Tales of the Wild and the Wonderful [1867]

by Mary Diana Dods

Transcribed from the 1867 Milner and Sowerby edition by David Price. Many thanks to the Bodleian Library for making their copy available.

TALES
OF THE
WILD AND THE WONDERFUL.

“Messer, dovete havete pigliate tante coglionerie?” quoth the Reader.

Cardinal Ippolito d’Este to Ariosto.

LONDON:
MILNER AND SOWERBY,
44, PATERNOSTER ROW,
AND HALIFAX, YORKSHIRE.

1867.

PREFACE.

Pause one moment, gentle Reader—only one little moment will I detain you, while I reply to the question which I have supposed you to ask in the title-page. Blame not me, I beseech you, if you are compelled to make the usual accusation against authors, that there is nothing new in the pages which I diffidently present to you: I am sorry for it, but I cannot help it. Solomon asserted that all things under the sun were aged in his time; and if the wisest of old gentlemen could find nothing new in that early stage of his empire, what can be expected from a poor scribbler like me, near three thousand years after him? Consider too, dear Reader, that this is the first time I have appeared before you in the character of a story-teller; and that I am a timid, nervous subject, and very easily discouraged. Accept me then upon the score of wishing to amuse you, and permit me to say something for my Tales, after having said so much for myself.

Of the stories, “Der Freischütz,” as every body knows, is from the German. “The Fortunes of De la Pole” is original; so is “The Prediction,” and “The Yellow Dwarf,” if I may be allowed that claim for such a “thing of shreds and patches;” it is an olla podrida of odds and ends, a snip of the garment of every fairy tale written since the days of King Arthur. The story of “The Lord of the Maelstrom” is also original, though, as in that of “The Yellow Dwarf,” I have raised my structure upon an old nursery foundation; but it appeared to me an excellent vehicle for the beautiful mythology of the North, and the introduction of Odin and his exploits,—whose history, by the way, I believe, has been extracted from the Talmud, or from the rabbinical traditions of the events previous to the creation, and the deeds of Moses and others. I, moreover, designed to have given thee a little poetry for thy money, gentle Reader, but the booksellers shook their heads when I mentioned my design, and told me it was out of fashion; so I returned my treasures in that way to my desk, there to remain, among many other excellent things, I assure thee, until it should again be the taste in England; and, with two other short stories, in the meantime offer these Tales of diablerie for your amusement. Entreat me kindly, gentle Reader, I beseech you, for two reasons;—first, because it will entirely depend upon your reception of this, whether I shall ever write a second volume—and secondly, because there has been a sad sweep lately among those who used to cater for your diversion: many who were most deserving have been snatched from your admiration and regard. “Shelley is not—Lord Byron is not—and Maturin have they taken away.” For myself, I am not a long-lived man, and therefore advise you to make much of me while I am with you; and as an example, look upon these “coglionerie” with a milder eye than their merits may seem to deserve from your judgment.

I am, dear Reader, truly yours,

THE AUTHOR.

CONTENTS.

	PAGE
The Prediction	[9]
The Yellow Dwarf	[44]
Der Freischutz	[101]
The Fortunes of De la Pole	[130]
The Lord of the Maelstrom	[179]
Notes to the Lord of the Maelstrom	[264]
The Spectre Barber	[267]
The Sleeping Friar; or The Stone of Father Cuddy	[311]

THE PREDICTION.

“Let’s talk of Graves.”—Shakspeare.

On the south-west coast of the principality of Wales stands a romantic little village, inhabited chiefly by the poorer class of people, consisting of small farmers and oyster dredgers, whose estates are the wide ocean, and whose ploughs are the small craft, in which they glide over its interminable fields in search of the treasures which they wring from its bosom; it is built on the very top of a hill, commanding on the one side an immense bay, and on the other, of the peaceful green fields and valleys, cultivated by the greater part of its quiet inhabitants. The approach to it from the nearest town was by a road, which branched away into lanes and wooded walks, and from the sea by a beautiful little bay, running up far into the land; both sides of which and indeed all the rest of the coast were guarded by craggy and gigantic rocks, some of them hollowing into caverns, into which none of the inhabitants, from motives of superstition, reverence, and fear, had ever dared to penetrate. There were, at the period of which we are about to treat, no better sort of inhabitants in the little village just described, none of those so emphatically distinguished as “quality” by the country people; they had neither parson, lawyer, nor doctor, among them, and of course there was a tolerable equality among the residents. The farmer, who followed his own plough in the spring, singing the sweet wild national chaunt of the season, and bound up with his own hands his sheaves in autumn, was not richer, greater, nor finer, than he who, bare-legged on the strand, gathered in the hoar weeds for the farmer in the spring, or dared the wild winds of autumn and the wrath of the winter in his little boat, to earn with his dredging net a yet harder subsistence for his family. Distinctions were unknown in the village, every man was the equal of his neighbour.

But, though rank and its polished distinctions were strange in the village of N—, the superiority of talent was felt and acknowledged almost without a pause or a murmur. There was one who was as a king amongst them, by the mere force of a mightier spirit than those with whom he sojourned had been accustomed to feel among them: he was a dark and moody man, a stranger, evidently of a higher order than those around him, who had a few months before settled among them: he was poor, but had no occupation—he lived frugally, but quite alone—and his sole occupation was to read during the day, and wander out unaccompanied into the fields or by the beach during the night. Sometimes indeed he would relieve a suffering child or rheumatic old man by medicinal herbs, reprove idleness and drunkenness in the youth, and predict to all the good and evil consequences of their conduct; and his success in some cases, his foresight in others, and his wisdom in all, won for him a high reputation among the cottagers, to which his taciturn habits contributed not a little, for, with the vulgar as with the educated, no talker was ever seriously taken for a conjuror, though a silent man is often decided to be a wise one.

There was but one person in N— at all disposed to rebel against the despotic sovereignty which Rhys Meredith was silently establishing over the quiet village, and that was precisely the person most likely to effect a revolution; she was a beautiful maiden, the glory and boast of the village, who had been the favourite of, and to a certain degree educated by, the late lady of the lord of the manor; but she had died, and her pupil, with a full consciousness of her intellectual superiority, had returned to her native village, where she determined to have an empire of her own, which no rival should dispute: she laughed at the maidens who listened to the predictions of Rhys, and she refused her smiles to the youths who consulted him upon their affairs and their prospects; and as the beautiful Ruth was generally beloved, the silent Rhys was soon in danger of being abandoned by all, save doting men and paralytic women, and feeling himself an outcast in the village of N—.

But to be such was not the object of Meredith; he was an idle man, and the gifts of the villagers contributed to spare him from exertion; he knew too, that in another point of view his ascendancy was necessary to his purposes; and as he had failed to establish it by wisdom and benevolence, he determined to try the effect of fear. The character of the people with whom he sojourned was admirably calculated to assist his projects; his predictions were now uttered more clearly, and his threats denounced in sterner tones and stronger and plainer words; and when he predicted that old Morgan Williams, who had been stricken with the palsy, would die at the turn of tide, three days from that on which he spoke, and that the light little boat of gay Griffy Morris, which sailed from the bay in a bright winter’s morning, should never again make the shore; and the man died, and the storm arose, even as he had said; men’s hearts died within them, and they bowed down before his words, as if he had been their general fate and the individual destiny of each.

Ruth’s rosy lip grew pale for a moment as she heard of these things; in the next her spirit returned, and “I will make him tell my fortune,” she said, as she went with a party of laughers to search out and deride the conjuror. He was alone when they broke in upon him, and their mockeries goaded his spirit; but his anger was deep, not loud; and while burning with wrath, he yet could calmly consider the means of vengeance: he knew the master spirit with which he had to contend; it was no ordinary mind, and would have smiled at ordinary terrors. To have threatened her with sickness, misfortune, or death, would have been to call forth the energies of that lofty spirit, and prepare it to endure, and it would have gloried in manifesting its powers of endurance; he must humble it therefore by debasement; he must ruin its confidence in itself; and to this end he resolved to threaten her with crime. His resolution was taken and effected; his credit was at stake; he must daunt his enemy, or surrender to her power: he foretold sorrows and joys to the listening throng, not according to his passion, but his judgment, and he drew a blush upon the cheek of one, by revealing a secret which Ruth herself, and another, alone knew, and which prepared the former to doubt of her own judgment, as it related to this extraordinary man.

