“The day of torture came; thou wert by my side, and didst urge a voluntary death to rescue me from agony and the stare of burning eyes eagerly watching my pangs. I rejected thy counsel; yet didst thou not forsake me, but marched to the scene of my infamy by my side. All around, as I went thither, did I look for the promised appearance of my brother, and trembled lest I should not behold him. ‘Surely this is mine hour of agony,’ I said, as I ascended the steps of the scaffold; ‘wherefore is he not by my side?’ And the guest from the other world,—he beneath whose scowl my heart had for months been withering,—was desired with more impatience than ever I had felt for the presence of earthly friends. I had not long to fear or to doubt—he was there before me; on reaching the scaffold, I beheld him standing by the block, and calmly and silently smiling a welcome to his brother. Thou didst behold my firmness, and the multitude saw my composure with wonder; but they beheld not the cause; they saw not that he was looking on, and that I drew in resolution from his smile, and firmness from his awful brow.
“The ineffectual agony was past—curiosity was silenced—and I was condemned to die; and to-morrow I shall die,—from all that I have loved hated, or valued, I shall be torn to-morrow. The last sunset is falling upon my paper, is gilding my pen as I write; to-morrow it will sparkle upon the edge of the axe, and illuminate a brow from which the inward light will have departed for ever; to-morrow will be the scene of my last humiliation: but he will be there to witness it, and convert it by his presence into a triumph; and, when all shall be over, when the last mortal throb shall be past, what then shall be my destiny? ‘Thou art pardoned,’ he said; ‘and an immortality is before thee!’ Oh, then let me hope for an immortality of peace! Now, then, I will go sleep—exhausted nature must be recruited for her great labour to-morrow—for these broken limbs, these strained sinews, and this bruised flesh, must needs want repose, ere they can encounter the task of fresh exertion. Serve me well, ye mangled limbs, but to-morrow, and I shall require your service no more.—Courtenay, good night.”
Such was the tale of the fratricide, and of him who was his victim: of her who survived the deaths of both, no more was heard; for upon Courtenay’s going to the cottage at the period she had appointed to receive her last commands, he learned she had quitted it two days previous, but had left a small parcel to be given to him: it contained a few remembrances of herself and Eustace, and the following letter:—
“Courtenay—
“In giving thee the papers containing our story, I have obeyed the last wish of him whose lightest word was a law to me; but I cannot look on thee again after this communication. Grieve not for me, for my lot will not be wretched; the death of my child has released me from the world, and I hasten to withdraw myself from it: I had arranged all things for the purpose before I sent to request thy presence. Endeavour not to discover me; such search would be fruitless and vain. I retire from the kingdom; and in a convent of Clairs, beneath the habits and rules of the order, and under another name, conceal for ever, from the eyes of the world, the person, the crime, and the sorrow of
“Agatha de la Pole.”
THE LORD OF THE MAELSTROM.
PART I.
THE RAVEN.
—Hell is empty,
And all the Devils are here.Shakespeare.
Somewhere about the year 112, in winter or summer—we are not exactly prepared to say which—died Olave the Second, one of the early kings of Denmark; he was a “fellow of no reckoning,” for he took no account of any thing that occurred during his reign, except the making of strong drink, and the number of butts in his cellar. His majesty, it must be avowed, was in the presumptuous habit of forestalling the joys of heaven, (we mean Odin’s,) that is to say, he impiously got drunk every day of his life, before the regular allowance of fighting, the customary number of enemies’ broken heads, and his own orderly death upon the field of battle, bore testimony that he was properly qualified for such supreme enjoyment. Olave in his life was a happy fellow; for, never having been sober during one hour of it, he had not the misfortune to hear all the ill-natured things that his courtiers and subjects said of his enormities, behind his back, or when he was asleep. It must, however, be acknowledged that, even among the unscrupulous Danes, who were not at that period remarkable for their practice of sobriety, Olave was a filthy fellow: to this hour he is held up as a monument of brutality and stupidity, and the memory of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, was not more devoted to execration among the Jews, than that of king Olave the Second among the Danes. On his death-bed, however, when he could no longer swallow his usual enlivening potations, blue devils beset his nights, and conscience twitted him with his ill-spent days. He had never broken a head in his life, except by proxy; and how could he make his appearance in Valhalla without a skull to drink out of?—to knock at the gates of Valasciolf without a goblet in his hand?—The thing was impossible; it was clear he would be kicked through Asgard, and sent to fret in Nifthiem, where the burning claws of Lok would set fire to the good liquor incorporated with his being, and reduce him to the condition of an eternal, thinking cinder!—Miserable anticipations! he tried to weep; but water, which he had hitherto scorned, now scorned him, and absolutely refused to come at his desire: he shed tears of mead, which he caught in his mouth as fast as they fell, partly from fear lest Odin should remark them, and partly because he could not endure to see good liquor wasted.
