Silent and deserted—yes! It was not time alone that had wrought the desolation. Nettleby Tower had stood a siege in the time of the Commonwealth, and the marks of bullets might still be traced on its walls; but the injuries which had been inflicted by the slow march of centuries, or the more rapid visitation of war, were slight compared to those which had been wrought by litigation and family dissension. The property had been for years the subject of a vexatious lawsuit, which had half ruined the unsuccessful party, and the present owner of Nettleby Tower had not cared to take personal possession of the gloomy pile. Perhaps Mr. Auger knew that the feeling of the neighbourhood would be against him, as the sympathies of all would be enlisted on the side of the descendant of that ancient family which had for centuries dwelt in the Tower, who had been deprived of his birthright by the will of a proud and intemperate father.
The old fortress had thus been suffered to fall into decay. Grass grew in the courtyard; the wallflower clung to the battlements; the winter snow and the summer rain made their way through the broken casements, and no hand had removed the mass of wreck which lay where a furious storm had thrown down one of the ancient chimneys. Parties of tourists occasionally visited the gloomy place, trod the long, dreary corridors, and heard from a wrinkled woman accounts of the moth-eaten tapestry, and the time-darkened family portraits that grimly frowned from the walls. They heard tales of the last Mr. Bardon, the proud owner of the pile; how he had been wont to sit long and late over his bottle, carousing with jovial companions, till the hall resounded with their oaths and their songs; and how, more than thirty years back, he had disinherited his only son for marrying a farmer’s daughter. Then the old woman would, after slowly showing the way up the worn stone steps which led round and round till they opened on the summit of the tower, direct her listener’s attention to a small grey speck in the wide-spreading landscape below, and tell them that Dr. Bardon lived there in needy circumstances, in actual sight of the place where, if every man had his right, he would now be dwelling as his fathers had dwelt. And the visitors would sigh, shake their heads, and moralize on the strange changes in human fortunes.
The old woman who showed strangers over Nettleby Tower lived in a cottage hard by; neither she nor any other person was ever to be found in the old halls after the sun had set. The place had the repute of being haunted, and was left after dark to the sole possession of the rooks, the owls, and the bats. I must tax the faith of my readers to believe that the old tower was actually haunted; not by the ghosts of the dead, but by the spirits of evil that are ever moving amongst the living. I must attempt with a bold hand to draw aside the mysterious veil which divides the invisible from the visible world, and though I must invoke imagination to my aid, it is imagination fluttering on the confines of truth. Bear with me, then, while I personify the spirits of Pride and Intemperance, and represent them as lingering yet in the pile in which for centuries they had borne sway over human hearts.
Standing on the battlements of the grey tower, behold two dim, but gigantic forms, like dark clouds, that to the eye of fancy have assumed a mortal shape. The little rock-plant that has found a cradle between the crumbling stones bends not beneath their weight,—and yet how many deep-rooted hopes have they crushed! Their unsubstantial shapes cast no shadow on the wall, and yet have darkened myriads of homes! The natural sense cannot recognise their presence; the eye beholds them not, the human ear cannot catch the low thunder of their speech; and yet there they stand, terrible realities,—known, like the invisible plague, by their effects upon those whom they destroy!
There is a wild light in the eyes of Intemperance, not caught from the glad sunbeams that are bathing the world in glory; it is like a red meteor playing over some deep morass, and though there is often mirth in his tone, it is such mirth as jars upon the shuddering soul like the laugh of a raving maniac! Pride is of more lofty stature than his companion, perhaps of yet darker hue, and his voice is lower and deeper. His features are stamped with the impress of all that piety abhors and conscience shrinks from, for we behold him without his veil. Human infirmity may devise soft names for cherished sins, and even invest them with a specious glory which deceives the dazzled eye; but who could endure to see in all their bare deformity those two arch soul-destroyers, Intemperance and Pride?
“Nay, it was I who wrought this ruin!” exclaimed the former, stretching his shadowy hand over the desolated dwelling. “Think you that had Hugh Bardon possessed his senses unclouded by my spell, he would ever have driven forth from his home his own—his only son?”
“Was it not I,” replied Pride, “who ever stood beside him, counting up the long line of his ancestry, inflaming his soul with legends of the past, making him look upon his own blood as something different from that which flows in the veins of ordinary mortals, till he learned to regard a union with one of lower rank as a crime beyond forgiveness?”
“I,” cried Intemperance, “intoxicated his brain”—
“I,” interrupted Pride, “intoxicated his spirit. You fill your deep cup with fermented beverage; the fermentation which I cause is within the soul, and it varies according to the different natures that receive it. There is the vinous fermentation, that which man calls high spirit, and the world hails with applause, whether it sparkle up into courage, or effervesce into hasty resentment. There is the acid fermentation; the sourness of a spirit brooding over wrongs and disappointments, irritated against its fellow-man, and regarding his acts with suspicion. This the world views with a kind of compassionate scorn, or perhaps tolerates as something that may occasionally correct the insipidity of social intercourse. And there is the third, the last stage of fermentation, when hating and hated of all, wrapt up in his own self-worship, and poisoning the atmosphere around with the exhalations of rebellion and unbelief, my slave becomes, even to his fellow-bondsmen, an object of aversion and disgust. Such was my power over the spirit of Hugh Bardon. I quenched the parent’s yearning over his son; I kept watch even by his bed of death; and when holy words of warning were spoken, I made him turn a deaf ear to the charmer, and hardened his soul to destruction!”
“I yield this point to you,” said Intemperance, “I grant that your black badge was rivetted on the miserable Bardon even more firmly than mine. And yet, what are your scattered conquests to those which I hourly achieve! Do I not drive my thousands and tens of thousands down the steep descent of folly, misery, disgrace, till they perish in the gulf of ruin? Count the gin-palaces dedicated to me in this professedly Christian land; are they not crowded with my victims? Who can boast a power to injure that is to be compared to mine?”