Ruth was the last who approached to hear the secret of her destiny. The wizard paused as he looked upon her,—opened his book,—shut it,—paused,—and again looked sadly and fearfully upon her; she tried to smile, but felt startled, she knew not why; the bright inquiring glance of her dark eye could not change her enemy. Her smile could not melt, nor even temper, the hardness of his deep-seated malice: he again looked sternly upon her brow, and then coldly wrung out the slow soul-withering words, “Maiden, thou art doomed to be a murderer!”

From that hour Rhys Meredith became the destiny of Ruth Tudor. At first she spurned at his prediction, and alternately cursed and laughed at him for the malice of his falsehood: but when she found that none laughed with her, that men looked upon her with suspicious eyes, women shrunk from her society, and children shrieked at her presence, she felt that these were signs of truth, and her high spirit no longer struggled against the conviction; a change came over her mind when she had known how horrid it was to be alone. Abhorring the prophet, she yet clung to his footsteps, and while she sat by his side, felt as if he alone could avert that evil destiny which he alone had foreseen. With him only was she seen to smile; elsewhere, sad, silent, stern; it seemed as if she were ever occupied in nerving her mind for that which she had to do, and her beauty, already of the majestic cast, grew absolutely awful, as her perfect features assumed an expression which might have belonged to the angel of vengeance or death.

But there were moments when her naturally strong spirit, not yet wholly subdued, struggled against her conviction, and endeavoured to find modes of averting her fate: it was in one of these, perhaps, that she gave her hand to a wooer, from a distant part of the country, a sailor, who either had not heard, or did not regard the prediction of Rhys, upon condition that he should remove her far from her native village to the home of his family and friends, for she sometimes felt as if the decree which had gone forth against her, could not be fulfilled except upon the spot where she had heard it, and that her heart would be lighter if men’s eyes would again look upon her in kindliness, and she no longer sate beneath the glare of those that knew so well the secret of her soul. Thus thinking, she quitted N— with her husband; and the tormentor, who had poisoned her repose, soon after her departure, left the village as secretly and as suddenly as he had entered it.

But, though Ruth could depart from his corporeal presence, and look upon his cruel visage no more, yet the eye of her soul was fixed upon his shadow, and his airy form, the creation of her sorrow, still sat by her side; the blight that he had breathed upon her peace had withered her heart, and it was in vain that she sought to forget or banish the recollection from her brain. Men and women smiled upon her as before in the days of her joy, the friends of her husband welcomed her to their bosoms, but they could give no peace to her heart: she shrunk from their friendship, she shivered equally at their neglect, she dreaded any cause that might lead to that which, it had been said, she must do; nightly she sat alone and thought, she dwelt upon the characters of those around her, and shuddered that in some she saw violence and selfishness enough to cause injury, which she might be supposed to resent to blood. Then she wept bitter tears and thought of her native village, whose inhabitants were so mild, and whose previous knowledge of her hapless destiny might induce them to avoid all that might hasten its completion, and sighed to think she had ever left it in the mistaken hope of finding peace elsewhere. Again, her sick fancy would ponder upon the modes of murder, and wonder how her victim would fall. Against the use of actual violence she had disabled herself; she had never struck a blow, her small hand would suffer injury in the attempt; she understood not the usage of fire-arms, she was ignorant of what were poisons, and a knife she never allowed herself, even for the most necessary purposes: how then could she slay? At times she took comfort from thoughts like these, and at others, in the blackness of her despair, she would cry, “If it must be, O let it come, and these miserable anticipations cease; then I shall, at least, destroy but one; now, in my incertitude, I am the murderer of many!”

Her husband went forth and returned upon the voyages which made up the avocation and felicity of his life, without noticing the deep-rooted sorrow of his wife: he was a common man, and of a common mind; his eye had not seen the awful beauty of her whom he had chosen; his spirit had not felt her power; and, if he had marked, he would not have understood her grief; so she ministered to him as a duty. She was a silent and obedient wife, but she saw him come home without joy, and witnessed his departure without regret; he neither added to nor diminished her sorrow: but destiny had one solitary blessing in store for the victim of its decrees,—a child was born to the hapless Ruth, a lovely little girl soon slept upon her bosom, and, coming as it did, the one lone and lovely rose-bud in her desolate garden, she welcomed it with a warmer joy and cherished it with a kindlier hope.

A few years went by unsoiled by the wretchedness which had marked the preceding; the joy of the mother softened the anguish of the condemned, and sometimes when she looked upon her daughter she ceased to despair: but destiny had not forgotten her claim, and soon her hand pressed heavily upon her victim; the giant ocean rolled over the body of her husband, poverty visited the cottage of the widow, and famine’s gaunt figure was visible in the distance. Oppression came with these, for arrears of rent were demanded, and he who asked was brutal in his anger and harsh in his language to the sufferers. Ruth shuddered as she heard him speak, and trembled for him and for herself; the unforgotten prophecy arose in her mind, and she preferred even witnesses to his brutality and her degradation, rather than encounter his anger and her own dark thoughts alone.

Thus goaded, she saw but one thing that could save her, she fled from her persecutors to the home of her youth, and, leading her little Rachel by the hand, threw herself into the arms of her kin: they received her with distant kindness, and assured her that she should not want; in this they kept their promise, but it was all they did for Ruth and her daughter; a miserable subsistence was given to them, and that was embittered by distrust, and the knowledge that it was yielded unwillingly.

Among the villagers, although she was no longer shunned as formerly, her story was not forgotten; if it had been, her terrific beauty, the awful flashing of her eyes, her large black curls hanging like thunder-clouds over her stern and stately brow and marble throat, her majestic stature, and solemn movements, would have recalled it to their recollections. She was a marked being, and all believed (though each would have pitied her had they not been afraid) that her evil destiny was not to be averted; she looked like one fated to some wonderful deed. They saw she was not one of them, and though they did not directly avoid her, yet they never threw themselves into her way, and thus the hapless Ruth had ample leisure to contemplate and grieve over her fate. One night she sat alone in her wretched hovel, and, with many bitter ruminations, was watching the happy sleep of her child, who slumbered tranquilly on their only bed: midnight had long passed, yet Ruth was not disposed to rest; she trimmed her dull light, and said mentally, “Were I not poor, such a temptation might not assail me, riches would procure me deference; but poverty, or the wrongs it brings, may drive me to this evil; were I above want it would be less likely to be. O, my child, for thy sake would I avoid this doom more than for mine own, for if it should bring death to me, what will it not hurl on thee?—infamy, agony, scorn.”

She wept aloud as she spoke, and scarcely seemed to notice the singularity (at that late hour) of some one without, attempting to open the door; she heard, but the circumstance made little impression; she knew that as yet her doom was unfulfilled, and that, therefore, no danger could reach her; she was no coward at any time, but now despair had made her brave; the door opened and a stranger entered, without either alarming or disturbing her, and it was not till he had stood face to face with Ruth, and discovered his features to be those of Rhys Meredith, that she sprung up from her seat and gazed wildly and earnestly upon him.

