"I took my victim, for I then regarded her as such, to a secluded and lonely spot: I procured for her whatever advice England could afford; all was in vain. Night and day I was by her side, but she never, for a moment, seemed to recollect me: yet were there times of fierce and overpowering delirium, when my name was uttered in the transport of the most passionate enthusiasm—when my features as absent, though not present, were recalled and dwelt upon with all the minuteness of the most faithful detail; and I knelt by her in all those moments, when no other human being was near, and clasped her wan hand, and wiped the dew from her forehead, and gazed upon her convulsed and changing face, and called upon her in a voice which could once have allayed her wildest emotions; and had the agony of seeing her eye dwell upon me with the most estranged indifference and the most vehement and fearful aversion. But ever and anon, she uttered words which chilled the very marrow of my bones; words which I would not, dared not believe, had any meaning or method in their madness—but which entered into my own brain, and preyed there like the devouring of a fire. There was a truth in those ravings—a reason in that incoherence—and my cup was not yet full.
"At last, one physician, who appeared to me to have more knowledge than the rest of the mysterious workings of her dreadful disease, advised me to take her to the scenes of her first childhood: 'Those scenes,' said he, justly, 'are in all stages of life, the most fondly remembered; and I have noted, that in many cases of insanity, places are easier recalled than persons: perhaps, if we can once awaken one link in the chain, it will communicate to the rest.'
"I took this advice, and set off to Norfolk. Her early home was not many miles distant from the churchyard where you once met me, and in that churchyard her mother was buried. She had died before Gertrude's flight; the father's death had followed it: perhaps my sufferings were a just retribution. The house had gone into other hands, and I had no difficulty in engaging it. Thank Heaven, I was spared the pain of seeing any of Gertrude's relations.
"It was night when we moved to the house. I had placed within the room where she used to sleep, all the furniture and books, with which it appeared, from my inquiries, to have been formerly filled. We laid her in the bed that had held that faded and altered form, in its freshest and purest years. I shrouded myself in one corner of the room, and counted the dull minutes till the daylight dawned. I pass over the detail of my recital—the experiment partially succeeded—would to God that it had not! would that she had gone down to her grave with her dreadful secret unrevealed! would—but—"
Here Glanville's voice failed him, and there was a brief silence before he recommenced.
"Gertrude now had many lucid intervals; but these my presence were always sufficient to change into a delirious raving, even more incoherent than her insanity had ever yet been. She would fly from me with the most fearful cries, bury her face in her hands, and seem like one oppressed and haunted by a supernatural visitation, as long as I remained in the room; the moment I left her, she began, though slowly, to recover.
"This was to me the bitterest affliction of all—to be forbidden to nurse, to cherish, to tend her, was like taking from me my last hope! But little can the thoughtless or the worldly dream of the depths of a real love; I used to wait all day by her door, and it was luxury enough to me to catch her accents or hear her move, or sigh, or even weep; and all night, when she could not know of my presence, I used to lie down by her bedside; and when I sank into a short and convulsed sleep, I saw her once more, in my brief and fleeting dreams, in all the devoted love, and glowing beauty, which had once constituted the whole of my happiness, and my world.
"One day I had been called from my post by her door. They came to me hastily—she was in strong convulsions. I flew up stairs, and supported her in my arms till the fits had ceased: we then placed her in bed; she never rose from it again; but on that bed of death, the words, as well as the cause, of her former insanity, were explained—the mystery was unravelled.
"It was a still and breathless night. The moon, which was at its decrease, came through the half-closed shutters, and beneath its solemn and eternal light, she yielded to my entreaties, and revealed all. The man—my friend—Tyrrell—had polluted her ear with his addresses, and when forbidden the house, had bribed the woman I had left with her, to convey his letters—she was discharged—but Tyrrell was no ordinary villain; he entered the house one evening, when no one but Gertrude was there—Come near me, Pelham—nearer—bend down your ear—he used force, violence! That night Gertrude's senses deserted her—you know the rest.
