Part 5

“I have _that_ to tell to which you must listen now, Colonel Middleton,” said he, when the betrayed lover would fain have deferred his communication; “now, while your eye is darting fire upon the false woman who has made you the tool of her mercenary schemes. Listen to me now, ere the voice of the syren charm you into forgetfulness of what you behold. Five years ago I had a sister—my only one—a gentle, loving creature, with little beauty, but a heart filled with every good feeling. She was wooed by one whom I esteemed and approved; she loved him, and they were betrothed to each other. But Adeline went into the country on account of my mother’s ill health, and during her absence, her lover fell into the way of Rosa Crafts. They met at a fashionable watering-place, and, though struck with her beauty, he remained proof against all her ordinary fascinations, until her pride became piqued, and she determined to make him sensible of her attractions. Some fool among her danglers offered a wager that she would not succeed; she accepted the wager, and though she knew of his engagement to another, she deliberately set herself to the task of robbing his affianced bride of his affections. When did an unprincipled woman ever will any thing which she did not accomplish if she scrupled not the means? She succeeded. Adeline was neglected, and, for a time, forgotten. She pined in solitude for the accustomed tenderness which had become the nutriment of life to her young heart, but she received it not. At length came a letter; her lover, overcome with shame and remorse, but led away by his fatal passion, wrote her a wild, incoherent letter, full of penitence and sorrow, but still designed as a renunciation of his plighted faith. He broke his engagement with Adeline, and then offered his hand to his new mistress. Need I say that Rosa Crafts rejected his love and won her wager? I was absent at the time, and when I returned Adeline was dying of consumption. I watched beside her till I saw her laid within the tomb, and then I sought for vengeance on her perjured lover. He refused to fight me. I disgraced him in the public street by personal chastisement, and then he was obliged to meet me. We fought with pistols at twelve paces—I shot him through the body.”

Captain Sabretash paused, overcome by his emotion. “Five years have passed since then,” he resumed, “and I have haunted the steps of that woman in hopes of yet seeing her humbled to the dust. Talk of _harmless flirtation_! My buried sister, my murdered friend, my own blood-stained hand, can bear witness to the innocence of what the world calls _harmless_ flirtation!”

Colonel Middleton listened in silence. He felt that the Captain had uttered nothing but truth; yet when he thought of her intellectual gifts, her exquisite beauty, her inimitable grace, his heart sunk within him, for how could falsehood dwell with so much perfection?

“Ask Grace Leydon!” continued Captain Sabretash; “ask Grace Leydon if I have told you a word more than the simple, unvarnished truth.”

“How may I believe the one when thus compelled to doubt the other?” asked the Colonel.

“Doubt Grace Leydon!” exclaimed his companion, “why you might as well doubt the existence of the sun in heaven. She is all truth—all purity. Surely you must have seen enough of her vestal-like life to know that if ever there was a true-hearted woman upon earth, it is she. If Rosa Crafts had but half the mental graces and moral virtues of her cousin Grace, she would be an angel.”

Colonel Middleton _did_ ask Grace Leydon; but not till long afterwards. His decision of character forbade him to grieve over an unworthy object, and the moment Rosa ceased to be the noble-minded being he had imagined her, he ceased to cherish his affection for her. An interview, characterized on his part by grave earnestness and sad remonstrance, and on hers by flippancy and heartlessness, terminated all intercourse between the beautiful Rosa and her high-minded lover. In less than three weeks after the rupture between them, Baron de Stutenhoff had the satisfaction of leading to the altar the “belle of the season;” but long ere the honey-moon was over, he learned, to his great chagrin, that the anticipated riches of his bride were to be found somewhere in the vicinity of his own large estates in dream-land. A quarrel was the immediate result of the discovery, and while the noble Baron betook him to the life of a “Chevalier d’Industrie,” travelling from city to city, the brilliant Rosa was compelled to return to her mother’s dull country residence in the character of a deserted wife.