Meredith gave her no time to question; “Ruth Tudor,” said he, “behold the cruelest of thy foes comes sueing to thy pity and mercy; I have embittered thy existence, and doomed thee to a terrible lot; what first was dictated by vengeance and malice became truth as I uttered it, for what I spoke I believed. Yet, take comfort, some of my predictions have failed, and why may not this be false? In my own fate I have ever been deceived, perhaps I may be equally so in thine; in the mean time have pity upon him who was thy enemy, but who, when his vengeance was uttered, instantly became thy friend. I was poor, and thy scorn might have robbed me of subsistence in danger, and thy contempt might have given me up. Beggared by many disastrous events, hunted by creditors, I fled from my wife and son because I could no longer bear to contemplate their suffering; I sought fortune all ways since we parted, and always has she eluded my grasp till last night, when she rather tempted than smiled upon me. At an idle fair I met the steward of this estate drunk and stupid, but loaded with gold; he travelled towards home alone; I could not, did not wrestle with the fiend that possessed me, but hastened to overtake him in his lonely ride.—Start not! no hair of his head was harmed by me; of his gold I robbed him, but not of his life, had I been the greater villain, I should now be in less danger, since he saw and marked my person: three hundred pounds is the meed of my daring, and I must keep it now or die. Ruth, thou too art poor and forsaken, but thou art faithful and kind, and will not betray me to justice; save me, and I will not enjoy my riches alone; thou knowest all the caves in the rocks, those hideous hiding-places, where no foot, save thine, has dared to tread; conceal me in these till the pursuit be past, and I will give thee one half my wealth, and return with the other to gladden my wife and son.”

The hand of Ruth was already opened, and in imagination she grasped the wealth he promised; oppression and poverty had somewhat clouded the nobleness but not the fierceness of her spirit. She saw that riches would save her from wrath, perhaps from blood, and, as the means to escape so mighty an evil, she was not scrupulous respecting a lesser: independently of this, she felt a great interest in the safety of Rhys; her own fate seemed to hang upon his; she hid the ruffian in the caves and supplied him with light and food.

There was a happiness now in the heart of Ruth—a joy in her thoughts as she sat all the long day upon the deserted settle of her wretched fireside, to which they had for many years been strangers. Many times during the past years of her sorrow she had thought of Rhys, and longed to look upon his face and sit beneath his shadow, as one whose presence could preserve her from the evil fate which he himself had predicted. She had long since forgiven him his prophecy; she believed he had spoken the truth, and this gave her a wild confidence in his power; a confidence that sometimes thought, “if he can foreknow, can he not also avert?” She said mentally, without any reference to the temporal good he had promised her, “I have a treasure in those caves; he is there; he who hath foreseen and may oppose my destiny; he hath shadowed my days with sorrow, and forbidden me, like ordinary beings, to hope: yet he is now in my power; his life is in my hands; he says so, yet I believe him not, for I cannot betray him if I would; were I to lead the officers of justice to the spot where he lies crouching, he would be invisible to their sight or to mine; or I should become speechless ere I could say, ‘Behold him.’ No, he cannot die by me!”

And she thought she would deserve his confidence, and support him in his suffering; she had concealed him in a deep dark cave, hewn far in the rock, to which she alone knew the entrance from the beach; there was another (if a huge aperture in the top of the rock might be so called), which, far from attempting to descend, the peasants and seekers for the culprit had scarcely dared to look into, so perpendicular, dark, and uncertain was the hideous descent into what justly appeared to them a bottomless abyss; they passed over his head in their search through the fields above, and before the mouth of his den upon the beach below, yet they left him in safety, though in incertitude and fear.

It was less wonderful, the suspicionless conduct of the villagers towards Ruth, than the calm prudence with which she conducted all the details relating to her secret; her poverty was well known, yet she daily procured a double portion of food, which was won by double labour; she toiled in the fields for the meed of oaten cake and potatoes, or she dashed out in a crazy boat on the wide ocean to win with the dredgers the spoils of the oyster beds that lie on its bosom; the daintier fare was for the unhappy guest, and daily did she wander among the rocks, when the tides were retiring, for the shell-fish which they had flung among the fissures in their retreat, which she bore, exhausted with fatigue, to her home—and which her lovely child, now rising into womanhood, prepared for the luxurious meal; it was wonderful too, the settled prudence of the little maiden, who spoke nothing of the food which was borne from their frugal board; if she suspected the secret of her mother, she respected it too much to allow others to discover that she did so.

Many sad hours did Ruth pass in the robber’s cave; and many times, by conversing with him upon the subject of her destiny, did she seek to alleviate the pangs its recollection gave her; but the result of such discussions were by no means favourable to her hopes; Rhys had acknowledged that his threat had originated in malice, and that he intended to alarm and subdue, but not to the extent that he had effected: “I knew well,” said he, “that disgrace alone would operate upon you as I wished, for I foresaw you would glory in the thought of nobly sustained misfortune; I meant to degrade you with the lowest; I meant to attribute to you what I now painfully experience to be the vilest of the vices; I intended to tell you, you were destined to be a thief, but I could not utter the words I had arranged and I was struck with horror at those I heard involuntarily proceeding from my lips; I would have recalled them but I could not; I would have said, ‘Maiden, I did but jest,’ but there was something that seemed to withhold my speech and press upon my soul, ‘so as thou hast said shall this thing be’—yet take comfort, my own fortunes have ever deceived me, and doubtlessly ever will, for I feel as if I should one day return to this cave and make it my final home.”

He spoke solemnly and wept,—but the awful eye of his companion was unmoved as she looked on in wonder and contempt at his grief. “Thou knowest not how to endure,” said she to him, “and as soon as night shall again fall upon our mountains, I will lead thee forth on thy escape; the danger of pursuit is now past; at midnight be ready for thy journey, leave the cave, and ascend the rocks by the path I shewed thee, to the field in which its mouth is situated; wait me there a few moments, and I will bring thee a fleet horse, ready saddled for the journey, for which thy gold must pay, since I must declare to the owner that I have sold it at a distance, and for more than its rated value.”

That midnight came, and Meredith waited with trembling anxiety for the haughty step of Ruth; at length he saw her, she had ascended the rock, and standing on its verge, was looking around for her guest; as she was thus alone in the clear moonlight, standing between rock and sky, and scarcely seemed to touch the earth, her dark locks and loose garments scattered by the wind, she looked like some giant spirit of the olden time, preparing to ascend into the mighty black cloud which singly hung from the empyreum, and upon which she already appeared to recline; Meredith beheld her and shuddered,—but she approached and he recovered his recollection.

“You must be speedy in your movements,” said she, “when you leave me; your horse waits on the other side of this field, and I would have you hasten lest his neighings should betray your purpose. But, before you depart, Rhys Meredith, there is an account to be settled between us: I have dared danger and privations for you; that the temptations of the poor may not assail me, give me my reward and go.”

Rhys pressed his leathern bag to his bosom, but answered nothing to the speech of Ruth: he seemed to be studying some evasion, for he looked upon the ground, and there was trouble in the working of his lip. At length he said cautiously, “I have it not with me: I buried it, lest it should betray me, in a field some miles distant; thither will I go, dig it up, and send it to thee from B—, which is, as thou knowest, my first destination.”

Ruth gave him one glance of her awful eye when he had spoken; she had detected his meanness, and smiled at his incapacity to deceive. “What dost thou press to thy bosom so earnestly?” she demanded; “surely thou art not the wise man I deemed thee, thus to defraud my claim: the friend alone thou mightest cheat, and safely; but I have been made wretched by thee, guilty by thee, and thy life is in my power; I could, as thou knowest, easily raise the village, and win half thy wealth by giving thee up to justice; but I prefer reward from thy wisdom and gratitude; give, therefore, and be gone.”

But Rhys knew too well the value of the metal of sin to yield one half of it to Ruth; he tried many miserable shifts and lies, and at last, baffled by the calm penetration of his antagonist, boldly avowed his intention of keeping all the spoil he had won with so much hazard. Ruth looked at him with scorn: “Keep thy gold,” she said, “if it thus can harden hearts, I covet not its possession; but there is one thing thou must do, and that ere thou stir one foot. I have supported thee with hard-earned industry, that I give thee; more proud, it should seem, in bestowing than I could be, from such as thee, in receiving: but the horse that is to bear thee hence to-night I borrowed for a distant journey; I must return with it, or with its value; open thy bag, pay me for that, and go.”