But all things have an end—in this world at least—and so it was with the life and repentance of king Olave the Second; he died without the drinking-cup he had regretted so deeply, and before he had time to frame a decent apology to Odin for venturing into Valhalla without one. There was a world of business now to be done at the palace of Sandaal: a dead king to be buried, and two living kings to be crowned; for such was the will of the lamented Olave, that both his sons should succeed him. They were princes of very different characters, yet their father, it should seem, loved them equally, as he divided his dominions very fairly between them, to the no small disgust of the elder prince, Frotho, who, like the imperial Octavius, some years before, could not bear a divided throne. This worthy in character resembled, in no slight degree, his excellent father, of dozy memory, for he loved to drink much and fight little,—more especially as his younger brother Harold had a decided vocation for the latter employment, and none at all for the former: to him, therefore, he left the charge of the glory of the Danish crown, while he, for the present, contented himself with drinking to his successes. This good understanding, however, between the princes could not last for ever. Frotho was, after all, only half a drunkard, and therefore extremely sulky in his cups—more especially when his queen Helga seated herself at his elbow to twit his courage with the heroic deeds of his brother. Queen consorts should not meddle with politics, they never do anything but mischief—and so it proved in this instance; for Frotho grew absolutely delirious, kept himself entirely sober for three whole days, buckled on his wooden target, put himself at the head of his troops, and, swearing to be revenged upon his brother, marched on an expedition to Jutland. The expedition neither answered his intentions nor expectations; the men of Jutland were too many for king Frotho, for, headed by Feggo, (the murderous uncle of the philosophic Hamlet, whose father was prince only of this part of Denmark,) they drove Frotho “home without boots, and in foul weather too,” as Glendwr did, long afterwards, king Harry Bolingbroke. Frotho could not stomach this affront—the beating was hard of digestion: his subjects made mouths at him too, and mimicked a race whenever he appeared in public. So he sent his brother, king Harold, who was a fighter to the back-bone, to chastise the Jutlanders, which when he had done most effectually, Frotho grew more angry still; he detested his brother, dreaded his popularity, feared his wisdom, and quivered at his anger,—so he began to consider seriously how he might cleverly and quietly put him out of the way.
King Frotho had two counsellors, neither of whom ever agreed with the other in the advice they gave his majesty: the reason was tolerably obvious, for the one was an honest man, the other a rogue, and, like the Topaz and Ebene of Voltaire, they bewildered the unhappy monarch with the diversity of their opinions and advice. On this occasion, however, king Frotho troubled only the rogue for his advice, which he was pretty certain beforehand would not differ very widely from his own. Eric Swen was an unprincipled ragamuffin, who hated Harold, because he had discovered that Harold hated his vices; and, as that prince had two sons who were rising into manhood, he shuddered at the prospect of two or three strict warrior reigns, which would certainly bring virtue into fashion: the prince had refused him, too, the hand of his sister, which, to make the refusal more bitter, he had bestowed upon his rival in the council and camp, Frotho’s general, Haquin. All these offences were carefully summoned up, to inflame his ire against Harold, by the devil, in the shape of Frotho, who promised him—Heaven knows what—both on earth and in Valhalla, if he would only push king Harold from his share of the stool, and leave both halves of it to Frotho.