she bade adieu to
her gallant lord, and saw him with his brave, misguided followers,
set foot in stirrup and ride proudly northward, with banners
to the wind, and music on the summer air.
As Agnes stood on the terrace, with her blue eyes sparkling
with a strange unnatural light, her cheeks flushed crimson, her
glowing lips apart, her whole frame seemingly expanded and
alive with generous enthusiasm, waving her embroidered kerchief
to the parting cavaliers, Maud Gisborough gazed upon
her with a feeling she had never felt before.
It was in part admiration, for she could not but see and confess
her surpassing loveliness; in part, it might be, envy, for
she knew her her own superior in womanly attractions — but it
was something more than this, it was something between wonder
and fear. For she saw now, that there was something
deeper and stronger in the character of her friend, than she
not all right with her.
Maud Gisborough was a light, vain, giddy girl; but the
world and its flatteries or its follies had not corrupted a naturally
good heart, so far that she could not distinguish good from
evil.
She had long perceived, with the quickness of a woman in
all matters relative to the affections, that Agnes Vernon did not
love her husband with that sort of love, which she would have
looked to give and to inspire in a married life. Perhaps, she
half suspected that she did love her brother, Bentinck Gisborough;
but she did not imagine, that there was anything guilty
or dishonorable in that love; that it had ever gone beyond feelings,
and those innocent and Platonic, much less found vent in
words and deeds of shame.
But now a light shone upon her understanding, and she began
to see much which she had not thought of before. And it
was under the impression of such an impulse or instinct, call it
as you will, that she turned to her suddenly, and said in a low
voice, half blushing as she spoke:—
“You are a strange person, Agnes Vernon. One would
think to see you now, so joyous and excited, that you were on
the point of gaining a lover, rather than running great risk of
losing a husband.”
There are moments when the heart is attacked so suddenly,
when overloaded with strong passion, that the floodgates of reserve,
nay, of common prudence, are thrown open on the instant;
and the cherished secrets of the soul, guarded with
utmost care and anxiety for years, are surrendered at the first
call, nay, even without a call, and a life's labor cast to the
winds by the indiscretion of a minute.
Great criminals, who have laid their plans with the extremest
ingenuity, who have defied the strictest cross-examinations,
fault, and their guilt disbelieved through a long course of years,
have, at some chance word of an infant, or at the gossipping
of an old woman, betrayed the secret causelessly, and sent
themselves, by their own act and impulse, to the scaffold, thus
giving rise to the old adage, quos deus vult perdere, prius dementat.
But such is far from being the result or consequence of madness;
showing much more the intense operation of the mind,
than the lack of it. Be this, however, as it may, such a moment
was this with Agnes Vernon; and to the half-casual, half-intended
words of her lover's sister, she replied on the instant:
“It may be that you are right, girl. The gaining of a lover
and the losing of a husband, are not always events so far removed
as you may have imagined.”
“Good faith, Agnes,” replied the other; “I never have imagined
anything about it. It seems to me it were my first essay
to get a husband, not to think how to lose one. But you
are jesting with me, Agnes, for presuming to talk to a staid,
married lady like yourself, about husbands.”
For a few minutes, Agnes Vernon was silent, more than
half aware that she had partially betrayed herself; but, whether
the impulse was too strong for her, or whether she was led
on by the confidence that it was Bentinck's sister to whom she
spoke, after a pause she answered: —
“Take heed, dear girl, take heed, I beseech you, ere you do
get one; for this world has many miseries, but none so dreadful,
I believe, as to be linked to a husband whom you hate!”
“Whom you hate, Agnes! God forbid such a thing were
possible! You do not mean to say that it is so with you?”
“Not so! — not so with me! with whom then should it be
so? Heaven alone knows, how I loathe, how I detest that
man —”
“But wherefore, Agnes? what has he done to you, that you
should so detest him?”
“What rather has he not done to me? Did he not come
and claim me, when I was a girl — a mere girl — a happy girl,
in London — and tear me away from all whom I loved, all who
loved me, and drag me down to these doleful woods here in the
north; and chill me with his stately, stern, cold-blooded, heartless
dignity, till he has turned all my young, warm, healthful
blood, into mere stagnant puddle; till I have been for years as
hopeless as himself, if not as heartless. But Heaven be praised
for it, Maud, there is a good time coming.”
She stopped abruptly, whether she felt that she had gone too
far already, or that the fiery spur which had goaded her to such
strange revelation, had grown cold; and the quick light faded
from her eye, and the flush paled from her cheek, and she let
her head droop upon her bosom, and clasped her hands together,
and wrung them for a moment vehemently.
But Maud Gisborough gazed on her with a cold, fixed eye,
and answered nothing; that conversation had made the gay
girl older by half a lifetime, and more thoughtful than she
would, in any probability, ever have been otherwise.
“I do not understand you, Agnes,” she said, at length, still
gazing upon her with that cold, grave, unsympathizing eye.
“I am not sure that I wish — that I ought — to understand you.
I am going to my sister.”
“God help me,” cried the miserable woman; “I do not know
that I understand myself.”
But Bentinck's sister paused not, nor looked back, but crossed
the terrace, passed through the great hall, ascended the staircase,
and rushing into her sister's chamber, where she sat in
her loose, brocaded dressing-room, reading a light French novel,
while her French fille-de-chambre was brushing the marechal
stunned and bewildered.
“What ails you, Maud?” cried the elder sister, a sharper and
far more worldly girl, “what ails you? have you seen a ghost, that
you look so pale and terrified? give her a glass of the camphor-julep,
Angelique.”
“No! no,” replied the younger girl, waving aside the proper
stimulant. “No, no; leave us a while, good Angelique, I must
speak with my sister, alone.”
“Mais, mon Dieu!” said the cunning French waiting-woman,
with a shrug, “apparement, miladi Maud has found out she has
got one leetle heart of her own, for somebody or oder.”
“Is it so, sis?” said Lucy, laughing at the girl's flippant
impudence, “and have you found a heart, or lost one? But, no,
no,” she continued, alarmed at the increasing paleness of Maud's
pretty features, “it is something more than this. Leave us,
Angelique, and do not return until I ring the bell. Now, Maud,
what is it, little, foolish sister?”
“Lucy,” replied the other, faltering a little in her speech, for
she scarce knew how what she was about to say would be received,
“this is no place for us any longer; nor is Agnes any
companion for us.”
“What do you mean, Maud? Have you gone mad all on a
sudden?”
“You can not conceive, how frightfully she has been talking,
since the gentlemen rode away to join the prince. She
told me in so many words, that she loathed and detested Sir
Reginald; and almost said that she hoped ere long to lose him,
and to get a new lover; and if I do not very greatly err, she
means our brother Bentinck. I do believe she loves Bentinck,
Lucy.”
“Ha! ha! ha! Do you, indeed, believe so, innocent, little
you make me laugh, upon my word and honor. Why, I have
known they loved each other since the first week we were
here. I have seen him kiss her and clasp her in his arms, a
dozen times, when they did not dream that I was near; and she
meets him every evening in the woods somewhere. I am sure
she was with him that night, too, on which she made such an
outcry against some person, who she said, had robbed her. No
such thing! Some one might have detected them together, and
threatened to expose her; and so she wished to have him put
out of the way, whoever it was, to preserve her secret. Bless
you, I saw it with half an eye — I have known it all along. You
are certainly either very innocent, sis, or a very great hypocrite
— one of the two.”