But Rhys seemed afraid to open his bag in the presence of her he had wronged. Ruth understood his fears; but, scorning vindication of her principles, contented herself with entreating him to be honest. “Be more just to thyself and me,” she persisted: “the debt of gratitude I pardon thee; but, I beseech thee, leave me not to encounter the consequence of having stolen from my friend the animal which is his only means of subsistence: I pray thee, Rhys, not to condemn me to scorn.”

It was to no avail that Ruth humbled herself to entreaties; Meredith answered not, and while she was yet speaking, cast side-long looks towards the gate where the horse was waiting for his service, and seemed meditating, whether he should not dart from Ruth, and escape her entreaties and demands by dint of speed. Her stern eye detected his purpose; and, indignant at his baseness, and ashamed of her own degradation, she sprung suddenly towards him, made a desperate clutch at the leathern bag, and tore it from the grasp of the deceiver. Meredith made an attempt to recover it, and a fierce struggle ensued, which drove them both back towards the yawning mouth of the cave from which he had just ascended to the world. On its very verge, on its very extreme edge, the demon who had so long ruled his spirit now instigated him to mischief, and abandoned him to his natural brutality: he struck the unhappy Ruth a revengeful and tremendous blow. At that moment a horrible thought glanced like lightning through her soul; he was to her no longer what he had been; he was a robber, ruffian, liar; one whom to destroy was justice, and perhaps it was he—. “Villain!” she cried, “thou—thou didst predict that I was doomed to be a murderer! art thou—art thou destined to be the victim?” She flung him from her with terrific force, as she stood close to the abyss, and the next instant heard him dash against its sides, as he was whirled headlong into darkness.

It was an awful feeling, the next that passed over the soul of Ruth Tudor, as she stood alone in the pale sorrowful-looking moonlight, endeavouring to remember what had chanced. She gazed on the purse, on the chasm, wiped the drops of agony from her heated brow, and then, with a sudden pang of recollection, rushed down to the cavern. The light was still burning, as Rhys had left it, and served to shew her the wretch extended helplessly beneath the chasm. Though his body was crushed, his bones splintered, and his blood was on the cavern’s sides, he was yet living, and raised his head to look upon her, as she darkened the narrow entrance in her passage: he glared upon her with the visage of a demon, and spoke like a fiend in pain. “Me hast thou murdered!” he said, “but I shall be avenged in all thy life to come. Deem not that thy doom is fulfilled, that the deed to which thou art fated is done: in my dying hour I know, I feel what is to come upon thee; thou art yet again to do a deed of blood!” “Liar!” shrieked the infuriated victim. “Thou art yet doomed to be a murderer!” “Liar!” “Thou art—and of—thine only child!” She rushed to him, but he was dead.

Ruth Tudor stood for a moment by the corpse, blind, stupefied, deaf, and dumb; in the next she laughed aloud, till the cavern rung with her ghastly mirth, and many voices mingled with and answered it; but the noises scared and displeased her, and in an instant she became stupidly grave; she threw back her dark locks with an air of offended dignity, and walked forth majestically from the cave. She took the horse by his rein, and led him back to his stable: with the same unvarying calmness she entered her cottage, and listened to the quiet breathings of her sleeping child; she longed to approach her nearer, but some new and horrid fear restrained her, and held back her anxious step: suddenly remembrance and reason returned, and she uttered a shriek so full of agony, so loud and shrill, that her daughter sprung from her bed, and threw herself into her arms.

It was in vain that the gentle Rachel supplicated her mother to find rest in sleep. “Not here,” she muttered, “it must not be here; the deep cave and the hard rock, these shall be my resting place; and the bed-fellow, lo! now, he waits my coming.” Then she would cry aloud, clasp her Rachel to her beating heart, and as suddenly, in horror thrust her from it.

The next midnight beheld Ruth Tudor in the cave seated upon a point of rock, at the head of the corpse, her chin resting upon her hands, gazing earnestly upon the distorted face. Decay had already begun its work; and Ruth sat there watching the progress of mortality, as if she intended that her stern eye should quicken and facilitate its operation. The next night also beheld her there, but the current of her thoughts had changed, and the dismal interval which had passed appeared to be forgotten. She stood with her basket of food: “Wilt thou not eat?” she demanded; “arise, strengthen thee for thy journey; eat, eat, thou sleeper; wilt thou never awaken? look, here is the meat thou lovest;” and as she raised his head, and put the food to his lips, the frail remnant of mortality shattered at her touch, and again she knew that he was dead.

It was evident to all that a shadow and a change was over the senses of Ruth; till this period she had been only wretched, but now madness was mingled with her grief. It was in no instance more apparent than in her conduct towards her beloved child: indulgent to all her wishes, ministering to all her wants with a liberal hand, till men wondered from whence she derived the means of indulgence, she yet seized every opportunity to send her from her presence. The gentle-hearted Rachel wept at her conduct, yet did not complain, for she believed it the effect of the disease, that had for so many years been preying upon her soul. Her nights were passed in roaming abroad, her days in the solitude of her hut; and even this became painful, when the step of her child broke upon it. At length she signified that a relative of her husband had died and left her wealth, and that it should enable her to dispose of herself as she had long wished; so leaving Rachel with her relatives in N—, she retired to a hut upon a lonely heath, where she was less wretched, because abandoned to her wretchedness.

In many of her ravings she had frequently spoken darkly of her crime, and her nightly visits to the cave; and more frequently still she addressed some unseen thing, which she asserted was for ever at her side. But few heard these horrors, and those who did, called to mind the early prophecy, and deemed them the workings of insanity in a fierce and imaginative mind. So thought also the beloved Rachel, who hastened daily to embrace her mother, but not now alone as formerly; a youth of the village was her companion and protector, one who had offered her worth and love, and whose gentle offers were not rejected. Ruth, with a hurried gladness, gave her consent, and a blessing to her child; and it was remarked that she received her daughter more kindly, and detained her longer at the cottage, when Evan was by her side, than when she went to the gloomy heath alone. Rachel herself soon made this observation, and as she could depend upon the honesty and prudence of him she loved, she felt less fear at his being a frequent witness of her mother’s terrific ravings. Thus all that human consolation was capable to afford was offered to the sufferer by her sympathising children.

But the delirium of Ruth Tudor appeared to increase with every nightly visit to the cave of secret blood; some hideous shadow seemed to follow her steps in the darkness, and sit by her side in the light. Sometimes she held strange parley with this creation of her phrensy, and at others smiled upon it in scornful silence; now, her language was in the tones of entreaty, pity, and forgiveness; anon, it was the burst of execration, curses, and scorn. To the gentle listeners her words were blasphemy; and, shuddering at her boldness, they deemed, in the simple holiness of their own hearts, that the evil one was besetting her, and that religion alone could banish him. Possessed by this idea, Evan one day suddenly interrupted her tremendous denunciations upon her fate, and him who, she said, stood over her to fulfil it, with imploring her to open the book which he held in his hand, and seek consolation from its words and promises. She listened, and grew calm in a moment; with an awful smile she bade him open, and read at the first place which should meet his eye: “from that, the word of truth, as thou sayest, I shall know my fate; what is there written I will believe.” He opened the book, and read—

“Whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I go up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell, thou art there; If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.”

Ruth laid her hand upon the book: “it is enough; its words are truth; it hath said there is no hope, and I find comfort in my despair: I have already spoken thus in the secrecy of my heart, and I know that he will be obeyed; the unnamed sin must be—.” Evan knew not how to comfort, so he shut up his book and retired; and Rachel kissed the cheek of her mother, as she bade her a tender good night. Another month and she was to be the bride of Evan, and she passed over the heath with a light step, for the thought of her bridal seemed to give joy to her mother. “We shall all be happy then,” said the smiling girl, as the youth of her heart parted from her hand for the night; “and heaven kindly grant that happiness may last.”