"The moment that I gathered, from Gertrude's broken sentences, their meaning, that moment the demon entered into my soul. All human feelings seemed to fly from my heart; it shrunk into one burning, and thirsty, and fiery want—that was for revenge. I would have sprung from the bedside, but Gertrude's hand clung to me, and detained me; the damp, chill grasp, grew colder and colder—it ceased—the hand fell—I turned—one slight, but awful shudder, went over that face, made yet more wan, by the light of the waning and ghastly moon—one convulsion shook the limbs—one murmur passed the falling and hueless lips. I cannot tell you the rest— you know—you can guess it.
"That day week we buried her in the lonely churchyard—where she had, in her lucid moments, wished to lie—by the side of her mother."
CHAPTER LXXV
I BREATHED,
But not the breath of human life;
A serpent round my heart was wreathed,
And stung my very thought to strife.
—The Giaour.
"Thank Heaven, the most painful part of my story is at an end. You will now be able to account for our meeting in the church-yard at _______. I secured myself a lodging at a cottage not far from the spot which held Gertrude's remains. Night after night I wandered to that lonely place, and longed for a couch beside the sleeper, whom I mourned in the selfishness of my soul. I prostrated myself on the mound; I humbled myself to tears. In the overflowing anguish of my heart I forgot all that had aroused its stormier passions into life. Revenge, hatred,—all vanished. I lifted up my face to the tender heavens: I called aloud to the silent and placid air; and when I turned again to the unconscious mound, I thought of nothing but the sweetness of our early love and the bitterness of her early death. It was in such moments that your footstep broke upon my grief: the instant others had seen me,—other eyes had penetrated the sanctity of my regret,—from that instant, whatever was more soft and holy in the passions and darkness of my mind seemed to vanish away like a scroll. I again returned to the intense and withering remembrance which was henceforward to make the very key and pivot of my existence. I again recalled the last night of Gertrude's life; I again shuddered at the low murmured sounds, whose dreadful sense broke slowly upon my soul. I again felt the cold-cold, slimy grasp of those wan and dying fingers; and I again nerved my heart to an iron strength, and vowed deep, deep-rooted, endless, implacable revenge.
"The morning after the night you saw me, I left my abode. I went to London, and attempted to methodize my plans of vengeance. The first thing to discover was Tyrrell's present residence. By accident I heard he was at Paris, and, within two hours of receiving the intelligence, I set off for that city. On arriving there, the habits of the gambler soon discovered him to my search. I saw him one night at a hell. He was evidently in distressed circumstances, and the fortune of the table was against him. Unperceived by him, I feasted my eyes on his changing countenance, as those deadly and wearing transitions of feeling, only to be produced by the gaming-table, passed over it. While I gazed upon him, a thought of more exquisite and refined revenge than had yet occurred to me flashed upon my mind. Occupied with the ideas it gave rise to, I went into the adjoining room, which was quite empty. There I seated myself, and endeavoured to develop more fully the rude and imperfect outline of my scheme.
"The arch tempter favoured me with a trusty coadjutor in my designs. I was lost in a revery, when I heard myself accosted by name. I looked up, and beheld a man whom I had often seen with Tyrrell, both at Spa and (the watering place, where, with Gertrude, I had met Tyrrell). He was a person of low birth and character; but esteemed, from his love of coarse humour and vulgar enterprise, a man of infinite parts—a sort of Yorick— by the set most congenial to Tyrrell's tastes. By this undue reputation, and the levelling habit of gaming, to which he was addicted, he was raised, in certain societies, much above his proper rank: need I say that this man was Thornton? I was but slightly acquainted with him; however, he accosted me cordially, and endeavoured to draw me into conversation.
"'Have you seen Tyrrell?' said he, 'he is at it again; what's bred in the bone, you know, etc.' I turned pale with the mention of Tyrrell's name, and replied very laconically, to what purpose I forget. 'Ah! ah!' rejoined Thornton, eying me with an air of impertinent familiarity, 'I see you have not forgiven him; he played you but a shabby trick at ______; seduced your mistress, or something of that sort; he told me all about it: pray, how is the poor girl now?'