“Very innocent, I hope, Lucy,” replied the girl, blushing
deeply. “I have heard of such things in the great world, but
never thought to see them. What a wretch she must be! and
how wicked of Bentinck, too, and she a married woman! We
must leave her, Lucy — we must leave this place to-morrow.”
“I think so, Maud, dear,” answered the other, still laughing
and bantering; “and, indeed, it was determined a week since,
that we should do so. It is Bentinck's desire; and he wrote
to Hexham, about it before leaving for his regiment — but not,
Maud, darling, because our hostess is a little fie! fie! but because
it will not do for such loyal folk as we to stay in the
house of a proclaimed rebel. Now, do n't be foolish, Maud, I
tell you. You must be very civil to her while we stay here,
and keep your little lips close shut about her naughtinesses; —
in the first place, because you can not speak of them without
getting Bentinck into trouble; and, in the next, because, if anything
happens to Sir Reginald, she is to have all this fine place
and property, and when she gets her right love, her first love —
you know, Maud, dear, she was to have married Bentinck, till
charming sister-in-law!”
“Lucy! Lucy! how can you talk so! But you are not —
you can not be in earnest.”
“Indeed, I am perfectly in earnest, and I had no notion that
you were such a little simpleton. Why, such things happen
every day, and nobody thinks about it, or pays any attention to
them, unless they are found out, and a scandal comes of it.
We girls, I know, are not supposed to know anything about
such things, but we are not blind, or fools altogether; and you
are just as well aware as I am, that a dozen of the fine ladies
of the ton, at whose houses we visit, are not one whit better
than they should be, without taking our dear duchess of Kendal,
into consideration. So just keep yourself as quiet as you
may, and be very sure that as soon as tidings can arrive, we
shall hear from our brother, the earl, ordering us home to Hexham
castle. Now, if you take my advice, you 'll have a headache
this evening, and go to your own chamber, and to-morrow
forget all that has passed, and be just as friendly with this pretty
Agnes, as if nothing had been said. I will go down and
take my coffee with her tête-a-téte, if you will let me ring for
Angelique.”
“I will do as you bid me, Lucy,” replied the other, rising to
leave the room. “But believe me, I do n't like it the least, nor
do I think it will add anything to our fair reputations.”
“To make a scandal about it, would be certainly to destroy
them,” answered the wiser and more worldly sister. “For,
besides bringing down upon our heads the deadly hatred of all
the D'Esterres, and getting anything but thanks from our own
people, all the world say, `Those Gisborough girls know too
much by half,' and set it down to envy or ill-nature, or anything
but modesty or virtue. Believe me, Maud, it is better in
the world's eye to seem innocent, than to be so.”
At this moment the entrance of Mademoiselle Angelique put
an end to the conversation, and not long afterward, Maud left
her sister's chamber, and went to lie down, and think over the
differences between principle and practice, not altogether feigning
a headache.
But Agnes Vernon, after her brief, wild conversation with
her lover's sister, overcome by the excess of her own passions,
faint and exhausted, and agonized by the perception that the
crisis of her fate was at hand, and that if not speedily liberated
from her husband, by some strange catastrophe, detection and
disgrace must be her portion, though she had no blush for the
sin or the shame, was yet overwhelmed by the thought of the
open scandal, and of the world's undisguised scorn.
She could not conceal it from herself, moreover, that she had
already escaped very narrowly being convicted and exposed;
that her infamy was known to many of her own servants, she
had been made painfully aware within the last week, when a
waiting-woman whom she had reproved somewhat sharply for
lightness of demeanor, replied with a flippant toss of her head,
that she saw no reason, for her part, why poor girls had not as
much right to have sweethearts as great ladies; and more too,
seeing that they had no husbands; an insult which she was
compelled to pass in silence, not daring to provoke the vengeance
of the offender.
Nor was this the only risk she had run; for it must not be
supposed that the strange tale of the attempted robbery in the
park, on the night of her last interview with Bentinck, had escaped
the ears of her husband; and when he came to inquire
into the particulars, and heard her version of the story, Sir
Reginald shook his head gravely as he answered:—
“There is something very strange in all this, Agnes — something
which I do not understand. I hope you are not deceiving
me in anything, for I know the person very well, whom
you imagine, but a veritable woman; and although she is a very
singular person, and perhaps not altogether right in her reason,
she is certainly incapable of robbery, or I may add of injuring any
person connected with myself. She has been for many years
one of the trustiest messengers and go-betweens of our party.
Her faith was sorely tried and not found wanting during the
terrible '15, and from that day to this she has been the repository
of secrets, which, if divulged, would set half the noblest
heads in England rolling. She was born in the village at the
park-end, and was foster-sister to my grandmother. She married
a Scotch drover afterward, and went away with him into
the western Highlands, where some adversities befell her — it
was a dark tale — by which her brain became unsettled. She
believes herself to be endowed with second sight, and the country
people regard her as a witch, and dread her accordingly;
but she has not been seen in these parts for many years, coming
when she has had occasion to bring me tidings from the
leaders of our party, under the shadow of the night, and concealing
herself in a vault under the hermitage summer-house,
as it is called, near the waterfall, in the Wild Boar's glen, which
is known only to herself and me, of people now alive. She
had brought me a message on the morning of that day, when I
set forth with Bentinck Gisborough, and has again gone
northward. I shall see her with the army, and will then learn
more of this strange business. But as you love me, Agnes, if
she come here in my absence, suffer her not to be harmed or
interfered with. The lives of hundreds hang upon her tongue.”
No words can express the terror of the miserable wife, as
she learned that the witness of her crime was her husband's
trusted confidante, that he would see her before many days, and
learn unquestionably all that she would most willingly conceal.
There was, however, nothing to be done, and she had only to
in the field, or ere the fatal explanation should take place.
The remainder of his stay at Vernon in the Vale, was fraught
to Agnes with terror and agony most intense and unutterable.
She knew not at what moment the woman might return; she
had no one in whom she could repose the slightest trust, now
that Bentinck Gisborough was afar off with his regiment, and
she well knew that Sir Reginald, cold as he was, and impassive
under the ordinary course of events, was as stern and implacable
as fate itself, where his honor was concerned, and she
foreboded but too surely that the discovery of her guilt would
be the signal for punishment as sudden and as sure as heaven's
thunder.
It was with double ecstacy, therefore, arising from a twofold
cause, that she beheld him mount his horse, and ride away,
never, she trusted, to return.
His departure liberated her from an almost oppressive sense
of immediate peril; and she believed that he was running headlong
on his ruin.
It was under the impulse of her boundless sense of relief
and exultation, that she had given vent to her feelings so incautiously
as to alarm the vain and worldly mind of Maud Gisborough,
and thus, by her own act, she had incurred fresh peril.
Scarcely had Maud left the room, before she became aware
of her own imprudence, and with a vague wish to be entirely
alone, and to review her own position, where she could not be
interrupted — perhaps spurred on by one of those incomprehensible
impulses which seem to urge men to their fate — she took
her mantle and walked away, accompanied by the great deer-hound
which had rescued her before, toward the scene of her
sin and shame.
She soon reached the secluded bower, and entering it cast
herself down on the seat, and sat gazing on the waterfall, and
autumn, scarcely conscious what she was looking upon, so
wildly and unconnectedly did her mind wander over the past
and the present, and strive to unravel the future.