The time appointed for the marriage of Rachel Tudor and Evan Edwards had long passed away, and winter had set in with unusual sternness even on that stormy coast; when, during a land tempest, on a dark November afternoon, a stranger to the country, journeying on foot, lost his way in endeavouring to find a short route to his destination, over stubble fields and meadow lands, by following the footmarks of those who had preceded him. The stranger was a young man, of a bright eye and hardy look, and he went on buffeting the elements, and buffeted by them, without a thought of weariness, or a single expression of impatience. Night descended upon him as he walked, and the snow storm came down with unusual violence, as if to try the temper of his mind, a mind cultivated and enlightened, though cased in a frame accustomed to hardships, and veiled by a plain, nay almost rustic exterior. The thunder roared loudly above him, and the wind blowing tremendously, raised the new-fallen snow from the earth, which, mingling with the showers as they fell, raised a clatter about his head which bewildered and blinded the traveller, who, finding himself near some leafless brambles and a few clustered bushes of the mountain broom, took shelter under them to recover his senses, and reconnoitre his position. “Of all these ingredients for a storm,” said he smilingly to himself, “the lightning is the most endurable after all; for if it does not kill, it may at least cure, by lighting the way out of a labyrinth, and by its bright flashes I hope to discover where I am.” In this hope he was not mistaken: the brilliant and beautiful gleam showed him, when the snow shower had somewhat abated, every stunted bush and blade of grass for some miles, and something, about the distance of one, that looked like a white-washed cottage of some poor encloser of the miserable heath upon which he was now standing. Full of hope of a shelter from the storm, and, lit onwards by the magnificent torch of heaven, the stranger trod cheerily forwards, and in less than half an hour, making full allowance for his retrograding between the flashes, arrived at his beacon the white cottage, which, from the low wall of loose limestones by which it was surrounded, he judged to be, as he had already imagined, the humble residence of some poor tenant of the manor. He opened the little gate, and was proceeding to knock at the door, when his steps were arrested by a singular and unexpected sound; it was a choral burst of many voices, singing slowly and solemnly that magnificent dirge of the church of England, the 104th psalm. The stranger loved music, and the sombrous melody of that fine air had an instant effect upon his feelings; he lingered in solemn and silent admiration till the majestic strain had ceased; he then knocked gently at the door, which was instantly and courteously opened to his inquiry.

On entering, he found himself in a cottage of a more respectable interior than from its outward appearance he had been led to expect: but he had little leisure or inclination for the survey of its effects, for his senses and imagination were immediately and entirely occupied by the scene which presented itself on his entrance. In the centre of the room into which he had been so readily admitted, stood, on its tressels, an open coffin; lights were at its head and foot, and on each side sat many persons of both sexes, who appeared to be engaged in the customary ceremony of watching the corse previous to its interment in the morning. There were many who appeared to the stranger to be watchers, but there were but two who, in his eye, bore the appearance of mourners, and they had faces of grief which spoke too plainly of the anguish that was mingling within: one, at the foot of the coffin, was a pale youth just blooming into manhood, who covered his dewy eyes with trembling fingers that ill concealed the tears which trickled down his wan cheeks beneath: the other—; but why should we again describe that still unbowed and lofty form? The awful marble brow upon which the stranger gazed, was that of Ruth Tudor.

There was much whispering and quiet talk among the people while refreshments were handed amongst them; and so little curiosity was excited by the appearance of the traveller, that he naturally concluded that it must be no common loss that could deaden a feeling usually so intense in the bosoms of Welsh peasants; he was even checked for an attempt to question; but one man,—he who had given him admittance, and seemed to possess authority in the circle,—told him he would answer his questions when the guests should depart, but till then he must keep silence. The traveller endeavoured to obey, and sat down in quiet contemplation of the figure who most interested his attention, and who sat at the coffin’s head. Ruth Tudor spoke nothing, nor did she appear to heed aught of the business that was passing around her. Absorbed by reflection, her eyes were generally cast to the ground; but when they were raised, the traveller looked in vain for that expression of grief which had struck him so forcibly on his entrance; there was something wonderful strange in the character of her perfect features: could he have found words for his thought, and might have been permitted the expression, he would have called it triumphant despair; so deeply agonised, so proudly stern, looked the mourner that sat by the dead.

The interest which the traveller took in the scene became more intense the longer he gazed upon its action; unable to resist the anxiety which had begun to prey upon his spirit, he arose and walked towards the coffin, with the purpose of contemplating its inhabitant: a sad explanation was given, by its appearance, of the grief and the anguish he had witnessed; a beautiful girl was reposing in the narrow house, with a face as calm and lovely as if she but slept a deep and refreshing sleep, and the morning sun would again smile upon her awakening: salt, the emblem of the immortal soul, was placed upon her breast; and, in her pale and perishing fingers, a branch of living flowers were struggling for life in the grasp of death, and diffusing their sweet and gracious fragrance over the cold odour of mortality. These images, so opposite, yet so alike, affected the spirit of the gazer, and he almost wept as he continued looking upon them, till he was aroused from his trance by the strange conduct of Ruth Tudor, who had caught a glimpse of his face as he bent in sorrow over the coffin. She sprung up from her seat, and darting at him a terrible glance of recognition, pointed down to the corse, and then with a hollow burst of frantic laughter, shouted—“Behold, thou liar!”

The startled stranger was relieved from the necessity of speaking by some one taking his arm and gently leading him to the farther end of the cottage; the eyes of Ruth followed him, and it was not till he had done violence to himself in turning from her to his conductor, that he could escape their singular fascination. When he did so he beheld a venerable old man, the pastor of a distant village, who had come that night to speak comfort to the mourners, and perform the last sad duty to the dead on the morrow. “Be not alarmed at what you have witnessed, my young friend,” said he; “these ravings are not uncommon: this unhappy woman, at an early period of her life, gave ear to the miserable superstitions of her country, and a wretched pretender to wisdom predicted that she should become a shedder of blood: madness has been the inevitable consequence in an ardent spirit, and in its ravings she dreams she has committed one sin, and is still tempted to add to it another.”

“You may say what you please, parson,” said the old man who had given admittance to the stranger, and who now, after dismissing all the guests save the youth, joined the talkers, and seated himself on the settle by their sides; “you may say what you please about madness and superstition; but I know Ruth Tudor was a fated woman, and the deed that was to be I believe she has done: aye, aye, her madness is conscience; and if the deep sea and the jagged rocks could speak, they might tell us a tale of other things that: but she is judged now; her only child is gone—her poor Rachel. Poor Evan! he was her suitor: ah, he little thought two months ago, when he was preparing for a gay bridal, that her slight sickness would end thus: he does not deserve it; but for her—God forgive me if I do her wrong, but I think it is the hand of God, and it lies heavy, as it should.” And the grey-haired old man hobbled away, satisfied that in thus thinking he was shewing his zeal for virtue.

“Alas, that so white a head should acknowledge so hard a heart!” said the pastor; “Ruth is condemned, according to his system, for committing that which a mightier hand compelled her to do; how harsh and misjudging is age! But we must not speak so loud,” continued he; “for see, the youth Evan is retiring for the night, and the miserable mother has thrown herself on the floor to sleep; the sole domestic is rocking on her stool, and therefore I will do the honours of this poor cottage to you. There is a chamber above this, containing the only bed in the hut; thither you may go and rest, for otherwise it will certainly be vacant to-night: I shall find a bed in the village; and Evan sleeps near you with some of the guests in the barn. But, before I go, if my question be not unwelcome and intrusive, tell me who you are, and whither you are bound.”

