THE PREDICTION.
“Let’s talk of Graves.”—Shakspeare.
On the south-west coast of the principality of Wales stands a romantic little village, inhabited chiefly by the poorer class of people, consisting of small farmers and oyster dredgers, whose estates are the wide ocean, and whose ploughs are the small craft, in which they glide over its interminable fields in search of the treasures which they wring from its bosom; it is built on the very top of a hill, commanding on the one side, a view of an immense bay, and on the other, of the peaceful green fields and valleys, cultivated by the greater number of its quiet inhabitants. The approach to it from the nearest town was by a road which branched away into lanes and wooded walks, and from the sea by a beautiful little bay, running up far into the land; both sides of which, and indeed all the rest of the coast, were guarded by craggy and gigantic rocks, some of them hollowed into caverns, into which none of the inhabitants, from motives of superstition, reverence, and fear, had ever dared to penetrate. There were, at the period of which we are about to treat, no better sort of inhabitants in the little village just described, none of those so emphatically distinguished as “quality” by the country people; they had neither parson, lawyer, nor doctor, among them, and of course there was a tolerable equality among the residents. The farmer, who followed his own plough in the spring, singing the sweet wild national chaunt of the season, and bound up with his own hands his sheaves in the autumn, was not richer, greater, nor finer, than he who, bare-legged on the strand, gathered in the hoar weed for the farmer in the spring, or dared the wild winds of autumn and the wrath of the winter in his little boat, to earn with his dredging net a yet harder subsistence for his family. Distinctions were unknown in the village, every man was the equal of his neighbour.
But, though rank and its polished distinctions were strange in the village of N—, the superiority of talent was felt and acknowledged almost without a pause or a murmur. There was one who was as a king amongst them, by the mere force of a mightier spirit than those with whom he sojourned had been accustomed to feel among them: he was a dark and moody man, a stranger, evidently of a higher order than those around him, who had but a few months before, without any apparent object, settled among them: he was poor, but had no occupation—he lived frugally, but quite alone—and his sole employments were to read during the day, and wander out unaccompanied into the fields or by the beach during the night. Sometimes indeed he would relieve a suffering child or rheumatic old man by medicinal herbs, reprove idleness and drunkenness in the youth, and predict to all the good and evil consequences of their conduct; and his success in some cases, his foresight in others, and his wisdom in all, won for him a high reputation among the cottagers, to which his taciturn habits contributed not a little, for, with the vulgar as with the educated, no talker was ever seriously taken for a conjuror, though a silent man is often decided to be a wise one.
There was but one person in N— at all disposed to rebel against the despotic sovereignty which Rhys Meredith was silently establishing over the quiet village, and that was precisely the person most likely to effect a revolution; she was a beautiful maiden, the glory and boast of the village, who had been the favourite of, and to a certain degree educated by, the late lady of the lord of the manor; but she had died, and her pupil, with a full consciousness of her intellectual superiority, had returned to her native village, where she determined to have an empire of her own, which no rival should dispute: she laughed at the maidens who listened to the predictions of Rhys, and she refused her smiles to the youths who consulted him upon their affairs and their prospects; and as the beautiful Ruth was generally beloved, the silent Rhys was soon in danger of being abandoned by all, save doting men and paralytic women, and feeling himself an outcast in the village of N—.
But to be such was not the object of Meredith; he was an idle man, and the gifts of the villagers contributed to spare him from exertion; he knew too, that in another point of view this ascendancy was necessary to his purposes; and as he had failed to establish it by wisdom and benevolence, he determined to try the effect of fear. The character of the people with whom he sojourned was admirably calculated to assist his projects; his predictions were now uttered more clearly, and his threats denounced in sterner tones and stronger and plainer words; and when he predicted that old Morgan Williams, who had been stricken with the palsy, would die at the turn of tide, three days from that on which he spoke, and that the light little boat of gay Griffy Morris, which sailed from the bay in a bright winter’s morning, should never again make the shore; and the man died, and the storm arose, even as he had said; men’s hearts died within them, and they bowed down before his words, as if he had been their general fate and the individual destiny of each.
Ruth’s rosy lip grew pale for a moment as she heard of these things; in the next her spirit returned, and “I will make him tell my fortune,” she said, as she went with a party of laughers to search out and deride the conjuror. He was alone when they broke in upon him, and their mockeries goaded his spirit; but his anger was deep, not loud; and while burning with wrath, he yet could calmly consider the means of vengeance: he knew the master spirit with which he had to contend; it was no ordinary mind, and would have smiled at ordinary terrors. To have threatened her with sickness, misfortune, or death, would have been to call forth the energies of that lofty spirit, and prepare it to endure, and it would have gloried in manifesting its powers of endurance; he must humble it therefore by debasement; he must ruin its confidence in itself; and to this end he resolved to threaten her with crime. His resolution was taken and effected; his credit was at stake; he must daunt his enemy, or surrender to her power: he foretold sorrows and joys to the listening throng, not according to his passion, but his judgment, and he drew a blush upon the cheek of one, by revealing a secret which Ruth herself, and another, alone knew, and which prepared the former to doubt of her own judgment, as it related to this extraordinary man.
Ruth was the last who approached to hear the secret of her destiny. The wizard paused as he looked upon her,—opened his book,—shut it,—paused,—and again looked sadly and fearfully upon her; she tried to smile, but felt startled, she knew not why; the bright inquiring glance of her dark eye could not change the purpose of her enemy. Her smile could not melt, nor even temper, the hardness of his deep-seated malice: he again looked sternly upon her brow, and then coldly wrung out the slow soul-withering words, “Maiden, thou art doomed to be a murderer!”
From that hour Rhys Meredith became the destiny of Ruth Tudor. At first she spurned at his prediction, and alternately cursed and laughed at him for the malice of his falsehood: but when she found that none laughed with her, that men looked upon her with suspicious eyes, women shrunk from her society, and children shrieked at her presence, she felt that these were signs of truth, and her high spirit no longer struggled against the conviction; a change came over her mind when she had known how horrid it was to be alone. Abhorring the prophet, she yet clung to his footsteps, and while she sat by his side, felt as if he alone could avert that evil destiny which he alone had foreseen. With him only was she seen to smile; elsewhere, sad, silent, stern; it seemed as if she were ever occupied in nerving her mind for that which she had to do, and her beauty, already of the majestic cast, grew absolutely awful, as her perfect features assumed an expression which might have belonged to the angel of vengeance or death.
But there were moments when her naturally strong spirit, not yet wholly subdued, struggled against her conviction, and endeavoured to find modes of averting her fate: it was in one of these, perhaps, that she gave her hand to a wooer, from a distant part of the country, a sailor, who either had not heard, or did not regard the prediction of Rhys, upon condition that he should remove her far from her native village to the home of his family and friends, for she sometimes felt as if the decree which had gone forth against her, could not be fulfilled except upon the spot where she had heard it, and that her heart would be lighter if men’s eyes would again look upon her in kindliness, and she no longer sate beneath the glare of those that knew so well the secret of her soul. Thus thinking, she quitted N— with her husband; and the tormentor, who had poisoned her repose, soon after her departure, left the village as secretly and as suddenly as he had entered it.