Colonel Middleton _did_ ask Grace Leydon; after he had learned that she was the _true_ author and owner of the gifted volume which Rosa had falsely claimed, after he had awakened from his dream of beauty to a sense of purity and sincerity, after he had learned the value of a truthful spirit and a loving heart, he asked Grace Leydon to share his future lot in life, and she became his wife—his happy and noble-minded wife—carrying into the home of her husband the talents and the virtues which had been the solace and resources of her hours of loneliness.

* * * * *

DEATH.

BY MRS. C. H. W. ESLING.

Death came to a beautiful boy at play, As he sat ’mong the summer flowers, But they seem’d to wither and die away In their very sunniest hours.

“I have come,” in a hollow voice, said Death, “To play on the grass with thee;” But the boy look’d frighten’d, and held his breath, In the midst of his childish glee.

“Away, away from my flowers,” he said, “For I know, and love thee not”— Death look’d at the boy, and shook his head: Then slowly he left the spot.

He met a maiden in girlhood’s bloom, And the rose on her cheek was bright, And she shuddered, as tho’ a ghost from the tomb Had risen before her sight.

She stood by the brink of a fountain clear— In its waters her beauty view’d, When Death, with his haggard face, drew near, And before the maiden stood.

“Fair damsel,” he said, with a courtly pride, “To thee I this goblet quaff,” But she turned with a buoyant step aside, And fled with a ringing laugh.

He journey’d on, where an old man sat On the trunk of a worn-out tree— A poor old man—for his held-out hat Was a symbol of beggary.

Death drew quite near, till the old man’s eyes Were raised to his wrinkled face; With a frighten’d look of wild surprise, He rose from his resting-place.

“I come to succor,” Death mildly said, But the old man would depart— Again he look’d, and shook his head, For he knew full well his mart.

“They all of them, shuddering, turn away— The boy in his childish glee, The maiden young, and the old man gray: Yet they all shall come to me.”

And he gather’d them all, for the boy was weak— The old man yielded his breath— And the rose grew pale on the maiden’s cheek, As she sank in the arms of Death.

* * * * *

THE SAXON’S BRIDAL.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE BROTHERS,” “CROMWELL,” “RINGWOOD THE ROVER,” ETC.

