University of Virginia Library

4. PART IV.

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

unnoticed, and old age steals upon them, hale, and green, 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

vast power of will, an intense power of feeling, whether good
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

could bring herself to do the deed, although her firm character
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

and in all that it could procure, and in the intoxication of her
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

— to such a home, as you and my own frenzy have left me, and
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

mother's fondness, nothing of a woman's overflowing tenderness,
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 —

weekly, in the charge of an old steward; but for the lady, none
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

the evening on which we have seen Agnes gazing out alone
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

dead, but for Agnes there was no such fortune! The boy and
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

time a fearful imprecation, “she shall come down, if I drag her
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.