But suddenly there was a sound as of several footsteps rushing up the stairs—and then came a loud knocking at the door, and the voices of the valet, Rosalie, and another servant demanding what was the matter and what meant the piercing scream that had reached their ears.
Then Barthelma recollected that, as a murderer, he would receive a murderer’s doom; and in a moment to his appalled soul started up all the grim and terrible array of the criminal tribunal—the executioner—the assembled myriads—and the gibbet!
All the frenzy of his maddening mind returned;—and tearing forth the stiletto from the bosom of his slaughtered wife, he plunged it deep into his own breast.
At the same instant the door of the apartment was forced in; and the horror-stricken domestics caught sight of their master just at the moment that he fell upon the corpse of their mistress!
So perished this youthful pair,—each endowed with a beauty of no ordinary kind!
Yes—thus died the tender, impassioned Lorenzo, and the profligate, wanton Perdita!
The world has seen no loveliness superior to hers, nor known a depravity more inveterate.
But was she to be blamed only, and not pitied in the slightest degree? It were unjust thus to regard her memory:—for, when her eyes first saw the light, had some kind hand been nigh to receive the innocent babe—to bear it away from that Newgate-cell which was the ominous scene of its birth—to rear it tenderly and save it from passing in the arms of a felon-mother into a penal settlement,—then to foster and cherish the growing girl with a true maternal care—bend her mind to the contemplation of virtue, and protect it from all bad influences—preserve her soul from the effects of vile examples, and inculcate principles of chastity, rectitude, and religion,—Oh! then would the prison-born Perdita have given by her conduct a refutation to her name, and she would have haply excelled in every accomplishment, every amiable characteristic, and every endearing qualification that combine like brilliant gems to form for the chaste woman’s brow a diadem such as angels wear!
Oh! my Lady Duchess—or you, highborn daughter of some proud Peer whose line of ancestry may be traced back to the period of the Norman Conquest,—look not with unmitigated disgust upon the character of Perdita, the Lost One! Let pity temper the feeling;—for—though the truth which we are about to tell may be not over palatable—yet is the moral which the Lost One’s history affords deserving of consideration. Suppose, my Lady Duchess—or you, highborn maiden,—suppose that either of you had been ushered into this world under such circumstances as those which attended on the birth of Perdita;—suppose that you first saw the light in Newgate—that you had been taken by a vile mother to the far-off place of her exile—that you had been reared where temptations abounded and virtuous influences were unknown—and that every example you had before you was evil and profligate,—what would have been the result? Do not dare to say, my Lady Duchess—or you, highborn maiden—that an innate perception of right and wrong, and a natural inclination to virtue, would have preserved you pure, and chaste, and untainted throughout the terrible ordeal! No—no—you would have fallen as Perdita fell—you would have been dragged through the mire of demoralisation as she was—you would have imbibed the infectious poison of vice as she did,—and, under such circumstances, you, my Lady Duchess—and you, highborn maiden—would have justified and illustrated in your own lives the history of the Lost One!