The Fate: A Tale of Stirring Times

by G. P. R. James

Little did any of the gay mockers know all the sources of poor Margaret's tears. True, she wept much for her brother's death. She had loved him well, as he had loved her. There had been something in his frank and generous nature peculiarly attractive to a heart like hers. Even his rashness, his vehemence, which were occasionally excessive, were all tempered toward her, and had only the effect of making her shrinkingly withhold from him the one great secret of her life. The thought that that secret love might have been the near, or even the remote cause of her brother's violent death, added double bitterness to her tears. But this was not all. Margaret wept for her lover as well as for her brother--wept for the slayer as well as the slain. She knew, with a certainty that might have made her swear to the fact, that the provocation must have been great indeed that could induce Ralph to draw the sword upon her brother Henry; she felt for the severe struggle which must have taken place in his mind before he sought the fatal spot. She felt for all that he must have experienced when their swords crossed and Henry fell. She felt for all he must have endured in the anguish of his flight, and for all he was still enduring, wherever he might have sought refuge.

"Remorse and despair, both in one," she said; "these must be his portion now, poor Ralph: remorse for having taken my brother's life, and despair for having by his own act placed an impassable bar between us forever. Oh, yes! whatever they may tell me, I know, I feel he loves me still. If he have, indeed, trifled for an hour with this bright and beautiful Hortensia Danvers, when he saw my poor Henry lying on the grass, all his love for Margaret has returned, I am certain. No man can forget the love of early years so easily--at least not Ralph. I know what he will feel, I know what he will think; and sure I am that no one here, not even myself or my father, will weep for poor Henry as bitterly as he does."

Oh! abiding confidence of woman's love, what is like thee? No other passion--no other feeling--no other thought pervades the whole of being, takes possession of every faculty, clings to the heart, rules and subjugates the mind, sets reason, and argument, and conviction at defiance like thee. It must be true love, though not the paltry passion, the half-indifferent liking, the admiration warmed a little by propinquity and habit, the convenient, half mercenary, half ambitious tenderness. None of those lukewarm mixtures of heart and brain, which stand white-gloved and orange-flowered before the altar of a fashionable church, and are recorded under the desecrated name of love, to have that very record blotted out, ere a few short years are over, by the bitter drops of regret or the burning spots of shame. No, no; it must be true, full, wholehearted love--the love that gets a grasp upon the very soul--the love that is immortal as the soul itself.

And such was Margaret's love for her pool cousin. For him she wept as much as for her brother Henry; for she felt and knew that his life was dead if his body lived, and that the fallen man was happier than he whose existence was prolonged.

At that moment Margaret thought little of herself or of her own future fate. She was of an unselfish nature; and her first thoughts were never--as so many's are--of the cares, anxieties, and griefs which the events of the day might bring upon herself. Imagination would indeed, from time to time, force upon her some recollection of her own fate and situation--dim, hovering phantoms, wandering the extreme verge of thought, but never coming near enough to be tangible. But, for the time, her feelings rather than her thoughts were alive principally to the fate of her brother and of her lover. Of her father, it is true, she thought often and painfully; but his deep grief might have affected her more, had it been of a character more like her own. But there was an eager, fiery fierceness in it, with which she could have no sympathy. He called down curses upon the head of him who had deprived him of his son; he vowed vengeance--ay, and sought it; and declared that life only should bound his purposes of revenge. Margaret, indeed, did not give much credence to such vows. Without having studied it, without having even thought of it, she knew her father's character well. It had sunk into her mind, as it were, making its impress, from infancy upward, more and more deeply every year. She knew him to be warm-hearted, kind, generous, passionate, somewhat careless, not without ability, but without consistency, if not continuity of purpose. She had never seen any passion maintain a long and powerful influence over him, however vehement might be the outburst at first. Grief, from which man usually flies the most eagerly, as his natural enemy--as the enemy of all his desires at every period of life--had had a greater hold upon him than any other affection of his mind to which she had ever seen him subject. She remembered well the period of her mother's death, which had occurred some five or six years before, and how long afterward a deep, brooding melancholy had hung over Lord Woodhall, how slow was his return to cheerfulness, how frequently the fits of gloom would come back. But even that had passed away, and she doubted not that this present frantic rage against poor unhappy Ralph would pass away likewise. She somewhat feared, indeed, what might be the result when the violence of passion should subside; when that which for the time seemed to bear away grief upon its fiery wings should sink down either gratified or wearied out, and leave him alone in sorrow and desolation. Then, she knew, would be the struggle; then, when he daily saw the empty place at the table, when he missed the beloved face, when he heard no more the cheerful voice, when the presence which was sunshine to him, and the gallant bearing in which he took such a pride, were all found wanting; when the house looked vacant and lonely, and the meals cheerless and solitary, and the evenings went by unenlivened, and the day ended with the knowledge that he was gone--then, she thought, when her mind turned in that direction, then will sorrow be fully felt in all its heavy weight; then will the anguish which is now divided by rage bow him to the earth; and then must be the time for me to struggle with my own griefs, in order to lighten his. Now it would be vain to say a word. To oppose his wrath against poor Ralph would be madness; to offer him consolation, as vain.