Had she not been in such a mood, she would soon have perceived
by the strangeness of the dog's demeanor that there was
something amiss, for from the moment he had entered the
alcove, he had not ceased to snuff at the crevices of the floor,
as if he scented something, with his eyes glaring and his bristles
erect along the whole line of his neck and shoulders, uttering
at times a low, short whine; until at length he went out,
and, after circling twice or thrice round the little building, laid
himself down at the mouth of the secret trap, and began scratching
violently with his forepaws, in which occupation he at last
became so furiously excited that he burst into a sharp and savage
crying.
This sound it was which first aroused Agnes from her stupor,
but as she stared about her with bewildered eyes, not
understanding what had occurred, a strange indistinct murmur
from below her feet, a faint groan, and a few half articulate
words reached her ears, and riveted her attention, while they
shook her very soul with terror.
The dog heard them too, for he began to bay with increased
fury, and it was not till after a second effort that she could
compel his silence.
Then followed a second, and a third groan, and then a hollow
and unearthly voice came up from the vaults below:—
“Help!” it cried, “help! Oh! in God's name, whoever
you are, help! I am dying — dying in agony of thirst and
famine.”
The words came forth at intervals, as if forced out by the
utmost effort only, with agony indescribable, and were accompanied
with deep racking sighs that seemed to announce a human
An impulse, stronger than her terrors, almost unnatural, urged
her on, though she more than half suspected who was the
speaker. She flew to the trap, seized the dog by the collar,
and tied him with her scarf to an oak sapling which had shot
up in the shadow of the old tree.
Then, after a little effort, she found the spring by which the
door was opened, lifted it, and gazed unconsciously into the
dark cavernous vault, feebly illuminated by the ray of light, half
interrupted by her own figure, which fell into it through the
doorway. It was a moment or two before she could distinguish
objects in the gloom, but as her eyes became accustomed to the
obscurity, she made out the figure of the woman she most
dreaded lying on the bare floor, emaciated to the last degree,
with the dews of death already on her sallow brow. A quantity
of dry clotted gore on the pavement and on her dress explained
the cause of her inability to move thence, as an empty
flask lying near her head, and one of her shoes cut into fragments
and partially eaten, told the extremity to which she had
been reduced in the last week by famine.
“Heaven be thanked!” she muttered as the feeble light fell
upon her glaring eyes. “There is yet time; water, for holy
love, fetch me water.”
“But will you not betray me, if I save you?” — faltered the
wretched Agnes, moved by the sight of so much horror, to the
one soft spot which must remain in the heart, even of the most
depraved of women. “Will you swear to preserve my secret,
if I save you — will you swear it? —”
She spoke quick and short, and in a voice rendered husky by
the intenseness of her excitement.
Then and not till then did the dying woman recognise her,
— “Ah —” she cried — “it is she — the adulteress — the harlot!
floor, from which she had half raised herself under the influence
of renewed hope, and the presence of ready succor.
“No, no, not lost —” cried Agnes eagerly — “not lost, but
saved, if you will swear to be silent —”
“Never!” cried the woman, “never, I will die, sooner.”
“Then die you must,” returned Agnes, shuddering between
the horror of her own purpose, and her dread of the consequences
of her enemy's recovery, “for I can not save you to be
my own destruction.”
“Water, for God's sake! but one drop of water.”
“Swear; and you shall have water, wine, food, surgical advice,
all that wealth can procure, all that the human heart can
desire — only swear, swear, I implore you,” and she clasped
her hands beseechingly, “and let me save you.”
“I must die, then,” muttered the woman hoarsely, “but not
alone — you too, adulteress, you too!” and with a sudden effort
of expiring strength, she raised one of her pistols, levelled and
discharged it at the head of Agnes. The bullet whistled close
beside her, but without harming her; it just grazed, however,
the haunch of the greyhound, who chanced to be in the line of
the aim, and who was struggling already fiercely against the
leash which held him. At the wound he made a yet more violent
spring, and loosening the knot of the scarf, dashed forward
with a fierce yell, leaped over the prostrate form of Agnes, who
had fallen back in terror at the shot, and plunged down headlong
upon his old antagonist.
There was an awful and confused struggle — a mixture of
fierce snarls and broken gasping groans, and before Agnes could
reach the spot — thoughwinged by horror and mercy she rushed
almost with the speed of light, into the area of the fatal vault —
all was over.
But the fierce dog was still nuzzling and crunching the throat
effort that the terrified lady dragged him from his victim,
and led him, licking his bloody chops, and growling angrily, up
the low steps from that scene of horror. She dared not look
back for a second on the multilated corpse, but closed and secured
the trap, with trembling fingers, and fled, pale and haggard,
through the green woods homeward. Haggard and pale,
and with a sense of indistinct blood-guiltiness upon her soul,
though not in the very deed guilty — for when she questioned
her own heart, she was forced to confess to herself that she
would have left the woman there to die alone and untended,
had not the savage hound anticipated her design with unintended
mercy — she felt that the very joy she felt at the death
of her worst enemy, was the joy of the successful murderess.
No wonder that gay Lucy Gisborough found her tête-à-tête
with her handsome hostess insufferably dull, and wondered
what had become of all the light, joyous mirth, and hairbrained
excitement, which were her characteristics, and which, until
now, had never failed her.
Both ladies, in a word, were thoroughly dissatisfied, one with
the other; and it was a relief to both when the hour for retiring
came; nor did it seem other than satisfactory to all parties,
when on the morrow morning, even before the early hour at
which our unsophisticated forefathers of those days were wont
to breakfast, a special courier arrived from Hexham castle, the
bearer of a message from the earl to his fair sisters, that they
should return home with all speed, and of a letter to the lady
Vernon, full of regrets and condolence, that Sir Reginald should
have taken so rash a step as to join the misguided gentlemen,
who had taken up arms for the chevalier (the earl of Hexham
was by far too shrewd a courtier to style a prince, who
within a few months might be king — even although he espoused
the other side — by the odious title of pretender), and
house of a gentleman, who howsoever the earl might privately
respect and esteem him, had yet been proclaimed a rebel.
Hereupon, with a multitude of kisses and protestations, the
ladies parted, all, to say the truth, excellently well pleased to
part; for there never had been any bond of union between them,
except in the person of the now absent major of dragoons; and
Agnes was left to solitude and the insatiate restlessness of her
own over-boiling passions, incessantly craving the presence of
the one loved object of her every thought.
Her children were little company for her, and it seemed
almost as if her undisguised hatred for their father was fast ripening
into a confirmed dislike of them also.
Society she had none, for the secluded habits and grave demeanor
of her husband had deterred the neighboring families
in the first instance from forming intimacy with the stern baronet
and his beautiful wife; and latterly, the increasing rumors
— though secretly whispered only — concerning the looseness
of the lady's conversation, had operated yet more as a decided
bar against her.
She went forth now but seldom, never beyond the precincts
of the park, and passed the most of her time in dark and moody
musings, most unlike to the old levities of her former life.
Only at one time did she arouse herself from this gloom,
which was fast growing habitual to her, and that was when
tidings arrived from the army of Charles Edward's progress
southward, relating the deeds, the victories of his followers,
the wounds, the death, the glory of those who fell in the arms
of triumph.
Then something of their old fire would kindle her blue eyes,
of their ancient brilliancy flush crimson to her pallid cheeks.
A quick, nervous restlessness would agitate her whole frame,
and mark her whole demeanor.