There are times in England, when the merry month of May is not, as it would now appear, merely a poet’s fiction; when the air is indeed mild and balmy, and the more conspicuously so, that it succeeds the furious gusts and driving hail-storms of the boisterous March, the fickle sunshine and capricious rains of April. One of these singular epochs in the history of weather it was, in which events occurred which remained unforgotten for many a day in the green wilds of Charnwood Forest. It was upon a soft, sweet morning, toward the latter end of the month, and surely nothing more delicious could have been conceived by the fancy of the poet. The low west wind was fanning itself among the tender leaves of the new-budded trees, and stealing over the deep meadows, all redolent with dewy wild flowers, waving them with a gentle motion, and borrowing a thousand perfumes from their bosoms; the hedgerows were as white with the dense blossoms of the hawthorn, as though they had been powdered over by an untimely snow-storm, while everywhere along the wooded banks, the saffron primrose and its sweet sister of the spring, the violet, were sunning their unnumbered blossoms in the calm warmth of the vernal sunshine. The heavens, of a pure transparent blue, were laughing with a genial lustre, not flooded by the dazzling glare of midsummer, but pouring over all beneath their influence a lovely, gentle light, in perfect keeping with the style of the young scenery, and all the air was literally vocal with the notes of innumerable birds, from the proud lark, “rejoicing at heaven’s gate,” to the thrush and blackbird, trilling their full, rich chants from every dingle, and the poor linnet, piping on the spray. Nothing—no, nothing—can be imagined that so delights the fancy with sweet visions, that so enthrals the senses, shedding its influences even upon the secret heart, as a soft old-fashioned May morning. Apart from the mere beauties of the scenery, from the mere enjoyment of the bright skies, the dewy perfumes that float on every breeze, the mild, unscorching warmth—apart from all these, there is something of a deeper and a higher nature in the thoughts called forth by the spirit of the time—a looking forward of the soul to fairer things to come, an excitement of a quiet hope within, not very definite perhaps, nor easily explained, but one which almost every man has felt, and contrasted with the languid and pallid satiety produced by the full heat of summer, and yet more with the sober and reflective sadness that steals upon the mind as we survey the russet hues and the sere leaves of autumn. It is as if the newness, the fresh youth of the season, gave birth to a corresponding youth of the soul. Such are the sentiments which many men feel now-a-days, besides the painter and the poet and the soul-rapt enthusiast of nature; but those were iron days of which we write, and men spared little time to thought from action or from strife, nor often paused to note their own sensations, much less to ponder on their origin or to investigate their causes. The morning was such as we have described—the scene a spot of singular beauty within the precincts of the then royal forest of Charnwood, in Leicestershire. A deep, but narrow stream, wound in a hundred graceful turns through the rich meadow-land that formed the bottom of a small sloping vale, which had been partially reclaimed, even at that day, from the waste, though many a willow bush fringing its margin, and many a waving ash, fluttering its delicate tresses in the air, betrayed the woodland origin of the soft meadow. A narrow road swept down the hill, with a course little less serpentine than that of the river below, and crossed it by a small one-arched stone bridge, overshadowed by a gigantic oak tree, and scaled the opposite acclivity in two or three sharp sandy zigzags. Both the hill sides were clothed with forest, but still the nature of the soil or some accidental causes had rendered the wood as different as possible, for on the further side of the stream, the ground was everywhere visible covered by a short mossy turf, softer and more elastic to the foot than the most exquisite carpet that ever issued from the looms of Persia, and overshadowed by huge and scattered oaks, growing so far apart that the eye could range far between their shadowy vistas; while on the nearer slope—the foreground, as it might be called, of the picture—all was a dense and confused mass of tangled shrubbery and verdure. Thickets of old gnarled thorn-bushes, completely overrun and matted with woodbines; coppices of young ash, with hazel interspersed, and eglantine and dog-roses thick set between; clumps of the prickly gorse and plume-like broom, all starry with their golden flowrets, and fern so wildly luxuriant that in many places it would have concealed the head of the tallest man, covered the ground for many a mile through which the narrow road meandered. There was one object more in view—one which spoke of man even in that solitude, and man in his better aspect—it was the slated roof and belfry, all overgrown with moss and stonecrop, of a small wayside chapel, in the old Saxon architecture, peering out from the shadows of the tall oaks which overhung it in the far distance. It was, as we have said, very small, in the old Saxon architecture, consisting, in fact, merely of a vaulted roof supported upon four squat massy columns, whence sprung the four groined ribs which met in the centre of the arch. Three sides alone of this primitive place of worship, which would have contained with difficulty forty persons, were walled in, the front presenting one wide open arch, richly and quaintly sculptured with the indented wolf’s teeth of the first Saxon style. Small as it was, however, the little chapel had its high altar, with the crucifix and candle, its reading desk of old black oak, its font and pix and chalices, and all the adjuncts of the Roman ritual. A little way to the left might be discovered the low thatched eaves of a rustic cottage, framed of the unbarked stems of forest trees, the abode, probably, of the officiating priest, and close beside the walls of the little church a consecrated well, protected from the sun by a stone vault, of architecture corresponding to the chapel.