“I was ever somewhat of a subscriber to the old man’s creed of fatalism,” said the stranger, smiling, “and I believe I am more confirmed in it by the singular events of this day. My father was a man of a certain rank in society, but of selfish and disorderly habits. A course of extravagance and idleness was succeeded by difficulties and distress. Harassed by creditors, he was pained by their demands, and his selfishness was unable to endure the sufferings of his wife and children. Instead of exertion, he had recourse to flight, and left us to face the difficulties from which he shrunk. He was absent for years, while his family toiled and struggled with success. Suddenly we heard that he was concealed in this part of the coast; the cause which made that concealment necessary I forbear to mention; but he as suddenly disappeared from the eyes of men, though we never could trace him beyond this part of the country. I have always believed that I should one day find my father, and have lately, though with difficulty, prevailed upon my mother to allow me to make my inquiries in this neighbourhood; but my search is at an end to-day,—I believe that I have found my father. Roaming along the beach, I penetrated into several of those dark caverns of the rocks, which might well, by their rugged aspects, deter the idle and the timid from entering. Through the fissures of one I discovered, in the interior, a light. Surprised, I penetrated to its concealment, and discovered a man sleeping on the ground. I advanced to awake him, and found but a fleshless skeleton, cased in tattered and decaying garments. He had probably met his death by accident, for exactly over the corpse I observed, at a terrific distance, the daylight, as if streaming down from an aperture above. Thus the wretched man must have fallen, but how long since, or who had discovered his body, and left the light which I beheld, I knew not, though I cannot help cherishing a strong conviction that it was the body of Rhys Meredith that I saw.”

“Who talks of Rhys Meredith,” said a stern voice near the coffin, “and of the cave where the outcast rots?” They turned quickly at the sound, and beheld Ruth Tudor standing up, as if she had been intently listening to the story. “It was I who spoke, dame,” said the stranger gently, “and my speech was of my father, of Rhys Meredith; I am Owen his son.”

“Son! Owen Rhys!” said the bewildered Ruth, passing her hand over her forehead, as if to enable her to recover the combinations of these names; “and who art thou, that thus givest human ties to him who is no more of humanity? why speakest thou of living things as pertaining to the dead? Father! he is father of nought save sin, and murder is his only begotten!”

She advanced to the traveller as she spoke, and again caught a view of his face; again he saw the wild look of recognition, and an unearthly shriek followed the convulsive horror of her face. “There! there!” she said, “I knew it must be thyself; once before to-night have I beheld thee, yet what can thy coming bode? Back with thee, ruffian! for is not thy work done?”

“Let us leave her,” said the good pastor, “to the care of her attendant; do not continue to meet her gaze, your presence may increase, but cannot allay her malady: go up to your bed and rest.”

He retired as he spoke; and Owen, in compliance with his wish, ascended the ruinous stair which led to his chamber, after he had beheld Ruth Tudor quietly place herself in her seat at the open coffin’s head. The room to which he mounted was not of the most cheering aspect, yet he felt that he had often slept soundly in a worse. It was a gloomy unfinished chamber, and the wind was whistling coldly and drearily through the uncovered rafters above his head. Like many of the cottages in that part of the country, it appeared to have grown old and ruinous before it had been finished; for the flooring was so crazy as scarcely to support the huge wooden bedstead, and in many instances the boards were entirely separated from each other, and in the centre, time, or the rot, had so completely devoured the larger half of one, that through the gaping aperture Owen had an entire command of the room and the party below, looking down immediately above the coffin. Ruth was in the same attitude as when he left her, and the servant girl was dozing by her side. Every thing being perfectly tranquil, Owen threw himself upon his hard couch, and endeavoured to compose himself to rest for the night, but this had become a task, and one of no easy nature to surmount; his thoughts still wandered to the events of the day, and he felt there was some strange connexion between the scene he had just witnessed, and the darker one of the secret cave. He was an imaginative man, and of a quick and feverish temperament, and he thought of Ruth Tudor’s ravings, and the wretched skeleton of the rock, till he had worked out in his brain the chain of events that linked one consequence with the other: he grew restless and wretched, and amidst the tossings of impatient anxiety, fatigue overpowered him, and he sunk into a perturbed and heated sleep. His slumber was broken by dreams that might well be the shadows of his waking reveries. He was alone (as in reality) upon his humble bed, when imagination brought to his ear the sound of many voices again singing the slow and monotonous psalm; it was interrupted by the outcries of some unseen things who attempted to enter his chamber, and, amid yells of fear and execrations of anger, bade him “Arise, and come forth, and aid:” then the coffined form which slept so quietly below, stood by his side, and in beseeching accents, bade him “Arise, and save her.” In his sleep he attempted to spring up, but a horrid fear restrained him, a fear that he should be too late; then he crouched like a coward beneath his coverings, to hide from the reproaches of the spectre, while shouts of laughter and shrieks of agony were poured like a tempest around him: he sprung from his bed and awoke.

It was some moments ere he could recover recollection, or shake off the horror which had seized upon his soul. He listened, and with infinite satisfaction observed an unbroken silence throughout the house. He smiled at his own terrors, attributed them to the events of the day, or the presence of a corse, and determined not to look down into the lower room till he should be summoned thither in the morning. He walked to the casement, and looked abroad to the night; the clouds were many, black, and lowering, and the face of the sky looked angrily at the wind, and glared portentously upon the earth; the sleet was still falling; distant thunder announced the approach or departure of a storm, and Owen marked the clouds coming from afar towards him, laden with the rapid and destructive lightning: he shut the casement and returned towards his bed; but the light from below attracted his eye, and he could not pass the aperture without taking one glance at the party.

They were in the same attitude in which he had left them; the servant was sleeping, but Ruth was earnestly gazing on the lower end of the room upon something, without the sight of Owen; his attention was next fixed upon the corpse, and he thought he had never seen any living thing so lovely; and so calm was the aspect of her last repose, that Meredith thought it more resembled a temporary suspension of the faculties, than the eternal stupor of death: her features were pale, but not distorted, and there was none of the livid hue of death in her beautiful mouth and lips; but the flowers in her hand gave stronger demonstration of the presence of the power, before whose potency their little strength was fading; drooping with a mortal sickness, they bowed down their heads in submission, as one by one they dropped from her pale and perishing fingers. Owen gazed, till he thought he saw the grasp of her hand relax, and a convulsive smile pass over her cold and rigid features; he looked again; the eye-lids shook and vibrated like the string of some fine-strung instrument; the hair rose, and the head cloth moved: he started up ashamed: “Does the madness of this woman affect all who would sleep beneath her roof?” said he; “what is this that disturbs me—or am I yet in a dream? Hark! what is that?” It was the voice of Ruth; she had risen from her seat, and was standing near the coffin, apparently addressing some one who stood at the lower end of the room: “To what purpose is thy coming now?” said she, in a low and melancholy voice, “and at what dost thou laugh and gibe? lo! you; she is here, and the sin you know of, cannot be; how can I take the life which another hath already withdrawn? Go, go, hence to thy cave of night, for this is no place of safety for thee.” Her thoughts now took another turn; she seemed to hide one from the pursuit of others; “Lie still! lie still!” she whispered; “put out thy light! so, so, they pass by and mark thee not; thou art safe; good night, good night! now will I home to sleep;” and she seated herself in her chair, as if composing her senses to rest.

Owen was again bewildered in the chaos of thought, but for this time he determined to subdue his imagination, and, throwing himself upon his bed, again gave himself up to sleep; but the images of his former dreams still haunted him, and their hideous phantasms were more powerfully renewed; again he heard the solemn psalm of death, but unsung by mortals—it was pealed through earth up to the high heaven, by myriads of the viewless and the mighty: again he heard the execrations of millions for some unremembered sin, and the wrath and the hatred of a world was rushing upon him: “Come forth! come forth!” was the cry; and amid yells and howls they were darting upon him, when the pale form of the beautiful dead arose between them, and shielded him from their malice; but he heard her say aloud, “It is for this, that thou wilt not save me; arise, arise, and help!”

