University of Virginia Library

58. CHAPTER LVIII.
THE AUTHOR OF THE MS. SPEAKS.

“Here let us pause,” says the author of the manuscript
from which these scenes are taken, “and looking back on
the current of events which we have seen flow on through
light and shadow, endeavor to extract briefly their significance.

“In the history of my respected ancestor, Champ Effingham,
Esq., I think I discern something which reminds me
of an Eastern fable I have met with. The enemy of Humanity,
the tale relates, came and found the first man sleeping
calmly under the palms of paradise: and gazing long at
him, endeavoured to find some weak point of attack. But
the lordly face of the sleeper made him groan with rage
and disappointment. He saw the brows made to conceive
pure and noble thoughts—the chiselled lips shaped to express
those thoughts, and utter prayer. He saw the strong arm,
with its iron muscles, moulded wondrously to strike and
overthrow wrong, should wrong trench upon the fair fields
it cultivated:—all repelled the enemy. At last he observed
the movement of the sleeper's heart, and kneeling down,
tapped upon it with his finger. It sounded hollow, and the
enemy smiled, as only fiends smile.

“`Here is a cavity!' he muttered; `I will fill it with
passions!'

“And, leaving the sleeper writhing in his slumbers, the
enemy of souls disappeared.

“My worthy ancestor, Mr. Effingham, seems to have
afforded proof that this fable is not wholly fanciful. His
passions were so strong that he was led by them to the commission
of actions which he often regarded with wondering
disgust in after years:—that infatuated young man whose
acts he recollected, scarcely seemed to be himself. His mad
passion for the young girl had changed his whole character.
Chivalrous and noble, it made him persecute a woman, and
exhaust the depths of bitterness and weakness. Sweet-tempered
and affectionate, under all his languid and satirical indifference,
if the phrase may be used, his character was

changed by that infatuation into one of sour and bitter scoffing
and mocking sarcasm. Careless of the prejudices of
rank, and disposed to treat all men with cordiality and kindness,
it made him taunt with low birth the rival who supplanted
him. Venerating his father, it led him to write to
that father a letter of cold defiance—and lastly, it made
him commit an action which madness alone excuses—the
forcible abduction of an unoffending girl:—and his wild, turbulent,
mad career, was wound up by an attempt to take the
life of a man whose only crime was love for that woman
who had driven him mad.

“Mr. Effingham was a true descendant of the man
tempted by the fiend, and filled with passion.

“But then we may observe in this career equal proof of
what Mr. Charles Waters had said to the man in the red
cloak—that the human heart is not radically false and hateful,
but suffers for the crimes it is led by passion to commit,
cruelly; and ever strives to disentangle itself from the
meshes of that fiery net which is bound around it by fate.

“In the midst of all his delinquency—when he was persecuting
the young woman—defying society and his family,
uttering unworthy and insulting words to his rival—carrying
off Beatrice—striking at the heart of her defender:—all
this time, remorse and sombre rage with himself burned in
his agitated heart like fire. We have traced some of the
scenes in his lonely chamber, in which these stormy emotions
were bared to his own consciousness, even in words—and we
have seen on one occasion, that the fury of his suffering and
remorse nearly led him to self-destruction. We have seen
how on that occasion he caught the child to his heart, and
called her his guardian angel and blessed her:—at that moment
his good impulses were strong, and had not the words
of his friend revived the slumbering passion in his heart,
many of the events herein narrated would never have occurred.

“Even in the midst of his most furious rages—when he
tried to persuade himself that he was the victim of cruel injustice
and unjustifiable scorn, his heart still whispered to
him that he was the wrong-doer; and in that night and day
after the river-fight, his remorse grew to a climax. We have
seen how he was touched by the affection of an animal, how

he mingled his tears with those of the child when she bade
him farewell. Those tears were not unmanly ones, and are
pleasanter to think of now, to me at least, than all his fearless
acts, his scornful defiances cast in the teeth of the universe.

“I have not space to speak further of those other personages
who were grouped around my ancestor, the central
figure of them all, and attracting to his splendid and fiery
graces, his wild passions, every eye: Beatrice—pure and
lovely creature! whose portrait I have vainly striven to delineate,
must be passed by: and Charles Waters, too; the
pure thinker. In after pages of this history I shall endeavour
to develop further those feelings which, so much more
than mere events, enter into the lives of my personages.”