And hence then," said his companion, pursuing the idea, "might we also believe in that wondrous and wild influence which the stars have been fabled to exercise over our fate; hence might we shape a visionary clew to their imagined power over our birth, our destinies, and our death."
"Perhaps," rejoined Mordaunt, and Lord Ulswater has since said that his countenance as he spoke wore an awful and strange aspect, which lived long and long afterwards in the memory of his companion, "perhaps they are tokens and signs between the soul and the things of Heaven which do not wholly shame the doctrine of him [Socrates, who taught the belief in omens.] from whose bright wells Plato drew (while he coloured with his own gorgeous errors) the waters of his sublime lore." As Mordaunt thus spoke, his voice changed: he paused abruptly, and, pointing to a distant quarter of the heavens, said,—
"Look yonder; do you see, in the far horizon, one large and solitary star, that, at this very moment, seems to wax pale and paler, as my hand points to it?"
"I see it; it shrinks and soars, while we gaze into the farther depths of heaven, as if it were seeking to rise to some higher orbit."
"And do you see," rejoined Mordaunt, "yon fleecy but dusky cloud which sweeps slowly along the sky towards it? What shape does that cloud wear to your eyes?"
"It seems to me," answered Lord Ulswater, "to assume the exact semblance of a funeral procession: the human shape appears to me as distinctly moulded in the thin vapours as in ourselves; nor would it perhaps ask too great indulgence from our fancy to image amongst the darker forms in the centre of the cloud one bearing the very appearance of a bier,—the plume, and the caparison, and the steeds, and the mourners! Still, as I look, the likeness seems to me to increase!"
"Strange!" said Mordaunt, musingly, "how strange is this thing which we call the mind! Strange that the dreams and superstitions of childhood should cling to it with so inseparable and fond a strength! I remember, years since, that I was affected even as I am now, to a degree which wiser men might shrink to confess, upon gazing on a cloud exactly similar to that which at this instant we behold. But see: that cloud has passed over the star; and now, as it rolls away, look, the star itself has vanished into the heavens."
"But I fear," answered Lord Ulswater, with a slight smile, "that we can deduce no omen either from the cloud or the star: would, indeed, that Nature were more visibly knit with our individual existence! Would that in the heavens there were a book, and in the waves a voice, and on the earth a token of the mysteries and enigmas of our fate!"
"And yet," said Mordaunt, slowly, as his mind gradually rose from its dream-like oppression to its wonted and healthful tone, "yet, in truth, we want neither sign nor omen from other worlds to teach us all that it is the end of existence to fulfil in this; and that seems to me a far less exalted wisdom which enables us to solve the riddles, than that which elevates us above the chances, of the future."
"But can we be placed above those chances;—can we become independent of that fate to which the ancients taught that even their deities were submitted?"
"Let us not so wrong the ancients," answered Mordaunt; "their poets taught it, not their philosophers. Would not virtue be a dream, a mockery indeed, if it were, like the herb of the field, a thing of blight and change, of withering and renewal, a minion of the sunbeam and the cloud? Shall calamity deject it? Shall prosperity pollute? then let it not be the object of our aspiration, but the byword of our contempt. No: let us rather believe, with the great of old, that when it is based on wisdom, it is throned above change and chance! throned above the things of a petty and sordid world! throned above the Olympus of the heathen! throned above the Stars which fade, and the Moon which waneth in her course! Shall we believe less of the divinity of Virtue than an Athenian Sage? Shall we, to whose eyes have been revealed without a cloud the blaze and the glory of Heaven, make Virtue a slave to those chains of earth which the Pagan subjected to her feet? But if by her we can trample on the ills of life, are we not a hundredfold more by her the vanquishers of death? All creation lies before us: shall we cling to a grain of dust? All immortality is our heritage: shall we gasp and sicken for a moment's breath? What if we perish within an hour?—what if already the black cloud lowers over us?—what if from our hopes and projects, and the fresh woven ties which we have knit around our life, we are abruptly torn?—shall we be the creatures or the conquerors of fate? Shall we be the exiled from a home, or the escaped from a dungeon? Are we not as birds which look into the Great Air only through a barred cage? Shall we shrink and mourn when the cage is shattered, and all space spreads around us,— our element and our empire? No; it was not for this that, in an elder day, Virtue and Valour received but a common name! The soul, into which that Spirit has breathed its glory, is not only above Fate,—it profits by her assaults! Attempt to weaken it, and you nerve it with a new strength; to wound it, and you render it more invulnerable; to destroy it, and you make it immortal! This, indeed, is the Sovereign whose realm every calamity increases, the Hero whose triumph every invasion augments; standing on the last sands of life, and encircled by the advancing waters of Darkness and Eternity, it becomes in its expiring effort doubly the Victor and the King!"