He sprung up as he was commanded; sleeping or waking he never knew; but he started from his bed to look down into the chamber, as he heard the voice of Ruth loud in terrific denunciation: he looked; she was standing, uttering yells of madness and rage, and close to her was a well-known form of appalling recollection—his father, as he had seen him last; he arose and darted to the door: “I am mad,” said he; “I am surely mad, or this is still a continuation of my dream:” he looked again; Ruth was still there, but alone.

But, though no visible form stood by the maniac, some fiend had entered her soul, and mastered her mighty spirit; she had armed herself with an axe, and shouting, “Liar, liar, hence!” was pursuing some imaginary foe to the darker side of the cottage: Owen strove hard to trace her motions, but as she had retreated under the space occupied by his bed, he could no longer see her, and his eyes involuntarily fastened themselves upon the coffin; there a new horror met them; the dead corpse had risen, and with wild and glaring eyes was watching the scene before her. Owen distrusted his senses till he heard the terrific voice of Ruth, as she marked the miracle he had witnessed; “The fiend, the robber!” she yelled, “it is he who hath entered the pure body of my child. Back to thy cave of blood, thou lost one! back to thine own dark hell!” Owen flew to the door; it was too late; he heard the shriek—the blow: he fell into the room, but only in time to hear the second blow, and see the cleft hand of the hapless Rachel fall back upon its bloody pillow; his terrible cries brought in the sleepers from the barn, headed by the wretched Evan, and, for a time, the thunders of heaven were drowned in the clamorous grief of man. No one dared to approach the miserable Ruth, who now, in utter frenzy, strode around the room, brandishing, with diabolical grandeur, the bloody axe, and singing a wild song of triumph and joy. All fell back as she approached, and shrunk from the infernal majesty of her terrific form; and the thunders of heaven rolling above their heads, and the flashings of the fires of eternity in their eyes, were less terrible than the savage glare and desperate wrath of the maniac:—suddenly, the house rocked to its foundation; its inmates were blinded for a moment, and sunk, felled by a stunning blow, to the earth;—slowly each man recovered and arose, wondering he was yet alive;—all were unhurt, save one. Ruth Tudor was on the earth, her blackened limbs prostrate beneath the coffin of her child, and her dead cheek resting on the rent and bloody axe;—it had been the destroyer of both.

THE YELLOW DWARF.
A TALE OF THE ORANGE TREE.

Oranges and Lemons.

Every body knows, or at least ought to know, with what an uproar of delight the birth of an heir to any noble family was celebrated in the old baronial times of fisty-cuff memory; exactly such a festival would we, the humble historian of the illustrious house of Tecklenburgh, describe if we knew how to render justice to the outrageous mirth which shook the old castle to its very foundation, on the day of the eventful morn on which the lady of the eldest son of the family had presented her lord, and his no less expecting father the count, with a new prop to the seat of their ancient dignities. It was amid the mingled uproar of trumpets, bells, soldiers, women, horses, and dogs, that the respectable purple-nosed dominican, who was confessor to the family, gave a blessing and a name to its future representative; and immediately after the ceremony, the knights and nobles, wearied by the blows given and received in the jousts, retired to the dining hall with the threefold intention of filling their empty stomachs with something better than the east wind, solacing their spirits with the biting jests of the count’s fool, and curing their wounds and bruises of the morning by bathing them in flagons of rhenish, till the moon should look down upon the evening.

But happiness will not endure for ever, like riches, she maketh herself wings and fleeth away: the company, after picking the flesh of the huge wild boar to the bone, began to stare at each other with bleared eyes, ask querulous questions with stuttering tongues, and reply with solemn and important visages; and the count of Tecklenburgh, fearing that his youngest son, the handsome Sir Ludolph, would soon grow as wise as the rest of the party, and of course utterly unfit for business, withdrew him quietly from the table and conducted him to his private apartment; there, seating himself in his state chair and enrobing his person, with an air of paternal dignity he solemnly demanded of his son, if he had, according to his particular order, considered the subject of their last conference. The young knight answered, without any hesitation, that he had not, for that the subject was so disagreeable to him that he had never suffered it to enter his mind since; that he thought the tonsure excessively unbecoming, and that he had no inclination to pray every time St. Benedict’s bells should ring; and he added moreover, that he was resolved to carve himself out a fortune with his sword, and for that purpose intended to set off immediately for the court of the injured princes of Thuringia, whose cause was a just and honourable one, and make them an offer of his services: all this was said with an air of so much determination and composure, as partly to disturb, and partly to amuse the gravity of the count of Tecklenburgh; but considering within himself for a few moments, he thought this last project of his son was not quite so foolish as he had at first been willing to imagine it. In addition to high courage and many knightly acquirements, Ludolph possessed a very handsome person, and this idea connecting itself with the beautiful sister of the princes of Thuringia, he began to think that it would be a pity to hide that fine form under a greasy cassock; he reflected that should the three sons of Albert the Depraved get their brains knocked out in the skirmish, (a consummation devoutly to be wished, and, from their warlike character and powerful enemies, very likely to happen,) their possessions would descend to their sister, who might possibly fall in love with his handsome son, and then possibly the margraviate of Thuringia might finally centre in his family. These, and many other possibilities working in the brain of father Tecklenburgh, worked a change in his countenance also; and Ludolph seeing a smile, or something like one, hovering over his iron features, judged it a favourable opportunity for re-enforcing his petition, which he did with all the zeal and eloquence he could muster—eloquence which touched the heart of his tender father, for he assured him that if he would permit him to depart, he would not draw the smallest piece of copper from his treasury to fit him out for the expedition, but would make his aunt’s legacy of relics answer every purpose. This last remonstrance settled the business; count Tecklenburgh, finding it was to cost him nothing, gave his consent to the measure, and made his son happy in his own way, though, if that happiness had cost him a single cruitzner, he would have held fast to the tonsure in spite of all the repugnance of poor Ludolph; as it was, he gave him his blessing, and dismissed him with much good advice, but not a single coin, and the knight was too happy in the granted permission to grieve at his father’s lack of liberality. With a lightened heart he went for his holy legacy, which he found much heavier than he had expected; every bone and rag was carefully marked with the name of its original owner, and, after getting the monk to read him their titles, and affix a value to each article, he hastened to dispose of his sanctified treasure. He imagined the most likely persons to bid handsomely for his commodities would be the monks, who paid such respectful and humble reverence to cargoes of that description; but, after visiting a convent of Dominicans situated near the castle, in this instance he found himself most grievously mistaken; these holy pedlars were much too wise to buy what they had long found their account in selling: they had already a good stock on hand, and, when this should be exhausted, they could manufacture others at a much cheaper rate than they could purchase them of count Ludolph: so he carried his legacy to the nuns, who rejected it instantaneously, doubting whether the articles were genuine. From the nuns he went to all the orders of mendicants, who treated him and his relics with great contempt, cried down his cargo, and impudently asserted that the leg of St. Bridget, which he had considered the most valuable article in the pious collection, was the leg of a woman who was hung some years before for sorcery in Nuremburg, as they themselves had the real original limb of the saint in their possession. Thus disappointed among the shorn lambs of the fold, Ludolph determined to seek for purchasers among the laity, and accordingly found them in the persons of priest-ridden princes, crusading nobles, pilgrim knights, and convent-founding ladies: the great variety of his good aunt’s collection enabled him to gratify the tastes of all, for his box contained one member or other of every saint mentioned in the monk of Treves’s martyrology. St. Bridget’s leg he sold at a high price to a miserable old noble who had grown rich by rapine, and who trusted by this measure to scare away the goblins and spectres who nightly kept their revels round his bed. The thumb of St. Austin was purchased by a beautiful princess, as the guard of her chastity amid the allurements of a court, and was suspended like a camphor bag around her delicate neck; while the illustrious mother of a reprobate young knight earnestly hoped, by tacking a piece of the hair shirt of St. Jerome to the shirt of her son, to effect a reformation in his morals, and an amendment in his manners. There were always abundance of fools in the world, and in those unlettered times it did not require the light of a lantern to look for them. Ludolph thought so, as, with a lightened box but a heavy purse, he returned to Tecklenburgh to fit out for his expedition. Hosen, boots, vests, tunics, hoods, harness, and arms, were all ready in a short time; for when a man has money, every thing else under the sun is very much at his service. His appointments were all of the handsomest kind; his device was a boar, and his colours were blue and scarlet. And thus, having equipped the knight and sent him forward, let us look back for a little, to ascertain whither he is going, and for what purpose when he shall arrive there.

