Thaddeus of Warsaw

by Jane Porter

This most unrighteous act perpetrated, he in vain sought tranquillity. He was now stung within by a constant sense of increasing guilt. Before this act he was the injured party—injured by those in whom he had confided his dearest earthly happiness; and he could raise his head in conscious truth, though all his fondest hopes had been wrecked by their falsehood. But now he was the betrayer of a young and innocent heart, which had implicitly trusted in him. And he had insulted with a base and treacherous ingratitude, by that act of deceit, without excuse, the honor of her father, whose generous confidence had also been implicitly placed in him. But the effects of these scorpion reproaches in his bosom were not less destructive of her peace than of his own. He saw that his wedded Therese was unweariedly anxious to soothe the mysterious wanderings of his mind with her softest tenderness. But his thoughts were, indeed, far from her, ever hovering over the changed image of his so lately adored Edith—ever agonizing over the lightness of a conduct so unlike her former virgin delicacy, so unlike the clinging vows she breathed to him in their hour of boding separation!—ever execrating the perfidy of his brother, which had brought on him this distracting load of guilt and woe!

In this temper of alienation from all the world, a second packet from England was put into his hand. Again he saw Edith's writing; but he dropped it unopened, in horror of the signature he anticipated would be appended to it. Roused by resentment towards him whose name he believed she then bore, he tore asunder the wax of a letter from his father, which was sealed with black. His eyes were speedily riveted to it. Sir Fulke, in the language of deep contrition, confessed a train of deception that petrified his son. He declared, with bitter invectives against himself, that all which had been communicated to that unhappy son relating to Edith and her intended marriage with Algernon had been devised by that unkind brother, and his no less unnatural father, for the treacherous purpose of that marriage. Devoted to ambition for his own sake, as well as for that of his favorite son, Sir Fulke owned that he had from the first of Edith Beaufort's becoming his ward resolved on her union in due time with Algernon, in order to endow him, in addition to his own rich inheritance, with all the political influence attendant on the vast estate to which she was heiress, and so build up the family, in the consideration of government, to any pitch of coroneted rank their high-reaching parent might choose to reclaim.

With many prayers for pardon from Heaven and the cruelly-injured Robert, the wretched father acknowledged that this confession was wrung from him by the sudden death of his eldest son, who having been thrown off his horse on a heap of stones in the high-road, after three days of severe bodily and mental suffering, now lay a sadly- disfigured corpse, under the vainly mourning blazonry of his house, in the darkened hall of his ancestors. The disconsolate narrator then added, "that in contrite repentance his son had conjured him, with his dying breath, to confess the falsehood of all that had passed to the grossly-abused Robert;" amongst which, was Algernon turning to the account of his own designs every confidence imparted to him by his brother, in his incognito movements, and awakened intimacy with the noble Sarmatian family at Florence. And from these unsuspected sources, this false friend and kinsman had contrived to throw out hints of his brother's reported sliding heart to the shrinking object of his own base and perfidious passion. At last, believing Robert to be unfaithful, she sunk into a depression of spirits which Sir Fulke thought would be easy to work to an assent, in mere reckless melancholy, to the union he sought. With that object, and to break the knot at once by a trenchant blow on Robert's side, Algernon forged that letter in Edith Beaufort's handwriting which had announced so unblushingly her preparations for an immediate marriage with the eldest son.

"But," continued Sir Fulke, "death has put an end to this unnatural rivalry. And my poor girl, undeceived in her opinion of you, longs to see you, and to give you that hand which your ill-fated brother and infatuated father so unjustly detained from you. You are now my only son, the only prop of my house, the only comfort of my old age! My son, do not abandon to his remorse and sorrow your only parent."

On receipt of this packet, in a consternation of amazement, and a soul divided between rekindled love in all its fires and pity and honor towards her he had betrayed before the altar of heaven, Robert Somerset sacrificed both to his imperious passion. He adored the woman on whose account he had left the country, and though every tie, sacred and just, bound him to the tender and faithful wife he must forsake to regain that idol, he at once consigned her to the full horrors of desertion and hastened to England.