Upon the nearer slope, not far from the road-side, but entirely concealed from passers by the nature of the ground and the dense thickets, there were collected, at an early hour of the morning, five men with as many horses, who seemed to be awaiting, in a sort of ambush, some persons whom they would attack at unawares. The leader of the party, as he might be considered, as much from his appearance as from the deference shown to him by the others, was a tall, active, powerful man, of thirty-eight or forty years, with a bold and expressive countenance—expressive, however, of no good quality, unless it were the fiery, reckless daring which blazed from his broad dark eye, and that was almost obscured by the cloud of insufferable pride which lowered upon his frowning brow, and by the deep scar-like lines of lust and cruelty and scorn which ploughed his weather-beaten features. His dress was a complete suit of linked chain-mail, hauberk and sleeves and hose, with shoes of plaited steel and gauntlets wrought in scale, covering his person from his neck downward in impenetrable armor. He had large gilded spurs buckled upon his heels, and a long two-edged dagger, with a rich hilt and scabbard, in his belt; but neither sword nor lance, nor any other weapon of offence except a huge steel mace, heavy enough to fell an ox at a single blow, which he grasped in his right hand, while from his left hung the bridle of a tall coal-black Norman charger, which was cropping the grass quietly beside him. His head was covered by a conical steel cap, with neither crest nor plume nor visor, and mail hood falling down from it to protect the neck and shoulders of the wearer. The other four were men-at-arms, clad all in suits of armor, but less completely than their lord; thus they had steel shirts only, with stout buff breeches and heavy boots to guard their lower limbs, and iron scull caps only, without the hood, upon their heads, and leather gauntlets upon their hands; but, as if to make up for this deficiency, they were positively loaded with offensive weapons—they had the long two-handed sword of the period belted across their persons, three or four knives and daggers of various size and strength at their girdles, great battle-axes in their hands, and maces hanging at their saddle-bows. They had been tarrying there already several hours, their leader raising his eyes occasionally to mark the progress of the sun as he climbed up the azure vault, and muttering a brief and bitter curse as hour passed after hour, and those came not whom he expected.

“Danian,” he said at length, turning to the principal of his followers, who stood nearer to his person and a little way apart from the others—“Danian, art sure this was the place and day? How the dog Saxons tarry—can they have learnt our purpose?”

“Surely not—surely not, fair sir,” returned the squire, “seeing that I have mentioned it to no one, not even to Raoul, or Americ, or Guy, who know no more than their own battle-axes the object of their ambush. And it was pitch dark when we left the castle, and not a soul has seen us here; so it is quite impossible they should suspect—and hark! there goes the bell; and see, sir, see—there they come trooping through the oak trees down the hill!”

And indeed, as he spoke, the single bell of the small chapel began to chime with the merry notes that proclaim a bridal, and a gay train of harmless, happy villagers might be seen, as they flocked along, following the footsteps of the gray-headed Saxon monk, who, in his frock and cowl, with corded waist and sandalled feet, led the procession. Six young girls followed close behind him, dressed in blue skirts and russet jerkins, but crowned with garlands of white May flowers, and May wreaths wound like scarfs across their swelling bosoms, and hawthorn branches in their hands, singing the bridal carol in the old Saxon tongue, in honor of the pride of the village, the young and lovely Marian. She was indeed the very personification of all the poet’s dreams of youthful beauty; tall and slender in her figure, yet exquisitely, voluptuously rounded in every perfect outline, with a waist of a span’s circumference, wide sloping shoulders, and a bust that, for its matchless swell, as it struggled and throbbed with a thousand soft emotions, threatening to burst from the confinement of her tight-fitting jacket, would have put to shame the bosom of the Medicean Venus. Her complexion, wherever the sun had not too warmly kissed her beauties, was pure as the driven snow, while her large, bright blue eyes, red laughing lip, and the luxuriant flood of sunny golden hair, which streamed down in wild, artless ringlets to her waist, made her a creature for a prince’s, or more, a poet’s adoration. But neither prince nor poet was the god of that fair girl’s idolatry; but one of her own class, a Saxon youth, a peasant—nay, a serf—from his very cradle upward the born thrall of Hugh de Mortemar, lord of the castle and the hamlet at its foot, named, from its situation in the depths of Charnwood, Ashby in the Forest. But there was now no graven collar about the sturdy neck of the young Saxon, telling of a suffering servitude; no dark shade of gloom in his full glancing eye; no sullen doggedness upon his lip, for he was that day, that glad day, a freeman—a slave no longer—but free, free, by the gift of his noble master—free as the wild bird that sung so loudly in the forest—free as the liberal air that bore the carol to his ears. His frock of forest green and buskins of the untanned deer-hide set off his muscular, symmetrical proportions, and his close-curled short auburn hair showed a well turned and shapely head. Behind this gay and happy pair came several maids and young men, two and two, and after these an old gray-headed man, the father of the bride, and leaning on his arm an aged matron, the widowed mother of the enfranchised bridegroom.