The cause of the princes of Thuringia was, as count Ludolph had truly stated, a just and honourable one: their father, Albert the Depraved, had disinherited them, and banished their mother, in favour of a worthless mistress and his illegitimate son, for whom he anxiously endeavoured to procure the investiture of his dominions after his decease. Not succeeding in this notable project, and bent upon the ruin of his own children, he sold his landgraviate of Misnia to the emperor Adolphus, who dying before he could be benefited by his purchase, bequeathed this right, to which he had no right at all, to his brother Philip of Nassau, who, poor in character, and still poorer in purse, was now levying an army, aided by the emperor Albert, to deprive the legitimate heir, Frederic with the Bite, and his brother Dictman, of their rights and possessions. To this project they were by no means disposed to consent, more especially as their mother, Margaret, daughter of Frederic the Redbeard, continually kept alive their resentment against their worthless father and his abandoned associates. This princess, on being years before separated from her children by her husband, had requested permission to take leave of them ere their departure, which being granted, she, in the frenzy of rage and grief, left a singular memorial of her wrongs with her eldest son; she bit a piece out of his cheek, and the impression remaining upon his face for ever, inflamed his indignation against the original author of this disfigurement; so that, when capable of bearing arms, he deposed his father and assumed his place, to thrust him from which Philip of Nassau was now threatening, and to oppose whom half Germany was rising in arms to assist the cheek-bitten Frederic, and among many others the knight of Tecklenburgh.

Margaret of Suabia, the mother of the princes, during the early part of her life, had been confined by her husband in the castle of Wartzburg, in order that she might be removed the more readily into a still smaller abode, whenever the proper opportunity should occur, and which he piously determined not to neglect. She was at this period in a situation which might have interested any man but such a husband, for she promised to increase his illustrious family by an additional son or daughter; but as he cared for no children but the son of his mistress Cunegunda, this circumstance rather operated against the poor princess, who was left to amuse herself as well as she could in superintending the infancy of her sons, and hunting in the haunted forest of Eisenac. One day, while thus diverting her attention from the many anxieties which oppressed her, she found herself suddenly separated from her attendants; but hearing a horn sound to the right, she spurred on her palfrey in that direction, till, after an hour’s hard riding, she began to fear she was removing still further from her people, for no sound could she hear but that of the eternal bugle, no hoof-tramp but that of her own steed. Still the horn sounded, and still the princess galloped, till at length wearied by her exercise, and finding herself in a large open plain, she dismounted to reconnoitre; at the same moment she remarked the silence of the horn, and the appearance of a gigantic orange tree, loaded with fine fruit, in the centre of the tranquil plain. Astonishment she certainly felt on beholding so extraordinary and beautiful an object; but hunger and fatigue had entirely banished all notions of fear; besides, dame Margaret, having no small share of the curiosity of her grandmother Eve, could no more resist the temptation of tasting these oranges, than the first woman did the apple; so climbing up into the tree, she regaled herself to her heart’s content with this fine fruit of the forest. By the time she had fairly dined, and was as weary of eating as she had previously been of riding, she bethought her of the boys at home, and with what glee they would have marched to the sack of the orange tree; but as that was not possible, she determined they should not be without share of the spoil, and therefore began to fill her huge pockets with the ripest and the largest of the fruit. But this action displeased the hospitable master of the table at which she had been so plentifully regaled; “Eat, but take nothing away,” had been one of his maxims, and he was mortally offended to see this honest rule set at nought in the person of a princess, a lady who, he thought, ought to have understood better manners. Before, therefore, she had laid up provisions for the march, a little shrill voice from the tree commanded her highness “not to steal his fruit,” and, at the same instant, there issued from the trunk which opened to give him a passage, a figure which effectually satisfied the curiosity of the princess of Suabia. The animal which now quickly ascended the tree, and placed himself vis à vis with her highness, was a little deformed man, about three feet and a half high, with a face as yellow as the oranges upon which he lived, hair of the same hue hanging down to his heels, and a monstrous beard, of the same bilious complexion, gracefully descending to his feet; if you add to this, the gaiety of his yellow doublet, short cloak, and hose, you will not wonder that Margaret did not altogether relish the tête à tête in which she found herself so suddenly and singularly placed, independent of the awkwardness of paying a first visit in the boughs of a tree. “Princess,” said the little yellow devil, after staring at her some time with his two huge goggling yellow eyes, “what business have you here?” “I have lost my way,” she replied, “and being fatigued, was going to gather an orange to appease my hunger:” but he, without the least respect for his guest, or the rank of an emperor’s daughter, rudely answered, “Woman, you lie! you were stealing my property to carry away.” At this insolent reproach, Margaret, whose patience was never proverbial, felt a strong inclination to treat the demon as she afterwards did her son; but fearing that the little gentleman might not endure it quite so temperately, prudently restrained this effort of her indignation, and only said, “I did not know the tree had any other owner than myself, or I would not have gathered any; what I have eaten I cannot restore, but here is the last I have taken;” and she threw it rather roughly at the Dwarf, who, irritated excessively at this behaviour, told her, grinning hideously, and exhibiting for her admiration his monstrous overgrown yellow claws, that he had a strong temptation to tear her to pieces, which nothing but his wish to be allied to the blood of the emperors should have prevented. “My oranges,” said he, “which you have stolen, I estimate above all price, except that which I am going to demand: I am a powerful demon, and rule with unbounded sway many thousand spirits; but I am unhappy in not having a wife with whom to share my power; as Adam was not delighted in Paradise, neither am I in my Orange Tree, without a companion. You are about to present an infant to your lord, who is utterly indifferent about the matter; it will be a girl, and I demand her in marriage on the day she will be twenty years old: consent to be my mother, and I will avenge your injuries upon your husband, and load you with honours and riches; refuse, and I will tear you in pieces this moment, and furnish my supper table with your carcass.” Margaret, who had never been so terrified in all her life, and would not only have given her daughter, but her sons and husband into the bargain, to have got away, readily promised to agree with the Dwarf’s wishes, who now became exceedingly polite, embraced his dear mother, and assured her of his devotion. He then informed her he would give her notice some months before he should claim his wife, placed her carefully and tenderly upon her palfrey, and mounting behind, spurred on the animal, who flew like the wind to the entrance of the forest; where again embracing his good mother, he dismounted and disappeared. Margaret, freed from the odious company of the Yellow Dwarf, began to reflect with no very pleasant feelings upon her present adventure and future prospects. She was, indeed, safe out of the orange-coloured clutches of her dutiful and well-beloved son; and, vexed as she was by the horrible promise she had been obliged to make, she could not help congratulating herself with great sincerity upon this circumstance, and began, like all who have just escaped a present danger, to make light of the evils in the distance. The farther she cantered from the Orange Tree, the easier her mind became; and taking a few hints from “Time, the comforter,” she reflected that many things might occur before the expiration of twenty years: it was a long period to look forward; the little yellow devil might die, (and, indeed, she could not but allow that he looked most miserably ill,) or he might forget his bargain, or he might be conquered and killed by some black, pea-green, or true blue devil, who might be stronger or more powerful than himself; or, in case of the worst, she could secure her daughter in some strong castle or convent, or marry her, before the expiration of the term, to some prince capable of protecting her; at all events, thought Margaret, “sufficient to the day is the evil thereof;” and, delighted by these soothing reflections, and charmed to find herself in a whole skin, she trotted along with great complacency, and arrived quite comforted before the gates of Wartzburg.