A convulsive shriek burst from the lips of Glorvina. She raised her eyes to heaven, then fixed them on her unfortunate lover, and dropped lifeless into his arms—a pause of indiscribable emotion succeeded. The Prince, aghast, gazed on the hapless pair; thus seemingly entwined in the embrace of death. The priest transfixed with pity and amazement let fall the sacred volume from his hands. Emotions of an indescribable nature mingled in the countenance of the bridegroom. The priest was the first to dissolve the spell, and to recover a comparative presence of mind; he descended from the altar and endeavoured to raise and extricate the lifeless Glorvina from the arms of her unhappy lover, but the effort was vain. Clasping her to his heart closer than ever, the almost frantic M———— exclaimed, “She is mine! mine in the eye of heaven! and no human power can part us!”
“Merciful providence!” exclaimed the bridegroom faintly, and sunk on the shoulders of the priest. The voice pierced to the heart of his rival; he raised his eyes, fell lifeless against the railing of the altar, faintly uttering, “God of Omnipotence! my father!” Glorvina released from the nerveless clasp of her lover, sunk on her knees between the father and the son, alternately fixed her wild regard on both, then suddenly turning them on the now apparently expiring Prince, she sprang forward, and throwing her arms round his neck, frantically cried, “It is my father they will destroy and sobbing convulsively, sunk, overcome, on his shoulder.”
The Prince pressed her to his heart, and looking round with a ghastly and inquiring glance for the explanation of that mystery no one had the power to unravel, and by which all seemed overwhelmed. At last, with an effort of expiring strength, he raised himself in his seat, entwined his arm round his child, and intimated by his eloquent looks, that he wished the mysterious father and his rival son to approach. The priest led the former towards him: the latter sprang to his feet, and hid his head in his mantle: all the native dignity of his character now seemed to irradiate the countenance of the Prince of Inismore; his eyes sparkled with a transient beam of their former fire; and the retreating powers of life seemed for a moment to rush through his exhausted veins with all their pristine vigour. With a deep and hollow voice he said: “I find I have been deceived, and my child, I fear, is to become the victim of this deception. Speak, mysterious strangers, who have taught me at once to love and to fear you—what, and who are you? and to what purpose have you mutually, but apparently unknown to each other, stolen on our seclusion, and thus combined to embitter my last hours, by threatening the destruction of my child?”
A long and solemn pause ensued, which was at last interrupted by the Earl of M. With a firm and collected air he replied: “That youth who kneels at your feet, is my son; but till this moment I was ignorant that he was known to you: I was equally unaware of those claims which he has now made on the heart of your daughter. If he has deceived you he also, has deceived his father! For myself, if imposition can be extenuated, mine merits forgiveness, for it was founded on honourable and virtuous motives. To restore to you the blessings of independence; to raise your daughter to that rank in life, her birth, her virtues, and her talents merit; and to obtain your assistance in dissipating the ignorance, improving the state, and ameliorating the condition of those poor unhappy compatriots, who, living immediately within your own sphere of action, are influenced by your example, and would best be actuated by your counsel. Such were the wishes of my heart; but prejudice, the enemy of all human virtue and human felicity, forbade their execution. My first overtures of amity were treated with scorn; my first offers of service rejected with disdain; and my crime was that in a distant age an ancestor of mine, by the fortune of war, had possessed himself of those domains, which, in a more distant age, a remoter ancestor of yours won by similar means.
“Thus denied the open declaration of my good intents, I stooped to the assumption of a fictitious character; and he who as a hereditary enemy was forbid your house, as an unknown and unfortunate stranger, under affected circumstances of peculiar danger, was received to your protection, and soon to your heart as its dearest friend. The influence I obtained over your mind, I used to the salutary purpose of awakening it to a train of ideas more liberal than the prejudices of education had hitherto suffered it to cherish; and the services I had it in my power to render you, the fervour of your gratitude so far over-rated, as to induce you to repay them by the most precious of all donations—your child. But for the wonderful and most unexpected incident which has now crossed your designs, your daughter had been by this the wife of the Earl of M.”
With a strong convulsion of expiring nature, the Prince started from his chair; gazed for a moment on the Earl with a fixed and eager look and again sunk on his seat; it was the last convulsive throe of life roused into existence by the last violent feeling of mortal emotion. With an indefinable expression, he directed his eyes alternately from the father to the son, then sunk back and closed them: the younger M. clasped his hand, and bathed it with tears; his daughter, who hung over him, gazed intently on his face, and though she tremblingly watched the extinction of that life in which her own was wrapped up, her air was wild, her eye beamless, her cheek pale; grief and amazement seemed to have bereft her of her senses, but her feelings had lost nothing of their poignancy: the Earl of M. leaned on the back of the Prince’s chair, his face covered with his hand: the priest held his right hand, and wept like an infant: among the attendants there was not one appeared with a dry eye.
After a long and affecting pause, the Prince heaved a deep sigh, and raised his eyes to the crucifix which hung over the altar: the effusions of a departing and pious soul murmured on his lips, but the powers of utterance were gone; every mortal passion was fled, save that which flutters with the last pulse of life in the heart of a doating father, parental solicitude and parental love. Religion claimed his last sense of duty, nature his last impulse of feeling; he fixed his last gaze on the face of his daughter; he raised himself with a dying effort to receive her last kiss: she fell on his bosom, their arms interlaced.
In this attitude he expired.
Glorvina, in the arms of the attendants, was conveyed lifeless to the castle. The body of the Prince was carried to the great hall, and there laid on a bier. The Earl of M. walked by the side of the body, and his almost lifeless son, supported by the arm of the priest (who himself stood in need of assistance,) slowly followed.
The elder M. had loved the venerable Prince as a brother and a friend: the younger as a father. In their common regret for the object of their mutual affection, heightened by that sadly affecting scene they had just witnessed, they lost for an interval a sense of that extraordinary and delicate situation in which they now stood related towards each other; they hung on either side in a mournful silence over the deceased object of their friendly affliction; while the concourse of poor peasants, whom the return of the Prince brought in joyful emotion to the castle, now crowded into the hall, uttering those vehement exclamations of sorrow and amazement so consonant to the impassioned energy of their national character. To still the violence of their emotions, the priest kneeling at the foot of the bier began a prayer for the soul of the deceased. All who were present knelt around him: all was awful, solemn, and still. At that moment Glorvina appeared; she had rushed from the arms of her attendants; her strength was resistless, for it was the energy of madness; her senses were fled.