Impressed by the fervour of his companion, with a sympathy almost approaching to awe, Lord Ulswater pressed Mordaunt's hand, but offered no reply; and both, excited by the high theme of their conversation, and the thoughts which it produced, moved in silence from their post and walked slowly homeward.
CHAPTER LXXXVII
Is it possible?
Is't so? I can no longer what I would
No longer draw back at my liking! I
Must do the deed because I thought of it.
. . . . . .
What is thy enterprise,—thy aim, thy object?
Hast honestly confessed it to thyself?
O bloody, frightful deed!
. . . . . .
Was that my purpose when we parted?
O God of Justice!
—COLERIDGE: Wallenstein.
We need scarcely say that one of the persons overheard by Mr. Brown was Wolfe, and the peculiar tone of oratorical exaggeration, characteristic of the man, has already informed the reader with which of the two he is identified.
On the evening after the conversation—the evening fixed for the desperate design on which he had set the last hazard of his life—the republican, parting from the companions with whom he had passed the day, returned home to compose the fever of his excited thoughts, and have a brief hour of solitary meditation, previous to the committal of that act which he knew must be his immediate passport to the jail and the gibbet. On entering his squalid and miserable home, the woman of the house, a blear-eyed and filthy hag, who was holding to her withered breast an infant, which, even in sucking the stream that nourished its tainted existence, betrayed upon its haggard countenance the polluted nature of the mother's milk, from which it drew at once the support of life and the seeds of death,—this woman, meeting him in the narrow passage, arrested his steps to acquaint him that a gentleman had that day called upon him and left a letter in his room with strict charge of care and speed in its delivery. The visitor had not, however, communicated his name, though the curiosity excited by his mien and dress had prompted the crone particularly to demand it.
Little affected by this incident, which to the hostess seemed no unimportant event, Wolfe pushed the woman aside with an impatient gesture, and, scarcely conscious of the abuse which followed this motion, hastened up the sordid stairs to his apartment. He sat himself down upon the foot of his bed, and, covering his face with his hands, surrendered his mind to the tide of contending emotions which rushed upon it.
What was he about to commit? Murder!—murder in its coldest and most premeditated guise! "No!" cried he aloud, starting from the bed, and dashing his clenched hand violently against his brow, "no! no! no! it is not murder: it is justice! Did not they, the hirelings of Oppression, ride over their crushed and shrieking countrymen, with drawn blades and murderous hands? Was I not among them at the hour? Did I not with these eyes see the sword uplifted and the smiter strike? Were not my ears filled with the groans of their victims and the savage yells of the trampling dastards?—yells which rang in triumph over women and babes and weaponless men! And shall there be no vengeance? Yes, it shall fall, not upon the tools, but the master; not upon the slaves, but the despot. Yet," said he, suddenly pausing, as his voice sank into a whisper, "assassination!—in another hour perhaps; a deed irrevocable; a seal set upon two souls,—the victim's and the judge's! Fetters and the felon's cord before me! the shouting mob! the stigma!—no, no, it will not be the stigma; the gratitude, rather, of future times, when motives will be appreciated and party hushed! Have I not wrestled with wrong from my birth? have I not rejected all offers from the men of an impious power? have I made a moment's truce with the poor man's foe? have I not thrice purchased free principles with an imprisoned frame? have I not bartered my substance, and my hopes, and the pleasures of this world for my unmoving, unswerving faith in the Great Cause? am I not about to crown all by one blow,—one lightning blow, destroying at once myself and a criminal too mighty for the law? and shall not history do justice to this devotedness,—this absence from all self, hereafter—and admire, even if it condemn?"
Buoying himself with these reflections, and exciting the jaded current of his designs once more into an unnatural impetus, the unhappy man ceased and paced with rapid steps the narrow limits of his chamber; his eye fell upon something bright, which glittered amidst the darkening shadows of the evening. At that sight his heart stood still for a moment: it was the weapon of intended death; he took it up, and as he surveyed the shining barrel, and felt the lock, a more settled sternness gathered at once over his fierce features and stubborn heart. The pistol had been bought and prepared for the purpose with the utmost nicety, not only for use but show; nor is it unfrequent to find in such instances of premeditated ferocity in design a fearful kind of coxcombry lavished upon the means.