But all this would subside again into the original, cold, and
deathlike quietude, when the despatches were once perused,
and she had learned that her own fate was unaltered — for what
to her mattered the fate of empires.
At first, and for many a day, the tidings were all prosperous
to the prince's faction — first, he had taken Edinburgh, on the
19th of September, and then a few days later he had defeated
Cope at Preston Pans, where Honeywood's dragoons had distinguished
themselves by falling into a sudden panic at the
sight of the highlanders, and running away in spite of all their
officers could do, as fast as their horses could carry them, full
thirteen miles from the field of battle.
Sir Reginald, who had joined the prince, after defeating a
detachment of horse sent to intercept himself, had distinguished
himself greatly, and been slightly wounded in the action.
He wrote in great spirits, and with more show of affection
toward his wife than he had of late manifested toward her, and
congratulating himself on the idea of seeing her a countess ere
a year had passed, the prince having promised to revive an ancient
earldom, which had long been in abeyance, in favor of his
brave supporter.
This letter was rewarded by the faithless wife, so soon as
she was left alone, and its contents thoroughly perused, by being
torn indignantly to atoms, and trampled under foot in a paroxysm
of scorn and fury.
A few days after this she received a visit from her lover, at
the head of a squadron of dragoons, who was now in full retreat
for England, before the victorious armies of the prince,
who was advancing by forced marches into Cumberland. He
came under the pretext of searching for arms and papers, but
in reality, to snatch a few moments of guilty consolation for defeat
from his abandoned paramour, who received him with undisguised
and rapturous affection.
Scarcely a month afterward siege was laid to Carlisle by the
pretender; and after a few days it surrendered to his army,
and with a joyous and triumphant party of his friends and companions,
Sir Reginald Vernon visited the house of his fathers,
eager once more to embrace his beautiful wife and beloved
children.
All was enthusiastic joy and loud triumph. Nothing was
spoken of but an uninterrupted march to London, but a succession
of victories and glories, crowned by the coronation of the
king at Westminster, before the old year should have given
birth to the new.
It was with difficulty and disgust that the wife submitted to
his caresses, the more odious now, that they were aggravated
by his joy, which she termed insolence, and by his success,
which seemed to prostrate the dearest of her hopes. And had
it not been for the revelry and merriment which rendered the
stay of the chevalier's adherents at Vernon in the Vale almost
one continued scene of tumultuous enthusiasm, her husband
could scarce have failed to discover the total alienation of her
feelings.
The only pleasure she tasted during his visit, was his assurance,
that Mabel M`Farlane never having been heard of since
the night of her attack on Agnes, he was well assured that she
had become entirely demented, and during some paroxysm of
insanity had been guilty of the outrage, in consequence of
which she had probably come to her end.
After a brief sojourn, Sir Reginald rejoined the highland
host; and full of high anticipations never to be fulfilled, and
joyous dreams soon to be changed for tears and lamentations,
their proud array took their way southward. For a time longer,
victory still clung to their footsteps. Manchester, with all
the catholic gentry of its ancient county, received the prince
with open arms; and Derby saw his gallant ranks defile, and
gateways.
But there was the limit of his success, the term of his progress.
Thence his retreat commenced, and with retreat, ruin—
for after he had turned his back to the capital, not a man in all the
kingdom looked upon his success as possible, or did not augur his
discomfiture. Within a little more than two months after their
triumphant passage through Carlisle, faint, hopeless, and dispirited,
the army of the unfortunate pretender retreated again through
that old city; but this time so speedy was their transit that Sir
Reginald found no time to visit Vernon in the Vale, merely acquainting
his wife by a brief and desponding letter, that he was
resolved to adhere to the last to the fortunes of Charles Edward,
and since revenge and victory had been denied to him, at
least to die for the noble cause which he had adopted.
A week had not elapsed, before the cavalry of the duke of
Cumberland came up in hot pursuit, thundering on the track of
the rebels, and again Bentinck Gisborough found time for a few
hours of dalliance with his once more exulting mistress.
The parting gleam of victory of Falkirk shed a last lustre
upon the prince's arms, but availed him nothing, and the retreat
was continued so far as to Culloden, where the highland array
was utterly and irretrievably defeated, the rebellion crushed, the
hapless chief a fugitive, literally pursued with bloodhounds
through the fastnesses of his hereditary kingdom, the birthplace
of his royal lineage, and all his brave adherents flying with a
price on their heads, from the vengeance of the house of
Hanover.
The energy and talent which Sir Reginaled Vernon has displayed
throughout the whole insurrection, would alone have
entitled him to the undesirable eminence of especial guiltiness
above all the rebels, but when to this were added the consideration
that he had been actuated even more by hostility to the
any loyalty to the Stuarts, and the secret instigations of the
house of Gisborough, actuated by Bentinck, it was soon understood
that whosoever else might be spared, no mercy would be
shown to Vernon, of Vernon in the Vale.
Meanwhile the prince escaped after incredible fatigues and
hardships. Of his brave adherents, too many perished by platoons
of musketry under the martial law; too many on the
bloody scaffold, victims to a mistaken and disastrous loyalty —
a few escaped, and when vengeance was satiate of blood, a sad
remnant received pardon and swore allegiance to the king.
But of Sir Reginald Vernon no tidings had been received
since in the last charge of Honeywood's dragoons at Culloden,
he was seen resisting desperately to the last, till he was unhorsed,
cut down, and left for dead upon the plain. His body
was not found, however, on the fatal field, and none knew what
had befallen him; but it was generally supposed that he had
escaped from the field only to die in some wretched and forlorn
retreat among the inaccessible fastnesses of the Highland hills.
His name was fast sinking into oblivion, and was remembered
only by his wife, when she congratulated herself on her
liberation from his detested power.
The winter had passed away, and flowers of spring had given
way to the more gorgeous bloom of summer, and still nothing
had been heard of Sir Reginald. Pursuit had ceased after
the rebels. Peace had resumed its sway in the land; and once
more Bentinck Gisborough, and his elder sister Lucy, were
on a visit at Vernon in the Vale.
It will be remembered that Reginald had devised his estates
in trust to this very man, and the arrangement of this trust was
the pretext of the present visit. Lucy accompanied her brother
in order to play decorum, and prevent scandal concerning
the young widow — for such Agnes was now generally regarded,
the mourner for the fate of a husband, whom she now openly
spoke of as a cold, stern, selfish tyrant.
Ill success is a great accuser, a great condemner of the
fallen. And what between the fury of the country against the
vanquished rebels, by which it compensated its terror while
they were victorious, and the address and beauty of Agnes Vernon,
she had come to be regarded as a victim, in some sort, a
very charming, and greatly-to-be-pitied person — a beautiful, innocent
child, ill-assorted with a kind of public Catiline and
domestic Blue-Beard. And Lucy smiled, and jested, and
played the unconscious innocent, while her brother played the
villain, and her hostess the wanton, openly before her unblushing
face.
And the world had begun to whisper that it was a pity that
Sir Reginald's death could not be authenticated, that his widow
might find consolation for all her sufferings and sorrows, in a
more congruous marriage with the young officer who, it was
rumored, had been the first object of her wronged affections.