"I made no reply; I sank down and gasped for breath. All I had suffered seemed nothing to the indignity I then endured. She—she—who had once been my pride—my honour—life—to be thus spoken of—and—. I could not pursue the idea. I rose hastily, looked at Thornton with a glance which might have abashed a man less shameless and callous than himself, and left the room.
"That night, as I tossed restless and feverish on my bed of, thorns, I saw how useful Thornton might be to me in the prosecution of the scheme I had entered into; and the next morning I sought him out, and purchased (no very difficult matter) both his secrecy and his assistance. My plan of vengeance, to one who had seen and observed less of the varieties of human nature than you have done, might seem far-fetched and unnatural; for while the superficial are ready to allow eccentricity as natural in the coolness of ordinary life, they never suppose it can exist in the heat of the passions,—as if, in such moments, anything was ever considered absurd in the means which was favourable to the end. Were the secrets of one passionate and irregulated heart laid bare, there would be more romance in them than in all the fables which we turn from with incredulity and disdain, as exaggerated and overdrawn.
"Among the thousand schemes for retribution which had chased each other across my mind, the death of my victim was only the ulterior object. Death, indeed—the pang of one moment—appeared to me but very feeble justice for the life of lingering and restless anguish to which his treachery had condemned me; but my penance, my doom, I could have forgiven: it was the fate of a more innocent and injured being which irritated the sting and fed the venom of my revenge. That revenge no ordinary punishment could appease. If fanaticism can only be satisfied by the rack and the flames, you may readily conceive a like unappeasable fury in a hatred so deadly, so concentrated, and so just as mine; and if fanaticism persuades itself into a virtue, so also did my hatred.
"The scheme which I resolved upon was to attach Tyrrell more and more to the gaming-table, to be present at his infatuation, to feast my eyes upon the feverish intensity of his suspense; to reduce him, step by step, to the lowest abyss of poverty; to glut my soul with the abjectness and humiliation of his penury; to strip him of all aid, consolation, sympathy, and friendship; to follow him, unseen, to his wretched and squalid home; to mark the struggles of the craving nature with the loathing pride; and, finally, to watch the frame wear, the eye sink, the lip grow livid, and all the terrible and torturing progress of gnawing want to utter starvation. Then, in that last state, but not before, I might reveal myself; stand by the hopeless and succourless bed of death; shriek out in the dizzy ear a name, which could treble the horrors of remembrance; snatch from the struggling and agonizing conscience the last plank, the last straw, to which, in its madness, it could cling, and blacken the shadows of departing life, by opening to the shuddering sense the threshold of an impatient and yawning hell.
"Hurried away by the unhallowed fever of these projects, I thought of nothing but their accomplishment. I employed Thornton, who still maintained his intimacy with Tyrrell, to decoy him more and more to the gambling-house; and, as the unequal chances of the public table were not rapid enough in their termination to consummate the ruin even of an impetuous and vehement gamester like Tyrrell so soon as my impatience desired, Thornton took every opportunity of engaging him in private play, and accelerating my object by the unlawful arts of which he was master. My enemy was every day approaching the farthest verge of ruin; near relations he had none,—all his distant ones he had disobliged; all his friends, and even his acquaintance, he had fatigued by his importunity or disgusted by his conduct. In the whole world there seemed not a being who would stretch forth a helping hand to save him from the total and penniless beggary to which he was hopelessly advancing. Out of the wrecks of his former property and the generosity of former friends, whatever he had already wrung had been immediately staked at the gaming-house and as immediately lost.
"Perhaps this would not so soon have been the case, if Thornton had not artfully fed and sustained his expectations. He had been long employed by Tyrrell in a professional capacity, and he knew well all the gamester's domestic affairs: and when he promised, should things come to the worst, to find some expedient to restore them, Tyrrell easily adopted so flattering a belief.