Striking a light, Wolfe reseated himself deliberately, and began with the utmost care to load the pistol; that scene would not have been an unworthy sketch for those painters who possess the power of giving to the low a force almost approaching to grandeur, and of augmenting the terrible by a mixture of the ludicrous. The sordid chamber, the damp walls, the high window, in which a handful of discoloured paper supplied the absence of many a pane; the single table of rough oak, the rush-bottomed and broken chair, the hearth unconscious of a fire, over which a mean bust of Milton held its tutelary sway; while the dull rushlight streamed dimly upon the swarthy and strong countenance of Wolfe, intent upon his work,—a countenance in which the deliberate calmness that had succeeded the late struggle of feeling had in it a mingled power of energy and haggardness of languor,—the one of the desperate design, the other of the exhausted body; while in the knit brow, and the iron lines, and even in the settled ferocity of expression, there was yet something above the stamp of the vulgar ruffian,—something eloquent of the motive no less than the deed, and significant of that not ignoble perversity of mind which diminished the guilt, yet increased the dreadness of the meditated crime, by mocking it with the name of virtue.
As he had finished his task, and hiding the pistol on his person waited for the hour in which his accomplice was to summon him to the fatal deed, he perceived, close by him on the table, the letter which the woman had spoken of, and which till then, he had, in the excitement of his mind, utterly forgotten. He opened it mechanically; an enclosure fell to the ground. He picked it up; it was a bank-note of considerable amount. The lines in the letter were few, anonymous, and written in a hand evidently disguised. They were calculated peculiarly to touch the republican, and reconcile him to the gift. In them the writer professed to be actuated by no other feeling than admiration for the unbending integrity which had characterized Wolfe's life, and the desire that sincerity in any principles, however they might differ from his own, should not be rewarded only with indigence and ruin.
It is impossible to tell how far, in Wolfe's mind, his own desperate fortunes might insensibly have mingled with the motives which led him to his present design: certain it is that wherever the future is hopeless the mind is easily converted from the rugged to the criminal; and equally certain it is that we are apt to justify to ourselves many offences in a cause where we have made great sacrifices; and, perhaps, if this unexpected assistance had come to Wolfe a short time before, it might, by softening his heart and reconciling him in some measure to fortune, have rendered him less susceptible to the fierce voice of political hatred and the instigation of his associates. Nor can we, who are removed from the temptations of the poor,—temptations to which ours are as breezes which woo to storms which "tumble towers,"— nor can we tell how far the acerbity of want, and the absence of wholesome sleep, and the contempt of the rich, and the rankling memory of better fortunes, or even the mere fierceness which absolute hunger produces in the humours and veins of all that hold nature's life, nor can we tell how far these madden the temper, which is but a minion of the body, and plead in irresistible excuse for the crimes which our wondering virtue—haughty because unsolicited—stamps with its loftiest reprobation!
The cloud fell from Wolfe's brow, and his eye gazed, musingly and rapt, upon vacancy. Steps were heard ascending; the voice of a distant clock tolled with a distinctness which seemed like strokes palpable as well as audible to the senses; and, as the door opened and his accomplice entered, Wolfe muttered, "Too late! too late!"—and first crushing the note in his hands, then tore it into atoms, with a vehemence which astonished his companion, who, however, knew not its value.
"Come," said he, stamping his foot violently upon the floor, as if to conquer by passion all internal relenting, "come, my friend, not another moment is to be lost; let us hasten to our holy deed!"
"I trust," said Wolfe's companion, when they were in the open street, "that we shall not have our trouble in vain; it is a brave night for it! Davidson wanted us to throw grenades into the ministers' carriages, as the best plan; and, faith, we can try that if all else fails!"
Wolfe remained silent: indeed he scarcely heard his companion; for a sullen indifference to all things around him had wrapped his spirit,— that singular feeling, or rather absence from feeling, common to all men, when bound on some exciting action, upon which their minds are already and wholly bent; which renders them utterly without thought, when the superficial would imagine they were the most full of it, and leads them to the threshold of that event which had before engrossed all their most waking and fervid contemplation with a blind and mechanical unconsciousness, resembling the influence of a dream.