From time to time these thoughts came upon her, and, even sad and bitter as they were, they offered her some relief; for the others--those I have described before--were so much more intense and painful, that any thing which led her mind away to other things was a blessing for the time. She might have looked round all the world for some surpassing woe, without finding any which could compare in her heart with that which the death of her brother, by the hand of her lover, had inflicted. They were both so dear--so unutterably dear--they were both so linked with every affection, and every memory, and every hope, that the one, who was dead to all, and the other, who must be dead to her, left the once flowery landscape of life, which had lain so lately smiling before her, nothing but a dark, desolate wilderness. It was like a fair scene just torn by an earthquake, and bearing not one trace of its former aspect.

It was over such thoughts that she was now weeping, somewhat more than a fortnight after her brother's death. Her father had gone forth, still moved by the same fierce desire of vengeance, to move every power of the court to gratify that burning thirst; for those were days in which influence and even wealth--money, base, corrupted money--made the very scales of justice quiver. He had been more harsh and ferocious that day than usual; he had dwelt upon the particulars of her poor brother's death with a painful, lingering minuteness, which tore poor Margaret's heart. He seemed anxious to lash his resentment to such a pitch that it would bear all before it, and he left the house declaring that he would bring Ralph to the gallows, or perish. This scene, as he had walked up and down the room, looking angrily at the floor, and every now and then stopping to add some bitter or painful word more, was full in Margaret's mind when she retired to her own chamber, and there sat down to weep as I have described. It was one of the darkest hours which had fallen upon her since her brother's death; for the probability of her lover's being found and taken--being brought to trial--being condemned--was brought more painfully home to her heart than it had ever been before. All seemed darkness and despair around her. What should she do in such a case? she asked herself. How should she act? Throw herself at her father's feet, and beseech him to forbear, and be merciful? She knew it was vain--all vain. She might as well beseech the hurricane. Should she leave him whom she so dearly loved to perish unseen, unsupported, unconsoled? She knew her own heart would perish also. Should she fly to him, cast off all restraint, make her fate with his, interpose between her father and his vengeance, and say, "Strike him through me?" But her brother's spirit seemed to stand in the way of the very thought, crying, "Margaret, Margaret he slew me."

Poor Margaret could but weep; and bitterly, painfully did she weep; but while the tears were still streaming as rapidly as ever down her cheeks, there was a light tap at the door, and, without waiting to be told, her maid entered the room. She was an old and faithful servant, who had waited many years upon her mother; somewhat stiff, indeed, but full of love for all the children of the house; one of those old attached servants of an English household, which are hardly to be found in any other land. She had wept over the death of poor Master Henry, as she called him, as bitterly as any one; but she had shared Margaret's feelings rather than those of the old lord. She had loved Henry well; but she loved Ralph nearly as well, for she had known him from the cradle; had known his mother, and every one who had known her had loved her. Ralph had always, too, shown a great attachment to her. As a child, he would sit with his arms round her neck, and call her, in his infant prattle, "his Dody"--her name was Dora Vernon; and the very first comfort which Margaret had received came from her lips, very shortly after the fatal news arrived.

"Do not take on so, Mistress Margaret," she said, adhering still to the term mistress, which was but beginning to decline; "the dead can never be brought back by weeping; and if your tears are for the living, as I can't help thinking they be in part, I dare say, if you knew all, Master Ralph is not so much to blame as you think. I don't see, for my own part, why the good old lord goes on so madly against poor Master Ralph. He fought two men in his day himself, and killed one of them, and he would not have a gentleman refuse to fight, I am sure, when he was asked. Master Henry, God rest him! was hot and passionate enough, as you know; and, I dare say, he provoked poor Ralph more than he could bear. Perhaps he was deceived about something, and wouldn't listen to reason about it, for he took up things very hastily, and all things are not as they seem at first; and I am sure Master Ralph would not give real cause of offense to man or woman either, for he is as good, and kind, and noble-hearted a lad as any in all the world. But if people will not listen to reason, and hear things explained, what can one do? and that was always Master Henry's way: a word and a blow, and the blow came first."

I have said that this speech, somewhat incoherent as it was, had comforted Margaret greatly and it gave her comfort in more ways than one. She remembered the letter which Henry had shown her, and the impression which it had produced upon her mind; and a doubt, a thought, a hope that they might both have been deceived--that the letter was either a fabrication, or might be explained, arose, and grew stronger and stronger every moment. What right had she to judge him unheard? she asked herself--what right had Henry? and, knowing the weakness of her brother's temper, his rashness, and punctiliousness upon the point of honor, she easily conceived that he actually compelled Ralph to draw his sword, without listening to any thing he might say in his own defense.