Merrily rung the gay, glad bells, and blithely swelled up the bridal chorus as they collected on the little green before the ancient arch, and slowly filed into the precincts of the forest shrine; but very speedily their merriment was changed into dismay and terror and despair, for scarcely had they passed into the sacred building, before the knight, with his dark followers, leaped into their saddles, and thundering down the hill at a tremendous gallop, surrounded the chapel before the inmates had even time to think of any danger. It was a strange, wild contrast, the venerable priest within pronouncing even then the nuptial blessing, and proclaiming over the bright young pair the union made by God, which thenceforth no man should dissever—the tearful happiness of the blushing bride, the serious gladness of the stalwart husband, the kneeling peasantry, the wreaths of innocent flowers; and at the gate the stern, dark men-at-arms, with their scarred savage features, and their gold-gleaming harness and raised weapons. A loud shriek burst from the lips of the sweet girl, as, lifting her eyes to the sudden clang and clatter that harbingered those dread intruders, she saw and recognized upon the instant the fiercest of the Norman tyrants—dreaded by all his neighbors far and near, but most by the most virtuous and young and lovely—the bold, bad Baron of Maltravers. He bounded to the earth as he reached the door, and three of his followers leaped from their horses likewise, one sitting motionless in his war-saddle, and holding the four chargers. “Hold, priest!” he shouted, as he entered, “forbear this mummery; and thou, dog Saxon, think not that charms like these are destined to be clasped in rapture by any arms of thy low slavish race!” and with these words he strode up to the altar, seemingly fearless of the least resistance, while his men kept the door with brandished weapons. Mute terror seized on all, paralyzed utterly by the dread interruption—on all but the bold priest and the stout bridegroom.

“Nay, rather forbear thou, Alberic de Maltravers! These two are one forever—wo be to those who part them!”

“Tush, priest—tush, fool!” sneered the fierce Baron, as he seized him by the arm, and swinging him back rudely, advanced upon the terrified and weeping girl, who was now clinging to the very rails of the high altar, trusting, poor wretch, that some respect for that sanctity of place which in old times had awed even heathens, might now prevail with one whom no respect for anything divine or human had ever yet deterred from doing his unholy will.

“Ha! dog!” cried he, in fiercer tones, that filled the chapel as it were a trumpet, seeing the Saxon bridegroom lift up a heavy quarter-staff which lay beside him, and step in quietly but very resolutely in defence of his lovely wife—“Ha! dog and slave, dare you resist a Norman and a noble?—back, serf, or die the death!” and he raised his huge mace to strike him.

“No serf, sir, nor slave either,” returned the Saxon, firmly, “but a freeman, by my good master’s gift, and a landholder.”

“Well, master freeman and landholder,” replied the other, with a bitter sneer, “if such names please you better, stand back—for Marian lies on no bed but mine this night—stand back, before worse come of it!”

“I will die rather”—was the answer—“Then die! fool! die!” shouted the furious Norman, and with the words he struck full at the bare brow of the dauntless Saxon with his tremendous mace—it fell, and with dint that would have crushed the strongest helmet into a thousand splinters—it fell, but by a dexterous sleight the yeoman swung his quarter-staff across the blow, and parried its direction, although the tough ash pole burst into fifty shivers—it fell upon the carved rails of the altar and smashed them into atoms; but while the knight who had been somewhat staggered by the impetus of his own misdirected blow, was striving to recover himself, the young man sprang upon him, and grappling him by the throat, gained a short-lived advantage. Short-lived it was indeed, and perilous to him that gained—for although there were men enough in the chapel, all armed with quarter-staves, and one or two with the genuine brown bill, to have overpowered the four Normans, despite their war array—yet so completely were they overcome by consternation, that not one moved a step to aid him; the priest, who had alone showed any spark of courage, being impeded by the shrieking women, who, clinging to the hem of his vestments, implored him for the love of God to save them.