Such was the aspect of affairs, when late on a July evening,
while Lucy was gazing at the moon through the stained windows,
and Agnes and Gisborough were talking in an under
tone in the shadow of a deep alcove at the farther end of the
withdrawing-room, a servant entered with a billet which he
handed to the lady of the house, saying that it had been brought
in by one of the head forester's children, who had it from a
stranger he had met in the park, near the Wild Boar glen.
Agnes turned pale as she heard his speech, and a half shriek
burst from her lips, as her eyes fell on the handwriting.
It was from her husband, and contained these words only:
“Agnes: By God's grace I am safe thus far; and if I can
lie hid here these four days, can escape to France. On Sunday
night a lugger will await me off the Greene point, nigh the
of, with food and wine so soon as it is dark. Ever my dearest,
whom alone I dare trust.
“It is from him!” whispered Bentinck, so soon as the servant
had retired, which he did not do until his mistress had
read the letter through, and burned it at the taper, saying carelessly,
“It is nothing. A mere begging letter. There is no
answer to it. Give the boy a trifle, and send him home, Robinson.”
“It is from him, Agnes!” whispered Bentinck, in a deep
voice trembling with emotion.
Agnes replied by a look of keen, clear intelligence, laying
her finger on her lip, and no more was said at the time, for
Lucy had paid no attention to what was passing and asked no
question, and Gisborough took the hint.
After a while, however, when the stir created by this little
incident had passed over, she in her turn said carelessly in an
ordinary tone, not whispering so as to excite observation:—
“Yes! It is he, and he must be dealt withal.”
“Ay!” answered Bentinck. “Ay! but how?”
“You must not be here, Gisborough, the while; that is clear.
So order your horse and men for to-morrow morning, and ride
away toward York, or to Hexham, it were better, to your brother's,
and tarry there a week, saying naught of this to anybody.”
“Well? but what then? How shall the rest be done? or
who shall do it?”
“I!” replied the miserable woman, her eye sparkling with
fierce light, but her brow, her cheek, her lip, as white as ashes.
“I!”
“You! Agnes, you!” said her lover, half aghast at such
audacity and cruelty combined.
“Yes! I, infirm of purpose, I! — not with my hand though,
be taken — that we must kill or die. I prefer the former.”
“I will go,” answered Gisborough quickly; and perhaps not
sorry to be away from the spot during the acting of so awful a
tragedy, and to have no absolute participation in the crime. “I
will go, and order my horses now, and set forth at six o' clock;”
and he rose from his seat as if to go and give directions.
“Well, if you must go, I suppose it is better so,” she replied.
“Lucy,” she added, raising her voice, “Bentinck goes to Hexham
to-morrow, to see your brother upon business. Will you
not run up to your room, dearest, and write a few lines to Maud,
with my love, asking her to return hither with him for a few
weeks.”
“Surely, yes, Agnes,” answered the girl, hurrying to obey
her. “I shall be very glad, that is so kind of you.” And she
left the room quite unconscious of what was going on.
Gisborough gazed on his paramour with something between
admiration at her coolness, and disgust at her cold-blooded ferocity,
but the former feeling, backed by her charms, and his
own interests, prevailed.
He drew her toward him, whispering, “You are a strange
girl, Agnes. So soft and passionate in your love, so cold and
stern in your hatred.”
“And do you reproach me with it?”
“Reproach you? I adore you.”
“A truce to these raptures now. This is the time for council
and for action! this deed accomplished, I am yours, all and
for ever — now — where are the nearest soldiers, and of whose
corps?”
“At Edenhall. Ligonier's veteran foot. One company with
Captain de Rottenberg.”
“Enough!” she answered. And, after a few moments'
search in the drawer of a writing-table, she found a piece of
and scrawled some lines on it, in a coarse, masculine hand, ill-spelled,
and ungrammatical, acquainting the officer commanding
the detachment, that by searching the vault under the summer-house,
in the park of Vernon in the Vale, hard by the waterfall
in the Wild Boar's glen, he would secure a prize of importance,
and gain a high reward.
This she directed and endorsed with speed, in the same
manly hand. Then giving it to her lover: “When you are
ten miles hence, on the road to Hexham, let one of your men,
in whom you can place confidence, ride down to Alstone moor,
and forward it thence by express to Edenhall, post-haste. Let
the man use no names — tell him it is for a bet, or what you
will, to divert him — only let him forward it post-haste, and
then follow you direct to Hexham. Once there, invent some
cause to send him off to London, or to my father's it were better
in the New Forest, so all shall be over, or ere he return
again.”
“I will; I see, brave Agnes! clever Agnes!” and again he
gazed at her passionately. “I see; and when he shall return
—”
“His head shall have fallen,” the woman interrupted him,
“and we shall be one for ever — secure and unsuspected; now
leave me. I must go to him, and lull him to security. Fare
you well, and God bless you!”
Most strange that lips, which scarce an instant ago had syllabled
those bloody schemes of adultery and murder, should
dare to invoke a blessing from the all-seeing God. But such
and so inconsistent a thing is humanity.
And then, with fraud on her lips, and treason at her heart,
she went forth, and carried food and wine, comfort, and hope,
and consolation, and more, “the fiend's arch mock,” the unsuspected
caresses of a wanton, to her betrayed and doomed partner,
vault, that charnel-vault, wherein had rotted the mortal
relics of the slaughtered woman, whose bones yet lay bare on
the damp and mouldy pavement.
What passed at that interview, none ever knew. For terror,
if not shame, held her tongue silent, and his was soon cold in
death. Certain it is, however, that she did lull him into false
security; for, on the second morning afterward, when De Rottenberg's
grenadiers, obedient to the note of their anonymous
informer, surrounded the summer-house, and entered the vault,
they found Sir Reginald sleeping, and secured him without
resistance.
The course of criminal justice was brief in those days, and
doubly brief with one so odious to the government and the
country at large, as a Roman catholic rebel.
His trial quickly followed his apprehension; conviction, sentence,
execution, went almost hand to hand with trial, so speedily
did they succeed to it.
No hope of mercy was entertained by Sir Reginald from the
first. The obstinate adherence of his family to the hapless
house of Stuart, forbade that hope, and he made no exertions
to obtain it, neither hurrying rashly upon his fate, nor seeking
weakly to avoid it.
It was observed at the time as strange, that he constantly refused
to see his wife after his arrest, though he spoke of her
respectfully, and even affectionately, to his attendants, and sent
her his miniature, at last, by his confessor. Some attributed
this refusal to a sense of his own past unkindness, and to self-reproach
— others to a fear of compromising her with the government
— but whatever was the cause, he kept it to himself;
and died, with undaunted resolution, commending his soul to
his Maker, and crying with his last breath, “God save King
James!” — under all the appalling tortures which the law denounces,
against those guilty of high treason.
He died, the good, the gallant, the high-minded — a victim
not to disloyalty or wicked partisanship, not to ambitious and
self-seeking motives — but to a mistaken sense of right — a
misguided and blind loyalty to one whom he deemed his rightful
sovereign, to family traditions, and what he believed to be
hereditary duty.
He died — silent! and whether unsuspecting or unforgiving,
even the guilty and fiendish wife who sent him to the reeking
scaffold, slaying him by her thought and deed, as surely as if
she had stricken him with her own hand, though she might
doubt and tremble, never knew to her dying day.
So died, at Carlisle, in his prime of noble manhood, unwept
and soon forgotten, Reginald Vernon. Peace be to his soul!
Vice was triumphant, then, and virtue quite downfallen and
subdued with rampant infamy exulting over her. But the end
was not then. The race is not always to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong.