"Meanwhile I had taken the name and disguise under favour of which you met me at Paris, and Thornton had introduced me to Tyrrell as a young Englishman of great wealth and still greater inexperience. The gambler grasped eagerly at an acquaintance which Thornton readily persuaded him he could turn to such account; and I had thus every facility of marking, day by day, how my plot thickened and my vengeance hastened to its triumph.
"This was not all. I said there was not in the wide world a being who would have saved Tyrrell from the fate he deserved and was approaching. I forgot, there was one who still clung to him with affection, and for whom he still seemed to harbour the better and purer feelings of less degraded and guilty times. This person (you will guess readily it was a woman) I made it my especial business and care to wean away from my prey; I would not suffer him a consolation he had denied to me. I used all the arts of seduction to obtain the transfer of her affections. Whatever promises and vows—whether of love or wealth—could effect were tried; nor, at last, without success: I triumphed. The woman became my slave. It was she who, whenever Tyrrell faltered in his course to destruction, combated his scruples and urged on his reluctance; it was she who informed me minutely of his pitiful finances, and assisted, to her utmost, in expediting their decay. The still more bitter treachery of deserting him in his veriest want I reserved till the fittest occasion, and contemplated with a savage delight.
"I was embarrassed in my scheme by two circumstances: first, Thornton's acquaintance with you; and, secondly, Tyrrell's receipt (some time afterwards) of a very unexpected sum of two hundred pounds, in return for renouncing all further and possible claim on the purchasers of his estate. To the former, so far as it might interfere with my plans or lead to my detection, you must pardon me for having put a speedy termination: the latter threw me into great consternation; for Tyrrell's first idea was to renounce the gaming-table, and endeavour to live upon the trifling pittance he had acquired as long as the utmost economy would permit.
"This idea Margaret, the woman I spoke of, according to my instructions, so artfully and successfully combated that Tyrrell yielded to his natural inclination, and returned once more to the infatuation of his favourite pursuit. However, I had become restlessly impatient for the conclusion to this prefatory part of my revenge; and, accordingly, Thornton and myself arranged that Tyrrell should be persuaded by the former to risk all, even to his very last farthing, in a private game with me. Tyrrell, who believed he should readily recruit himself by my unskilfulness in the game, fell easily into the snare; and on the second night of our engagement, he not only had lost the whole of his remaining pittance, but had signed bonds owning to a debt of far greater amount than he, at that time, could ever even have dreamt of possessing.
"Flushed, heated, almost maddened with my triumph, I yielded to the exultation of the moment. I did not know you were so near,—I discovered myself,—you remember the scene. I went joyfully home: and for the first time since Gertrude's death I was happy; but there I imagined my vengeance only would begin; I revelled in the burning hope of marking the hunger and extremity that must ensue. The next day, when Tyrrell turned round, in his despair, for one momentary word of comfort from the lips to which he believed, in the fond credulity of his heart, falsehood and treachery never came, his last earthly friend taunted and deserted him. Mark me, Pelham: I was by and heard her! "But here my power of retribution was to close: from the thirst still unslaked and unappeased, the cup was abruptly snatched. Tyrrell disappeared; no one knew whither. I set Thornton's inquiries at work. A week afterwards he brought me word that Tyrrell had died in extreme want, and from very despair. Will you credit that, at hearing this news, my first sensations were only rage and disappointment? True, he had died, died in all the misery my heart could wish, but I had not seen him die; and the death-bed seemed to me robbed of its bitterest pang.
"I know not to this day, though I have often questioned him, what interest Thornton had in deceiving me by this tale: for my own part, I believe that he himself was deceived; certain it is (for I inquired), that a person very much answering to Tyrrell's description had perished in the state Thornton mentioned; and this might, therefore, in all probability, have misled him.