"Disgraceful to relate!" ejaculated Sir Robert, putting his hand over his face, "I married Edith Beaufort, while in our deepest mourning, but at Somerset, as the place farthest from general notice. My father, eager to efface as fast as possible from my mind and hers all recollection of his past conduct towards us, had prepared everything splendid, though private, for our union; and in her blissful, restored possession, I forgot for a while Therese and her agonies. But when my dear Pembroke first saw the light, when I pressed him to my heart, it seemed as if in the same instant a dagger pierced it. When I would have breathed a blessing over him, the conviction struck me that I durst not—that I had deluded the mother who gave him birth, and that at some future period he might have cause to curse the author of his existence.

"Well," continued the baronet, wiping his forehead, "though the birth of this boy conjured up the image of your mother, to haunt me day and night, I never could summon moral courage to inquire of her destiny after I had left her. When the troubles of Poland commenced, what a dreadful terror seized me! The successes of their allied enemies, and the consequent distress and persecution of the chief nobility, overwhelmed me with apprehension. I knew not but that many, like the noblesse of France, might be forced to abandon their country; and the bare idea of meeting your grandfather, or the injured Therese, in England, precipitated me into a nervous state that menaced my life. I became abstracted and seriously ill, was forbidden all excitements; hence easily avoided the sight of newspapers; and, on the plea you have heard, my family were withheld from speaking on any public subjects that manifestly gave me pain. But I could not prevent the tongues of our visitors from discoursing on a theme which at that period interested every thinking mind. I heard of the valiant Kosciusko, the good Stanislaus, and the palatine Sobieski, with his brave grandson, spoken of in the same breath. I durst not surmise who this grandson was; I dared not ask—I dreaded to know.

"At length," added the agitated father, quickening his voice, "the idol of my heart—she for whom I had sacrificed my all of human probity, perhaps my soul's eternal peace—died in my arms. Where could a wretch like me turn for consolation? I had forfeited all right to it from Heaven or earth. But at last a benignant spirit seemed to breathe on me, and I bent beneath the stroke with humility; for I embraced it as the just chastisement of a crime which till then, even in the midst of my married felicity, had often pressed on my dearest feelings like the hand of death. I repeat, I bore this chastening trial with the resignation I have described. But when, two years afterwards, my eye fell by accident upon the name of Sobieski in one of the public papers, I could not withdraw it; my sight was fascinated as if by a rattle-snake. In one column I read how bravely the palatine fell, and in the next the dreadful fate of his daughter. She was revenged!" cried Sir Robert, eagerly grasping the hand of Thaddeus, who could not restrain the groan that burst from his breast. "For nearly three months I was deprived of that reason which had abused her noble nature.

"When I recovered my senes," continued he, in a calmer tone, "and found I had so fatally suffered the time of any restitution to her to go by, I began to torture my remorseful heart because that I had not, immediately on the death of my too much loved Edith, hastened to Poland, and besought Therese's pardon from her ever-generous heart. But this vivid approach to a sincere repentance was soon obliterated by the consideration that, the Countess Sobieski having had a prior claim to my name, such restitution on my part must have illegitimatized my darling Pembroke, his dying mother's fondest bequeathment to a father's arms.

"It was this fearful conviction," exclaimed Sir Robert, a sudden horror, indeed, distracting his before affectionate eye, "that caused all my barbarian cruelty. When my dear and long-believed only son described the danger from which you had rescued him, when he told me that Therese had fostered him with a parent's tenderness, I was probed to the heart. But when he added that the young Count Sobieski was now an alien from his country, and relying on my friendship for a home, my terror was too truly manifested. Horror drove all natural remorse from my soul. I thought an avenging power had sent my deserted child to discover his father, to claim his rights, and to publish me as a disgrace to the name I had stolen from him. And when I saw my innocent Pembroke, even to his knees, petitioning for the man who I believed had come to undo him, I became almost deranged. May the Lord of mercy pardon the fury of that derangement! For under that temper," added he, putting the trembling hand of Thaddeus to his streaming eyes, "I drove my first-born to be a wanderer on the face of the earth, not for his own crimes, but for those of his father; and Heaven justly punished in the crime the sin of my injustice. When I thought that evidence of my shame was divided from me by an insuperable barrier, when I believed that the ocean would soon separate me from my fears, a righteous Providence brought thee before me, forlorn and expiring. It was the son of Therese Sobieski I had exposed to such wretchedness. It was the cherished of her heart I had delivered to the raging elements! Oh, Thaddeus, my son," cried he, "can I be forgiven for all this, in this world or in the next?"