And so was it seen thereafter.
4. PART IV.
We still have judgment here; that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice
To our own lips.”
—Macbetr.
Ten years had flown from the day on which Reginald Vernon
died on the scaffold, devouring his own heart in silence.
Ten years! That is one-seventh part of the whole term of
human life, as it is laid down by the inspired writer; one-fourth
part nearly of that portion of existence in which maturity
both of mind and body permit of enjoyment in its largest and
most comprehensive sense. Ten years! Many and great
events are wont to happen even to the calmest and most everyday
individuals, events transforming their characters, altering
their very natures, raising them from the depths of misery and
wo, or on the other hand precipitating them from the pinnacle
of earthly bliss; — the death of friends, the defection of the
loved, the birth of children, the mutations of worldly fortunes,
the arrival of maturity, the approach of old age, the ravages of
disease, the shadow of death creeping across the dial premonitory
of his coming.
It is rarely indeed that ten years pass away over the head of
any human being, — unless it be the very humble and laborious
poor, whose life may be summed up in four words, to be born,
to toil, to suffer, and to die, — without leaving their impress indelible
either upon the features or upon the character. Happy
are they whose career is so moderate, whose course of life is
so innocent and tranquil, that their years glide away serene and
happy, or ere they have discovered that they are not still
young.
Ten years had rolled away, in storm and sunshine, over the
antique groves and time-honored mansions of Vernon in the
Vale, over the heads of its inhabitants; and all were still the
same, and yet how different. The very woods no longer wore
the same aspect, as the growth of the younger and the decay
of the more ancient trees had altered their outlines, let in sunlight
where there used to be dark shadows, and made deep
gloom where there used to be merry sunshine.
Buildings, perhaps, display the flight of time less than anything
else on the face of this transitory world, until extreme old
age and dilapidation has overtaken them. Still the old hall,
though not dilapidated, had taken a stride farther on the road
to ruin than the lapse of ten years should have warranted had a
master's eye overlooked it. The slated roof was overrun with
wild leeks and the yellow flowering stone-crop, the ivy had encroached
so far as to darken many of the windows, the swallows'
nests had accumulated under the eaves into great heaps
of rubbish, dank moss and lichens covered the neglected terraces,
and the grass grew rank among the stones of the courtyard.
Still it was not uninhabited or abandoned, for two or three
columns of smoke were worming their way slowly up into the
dull misty skies of November, and a few servants were seen
loitering to and fro, listless and inanimate, and seemingly but
half alive.
It was a melancholy, misty evening; the sere leaves lay
thick on the grass of the neglected lawns, the leafless boughs
of the great trees were groaning in the gusty night-wind, and
the solemn cawing of the homeward-bound rooks alone broke
the sad and chilling silence.
From one of the oriel windows of the withdrawing-room of
that old hall a solitary female figure was overlooking the melancholy
landscape, with an air as dark and in an attitude as
cheerless as the weather or the scenery.
A thin, emaciated, pallid female figure. The outlines of the
form still showed some traces, it is true, of grace and symmetry;
the gentle curve of the flexible throat, the soft fall of the
shoulders, the pliability of the waist, the delicate smallness of
the hand, the foot, the ankle, are things which do not pass away,
and these were still visible in the wreck of faded, frozen beauty.
All else was angular, and hard, and dry, as if the living woman
had been a mere skeleton overlaid with the parchment
skin of a mummy; in like manner, the features were still good,
but they were fleshless and attenuated, pinched and sharpened
almost into the likeness of a corpse.
The great blue eyes, once so soft and languishing, or so full
of vivid and speaking fire, retained their size indeed, nay, in
the general shrinking of all else they looked preternaturally
wide and open; but they were cold and stony as the carved orbits
of a marble statue, that have no speculation in them.
Her bosom heaved and fell with a quick, painful motion, as
if every breath was drawn with exertion and anguish. One
thin hand, which rested on her knee, was beating it with a nervous,
restless movement of which she evidently was unconscious.
Her hair, of old so luxuriant and of so glossy and so
rich an auburn hue, was now thin and dead-looking, and
bleached to a dull flaxen whiteness, utterly unlike the bright
and beautiful silver which is so honorable to the head of respected
age.
That wasted, withered figure was all that time had spared
of the once lovely, once voluptuous Agnes Vernon!
“Time!” said I — “what had time to do with that swift,
noiseless, premature decay?”
She had not as yet seen her thirty-third summer, and hers,
when we saw her last, was a frame that promised increased
vigor, health, luxuriance, beauty, as she should advance toward
maturer years and riper womanhood.
Time, we lay upon thy shoulders and broad wings many a
load which should be laid to the charge of our own secret sins
and withering passions. Excess of body, agony of mind, are
greater sowers of gray hairs on the head, deeper ploughers of
furrows on the brow of youth, than all the time that has
passed from the creation downward.
Time, thou wert guiltless of all this fair creature's swift decline
into the valley of sorrow — the valley of the shadow of
death; for such was the road which she was travelling, as the
most casual glance of the most careless passer could not fail
to see.
Yes! Agnes Gisborough was dying, and she knew it; but
she knew not whether she most wished to die from weariness
of the life present, or dreaded it from weariness of the life to
come.
Yes! Agnes Gisborough!
For hardly was the martyred rebel cold in the bloody cerements
of his untimely grave, before the youthful widow gave
herself and all her rich possessions to the choice of her young
heart, the partner of her secret sin, with the approval and amidst
the sympathizing joy of the selfish world.
The play was played out, and the great stake was won; then
followed a few months of wild rapture, of passion satiated, of
anticipation more than fulfilled, a few seasons of brilliant glitter
and blithe revelry in the gay scenes of the metropolis, and then
exhaustion, tedium, apathy, satiety, disgust.
I have wasted many words to little purpose, if I have not
made it evident that under all her lightness of exterior Agnes
had a secret well of immense energy and earnest passion, a
or evil — that she was one of those strangely constituted persons
who, as an Italian writer has paradoxically but not untruly
observed, demonstrated by the very atrocity of the crimes which
they commit, the perfection of their organization, and the greatness
of the virtues of which, under different circumstances, they
are capable.
She could not have hated so bitterly, had she not been capable
of loving devotedly; nay, more, she could not have hated
so bitterly, unless that very hate had been itself born of the
wrecks, the chaos of wronged, disappointed, and distorted love.
Detesting Reginald Vernon, she had no love for his children,
and she had devoted the whole intense energies of her affections
on a man utterly unworthy of appreciating her devotion,
utterly heartless, selfish, frivolous, and vain. The woman's necessity
— the necessity of loving something — was upon her,
and she had loved Gisborough, or rather the image of qualities
and attributes with which her fancy had invested him, with all
the depth of adoration which such a woman feels when she
does love indeed.
How terrible the extent of that love was can be estimated
only by the consideration of the atrocious crime of which she
had been guilty, and of the secret workings of the mind which
had goaded her on irresistibly to its commission; for she was
not hard or cruel by nature, nor had even the very perversion
of her passions rendered her so; on the contrary, she was joyous,
light-hearted, fond of pleasure, voluptuous, averse to pain
herself, and unwilling to inflict it on others. It can be conceived
what strange workings and self-deceptions of the secret
soul she must have felt ere such a one as she could be wrought
to the temper of the murderess.