"I left Paris, and returned, through Normandy, to England (where I remained some weeks); there we again met: but I think we did not meet till I had been persecuted by the insolence and importunity of Thornton. The tools of our passions cut both ways: like the monarch who employed strange beasts in his army, we find our treacherous allies less destructive to others than ourselves. But I was not of a temper to brook the tauntings or the encroachment of my own creature: it had been with but an ill grace that I had endured his familiarity, when I absolutely required his services; much less could I suffer his intrusion when those services,—services not of love, but hire, were no longer necessary. Thornton, like all persons of his stamp, had a low pride, which I was constantly offending. He had mixed with men more than my equals in rank on a familiar footing, and he could ill brook the hauteur with which my disgust at his character absolutely constrained me to treat him. It is true that the profuseness of my liberality was such that the mean wretch stomached affronts for which he was so largely paid; but, with the cunning and malicious spite natural to him, he knew well how to repay them in kind. While he assisted, he affected to ridicule, my revenge; and though he soon saw that he durst not, for his very life, breathe a syllable openly against Gertrude or her memory, yet he contrived, by general remarks and covert insinuations, to gall me to the very quick and in the very tenderest point. Thus a deep and cordial antipathy to each other arose and grew and strengthened, till, I believe, like the fiends in hell, our mutual hatred became our common punishment.
"No sooner had I returned to England than I found him here awaiting my arrival. He favoured me with frequent visits and requests for money. Although not possessed of any secret really important affecting my character, he knew well that he was possessed of one important to my quiet; and he availed himself to the utmost of my strong and deep aversion even to the most delicate recurrence to my love to Gertrude and its unhallowed and disastrous termination. At length, however, he wearied me. I found that he was sinking into the very dregs and refuse of society, and I could not longer brook the idea of enduring his familiarity and feeding his vices.
"I pass over any detail of my own feelings, as well as my outward and worldly history. Over my mind a great change had passed: I was no longer torn by violent and contending passions; upon the tumultuous sea a dead and heavy torpor had fallen; the very winds, necessary for health, had ceased:— "I slept on the abyss without a surge."
"One violent and engrossing passion is among the worst of all immoralities, for it leaves the mind too stagnant and exhausted for those activities and energies which constitute our real duties. However, now that the tyrant feeling of my mind was removed, I endeavoured to shake off the apathy it had produced, and return to the various occupations and businesses of life. Whatever could divert me from my own dark memories, or give a momentary motion to the stagnation of my mind, I grasped at with the fondness and eagerness of a child. Thus, you found me surrounding myself with luxuries which palled upon my taste the instant that their novelty had passed: now striving for the vanity of literary fame; now, for the emptier baubles which riches could procure. At one time I shrouded myself in my closet, and brooded over the dogmas of the learned and the errors of the wise; at another, I plunged into the more engrossing and active pursuits of the living crowd which rolled around me,—and flattered my heart, that amid the applause of senators and the whirlpool of affairs, I could lull to rest the voices of the past and the spectre of the dead.
"Whether these hopes were effectual, and the struggle not in vain, this haggard and wasting form, drooping day by day into the grave, can declare; but I said I would not dwell long upon this part of my history, nor is it necessary. Of one thing only, not connected with the main part of my confessions, it is right, for the sake of one tender and guiltless being, that I should speak.
"In the cold and friendless world with which I mixed, there was a heart which had years ago given itself wholly up to me. At that time I was ignorant of the gift I so little deserved, or (for it was before I knew Gertrude) I might have returned it, and been saved years of crime and anguish. Since then, the person I allude to had married, and, by the death of her husband, was once more free. Intimate with my family, and more especially with my sister, she now met me constantly; her compassion for the change she perceived in me, both in mind and person, was stronger than even her reserve, and this is the only reason why I speak of an attachment which ought otherwise to be concealed: I believe that you already understand to whom I allude, and since you have discovered her weakness, it is right that you should know also her virtue; it is right that you should learn that it was not in her the fantasy or passion of a moment, but a long and secreted love; that you should learn that it was her pity, and no unfeminine disregard to opinion, which betrayed her into imprudence; and that she is, at this moment, innocent of everything but the folly of loving me.