It can be conceived what a self-imposed task and horror it
was that she bore, and what a struggle it cost her ere she
gave no outward sign at the time of the inward convulsion.
She believed that by that deed she had bound Bentinck Gisborough
to herself by bonds indissoluble, everlasting — bonds
of affection as of gratitude. She had given him more, perhaps,
than woman ever gave before or since, acquired at such a price
of blood and honor.
She had raised him from actual penury to enormous wealth;
for, the younger brother of a peer, not himself so rich as he was
lavish and expensive, he had speedily consumed his small patrimony
in fashionable dissipation, and possessed nothing whereon
to live but his commission and a host of debts, when she, with
her beautiful form, her ardent temperament, and her boundless
adoration, bestowed on him a life-interest in the immense incomes
and noble demesnes of Vernon in the Vale.
But cold-blooded, weak-spirited, and irresolute, and, in a
word, incapable of strong feeling or energetic action of any
kind, Bentinck Gisborough had never loved her except with the
short-lived passion of the voluptuary, extinguished almost as
soon as it is satisfied; and had it not been for the strange events
that followed, he would probably have quitted her soon after
winning her for the arms of a new beauty.
When he perceived, on Sir Reginald's taking arms against
the government, that he had a manifold chance of ere long succeeding
to the reversion not of his wife only, for whom he was
then in the first glow of guilty passion, but in the common
course of things, without any overt action of his own, much
less any crime, of his estates and treasure likewise, he persevered
and persisted until the matter was resolved as it was.
In truth, from that moment, instead of gratitude for the love
and adoration of the woman, he felt only horror for the crime,
and dread lest he should in turn be a victim to the violence of
her passions. His interests, however, prevailed, and in wealth
beauty and of her adoration, while it was new, he had drowned
his apprehensions for what he felt could not be termed remorse.
For a time, therefore, all went on merrily, if not well, and
she thought not of sorrow or repentance, enjoying the full glow
of the world's admiration, revelling in prosperity and pleasure,
and possessed, as she believed, of Gisborough's intense affection.
By degrees, however, the novelty of the situation passed
away, Bentinck grew negligent, inattentive, and — though she
knew not as yet or suspected that — faithless to her person,
and a follower of other beauties.
That was a coarse age, indelicate in its pleasures, unrefined
in its profligacy. Vice wore no veil at the orgies of her worshippers.
And ere long, Gisborough began to indulge constantly
in the lowest debauchery, often intoxicated, often gambling,
until the sun was high in heaven, and she was left alone
to her own thoughts.
Her own thoughts, and they were horror. Thence she began
to reflect, began to mope, began to pine. And when he
would at times feel some return of passion, she could not meet
his raptures, but was cold, abrupt, or reluctant.
The seeds of distrust and dislike were sown; they had taken
root, and they grew apace.
At length, how it needs not to relate, for such details must
ever be offensive to pure minds, she detected him in open infidelity
— and that with a woman whom he openly disliked and
despised — a woman no more to be compared with herself in
charms than Hyperion to a satyr.
At once, and with all the impetuosity of her nature, all the
vehemence of a woman wronged, all the intense and lacerated
passion of a benefactor ill-required, she taxed him with his ingratitude,
not tenderly and reproachfully, but with all the
roused fury of a woman scorned.
He replied coarsely, brutally, cruelly. He reminded her of
her own faithlessness to her late husband, and went so far even
as to tell her laughingly that they well understood one another
now, and he would give her carte blanche for her actions, if she
would extend the like privilege to him.
The paroxysm of almost frantic rage into which this cast
her, seemed only to excite his merriment at first; but when it
had lasted some minutes, and when she at length threatened
that she who had given could take away, out broke the secret
of his soul.
“Look you,” he said, “my lady. You can not terrify me
by your menaces, even though I know all of which you are capable.
I shall not go throw my neck into the noose, like that
fool Vernon, that you may choke me at your leisure — nor,
though I well believe you have the will to use knife or poison
on me, do I think you dare it. If you do, I am on my watch,
my lady, and on the first attempt, I hand you over to the Bow
Street people — do you understand me? That is the way to
treat a harlot and a murderess!”
She gazed at him while he was speaking, as if she was perfectly
stupified, and did not comprehend his meaning, but before
he had ceased, every sign of passion had passed away
from her face, and though as pale, she was as firm as a marble
statue.
“Bentinck Gisborough,” she said, “no more! You have
said enough. Together we can live no longer. I will go my
way to Vernon in the Vale, and live there alone with my memory.
Allow me what you will of that which was once my
own; enjoy the rest, after your own fashion. There has been
that between us, which, treat me as you will, will not make me
hate you — the memory of mutual happiness — perhaps even
the consciousness of mutual crime. Spare me more bitter
words, and with to-morrow's dawn I will return home — home
I will trouble you no more for ever. God help me, and forgive
you, Bentinck Gisborough — for if ever a woman loved a man
with her whole soul and spirit, even so did I love you. Answer
me not; now, fare you well for ever.”
Before he could reply, if he would have replied, she had
left the room; and before he had awaked from his drunken
sleep on the following morning, she was miles away from London
on her way to the north, with a single woman-servant as
the companion of her way.
At the first moment, he might have felt some small compunction,
but some of his gay companions came to seek him, and
new orgies and a deeper bowl washed away all remembrance
of that shameful scene. Her absence liberated him from a
restraint that had of late become almost insupportable, and he
soon rejoiced that he was rid of her power.
The only touch of feeling which he showed to one who had
loved so much, who had sinned and suffered so deeply, and all for
him, was that he allowed her more than an ample maintenance,
more, by two thirds, than she expended, in her altered state;
and even this was probably the thoughtlessness of an extravagant
and careless disposition, lavish of what he hardly valued,
rather than the result of any kind or generous sympathy: — of
those he was incapable.
Thenceforth, as she had said, she lived with her memories,
and what those memories were, her altered aspect, her blanched
hair, her nervous, almost timid bearing, testified.
She found her children at the hall, where they had been left
under the care of a trusty servant, during those two years of
wild dissipation at the capital. They were much grown, much
improved — but they knew not their mother, nor recognised the
voice of her that bore them.
But from that day forth, although she showed little of a
she became the most exemplary of mothers, as a guide,
as a teacher.
It was remarked often by those who observed what was
going on, that she behaved as if she were performing a duty
which had no pleasure in it; as if she were paying a debt, for
which she should receive no reward.
And it is very like that she herself felt thus; and if she did
feel thus, her feelings were forebodings, for she did reap no
reward in this world, and of the next we judge not.
The children grew in beauty, in excellence of form, and rare
quickness of intellect; and they had learned to love their calm,
kind, quiet monitress with an exceeding love, though very different
from the glad, joyous affection of ordinary children.
In the second summer of her return home, however, the little
girl was taken with a terribly contagious fever, which was raging
in the district, and in spite of all Agnes's care, who never
left the bedside till she too was stricken down by the disease,
she died delirious while her mother was insensible.
The wretched woman returned slowly to herself — she was
not destined to die — and saw by the black dresses of her attendants
that all was over. She asked no question, made no
sign, nor ever again spoke the name of her little Agens; but
when she regained her strength, devoted herself as before to
her now sole trust, the boy Reginald.
I should have stated that she persisted in refusing to see any
visiters, even the clergyman of the parish, who would fain have
called to console her. She never received the offices even of
her own church, nor would admit the good priest, who performed
in secrecy, at peril of his life, the services of religion
in the chapels of the parish gentry of the neighborhood more
than the episcopalian rector.
The boy was sent to church — to the protestant church —
knew that she ever prayed at all, or that she believed in any
creed, or had faith in any doctrine.
Thus things went on for some years, the mother pining
hourly and fading, and becoming every year more frail, more
gray, more taciturn, more wretched; the boy growing daily in
strength and beauty, in proficiency in manly sports and exercises,
in intellect and scholarship.
If ever boy gave promise of a noble manhood, it was he; and
he had now reached his twelfth summer. Nine years had
elapsed since the death of the late Sir Reginald Vernon,
and seven since the return of his mother from her short sojourn
in London with her second lord; and since that day Bentinck
Gisborough had never visited the hall, nor, with the exception
of a formal letter, covering a large remittance every
quarter, had he given any token to the inhabitants of that seclusion
that he was in life, or mindful of their existence.
Of his career, however, tidings were rife in that remote
rural solitude. The most desperate roisterer in England was
the once refined Bentinck Gisborough; a furious gambler, an
unsparing ruiner of female reputations, a duellist of deadly
skill.
But in this last year it was said that he had surpassed all
former violences, all the extravagances of past conduct; and it
was whispered that the bold impudence of his conduct with a
certain beautiful French countess, the wife of the embassador
of the day, was such that it had called forth the animadversions
even of royalty, and that he would not be able much longer to
brazen it out in the metropolis.
Retirement in the country, it was whispered, or a tour on
the continent, would soon be the only resources left to the
ruined Bentinck Gisborough.
One summer's afternoon, some twelve months previous to
on the darkening scenery of the park, she was walking out in
a distant part of the chase, without a servant, accompanying
her boy, who was mounted on a new pony, which she had
lately procured for him from London at great cost and trouble.
It was a beautiful and graceful creature, an Arabian full of
spirit and quick fire, but gentle and docile as it was eager and
high-blooded. The boy was an excellent and fearless rider,
and had been careering to and fro over the open lawns, now
diving into the dark groves and rousing the fallow deer from
their lairs, now returning at full speed to his mother's side, topping
the rugged fences as he came, and calling up a wan smile
on her faded lips by his enthusiastic spirit.
Suddenly she saw him reappear from one of the clumps into
which he had galloped, with his cap off, his horse frantic either
with pain or with terror, and a furious stag close in pursuit
goading the horse with its antlers.
They broke away across the open lawn, and plunged into an
avenue which she knew but too well. It was that leading to
the fatal Wild Boar's Glen, which she never had visited since
that night of horror. Now she rushed to it by a short cut desperately,
madly — a short cut through the woods, the same in
which she had encountered Mabel on the eve of her first crime
— but she thought not of that now as she fled onward, onward,
shrieking so painfully that she aroused and brought out all the
servants from the distant hall.
But she outstripped them all, and reached the esplanade of
the fatal summer-house, just in time to see the Arabian plunge
in its frantic terror down the steep ravine, with the powerless
rider hanging rather than sitting on its back.
The servants when they reached the spot found the horse
and the two bodies together on the stream's verge, at the bottom
of the ravine. At first they believed that all three were
the horse were killed outright, the wretched mother had only
fainted; but it was months before she returned to the possession
of her senses, and during her delirium she raved so fearfully,
and uttered hints of such dark deeds, that the most practised
nurses fled her bedside in terror.
But as before she recovered, and as before asked no questions.
Her observers could observe her lips move often, when she
was silent, and tried from their movement to conjecture the
words which she syllabled. Some fancied that they were,
“Thy will be done.” But that spirit was not in her; they
were one sad, ceaseless, uninterrupted sigh, mea culpa, mea
culpa. Had she repented? Who shall read the soul! Only
she was seen oftentimes to draw forth from her bosom a small
vial of some very transparent liquid, to look at it wistfully, and
to shake her head as she returned it muttering, “Not yet, it is
not yet time.”
They thought in their simplicity that it was holy water.
And now she was sitting, as she was wont to do for hours,
gazing out on the growing gloom, devouring her own soul in
silence. If mortal agony endured on earth may wipe away
mortal sin, then indeed might we hope that hers might have
been cleansed and purified; but alas! we are told by those
pages which can not tell amiss, that we must repent, that we
must believe if we would be saved.
And did she repent, or in what did she believe?
Suddenly, as she sat there, she shuddered, for the sound of
wheels coming up the avenue at a rapid pace smote upon her
ears, and then the unwelcome sight of a travelling carriage at
full speed, with six horses and eight outriders, met her eyes.
She started to her feet, and pressed her hand on her heart
forcibly. Her foreboding spirit told her what was about to be.
Nearer it came and nearer, and now she might distinguish
the liveries of her husband's house, and now at the open window
her husband's head, and behind it a female hat of the
newest fashion, plumed, furbelowed, and flowered to the height
of the ton.
“It is too much,” she cried, in a hoarse, husky cry, “it is
too much — yet I looked for it. O God! O God! have mercy.”
And with the words she rushed up to her own room, entered
it, locking and double locking the door behind her; a female
servant seeing her wild looks followed hastily, and knocked
and there came no reply, and listened but there was no sound;
and after a while, growing weary of waiting, and supposing
that her lady was in a moody fit, she ran down stairs to see the
new-comers.
It was as wretched Agnes had foreseen. It was her miserable,
shameless lord, with his last paramour, the French embassadress,
driven out of London by the loud burst of indignation
which the impudence of their infamy had elicited, and
come to intrude upon the last refuge of his victim.
“Where is your mistress?” he asked sharply of the steward,
when he saw that the rooms were empty. “How cold and
cheerless everything looks here. Bring lights and make a
fire, and fetch refreshments too, and some of the old Burgundy;
and hark you, Robinson, let Lady Gisborough's woman bid her
come down and greet the countess of Penthicore.”
All below was soon in confusion; servants hurrying to and
fro with lights, and rich wines, and costly viands, but all above
was cold and silent as the grave. Agnes's maid knocked and
knocked at her lady's door in vain, and at last descended the
stairs fearfully, and sent word to Bentinck, who was by this
time, as his wont, half-intoxicated, that her lady would neither
come down nor make any answer.
“She shall come down,” said Bentinck, uttering at the same
by the hair — I will stand no woman fantasies. Show me her
room;” and rushing up stairs, scarcely pausing to shout fiercely
and violently to her to open the door for a harlot as she was,
kicked in the fastenings with his heavy boot, and darted in,
perhaps intending to do worse violence, followed by all the servants,
trembling, and pale, and foreboding I know not what of
horror.
It was a fearful sight. On the bed, cold and stiff already,
she lay outstretched, with her hands clenched, her white lips
apart showing the pearly teeth within hard set, her glassy eyes
glaring wide open, and full of some strange supernatural horror,
which seemed to have come over her in the last agony.
The stopper of a small glass phial rolled on the carpet under
the feet of one of the first who entered and on examination, the
bottle was found clenched in her right hand.
There was a faint odor in the room as of burnt almonds or
bruised laurel leaves.
She had gone to her fate, rash, headlong and impenitent.
Within three days Bentinck Gisborough fell by the hand of
the count de Penthicore, whose sword avenged not his own
wrongs alone, but the blood of many an innocent and one guilty
victim.
Truly was it written, that the wages of sin is death.
| The cavaliers of England, or, The times of the revolutions of 1642 and 1688 | |