Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 15

by Unknown

I shall not now, I hope, be long upon the face of this earth. It is sinful to wish to die; but, when the spirit is weary of the trials of this evil world, and the body broken, and the bones stricken to their dried marrow with pains, surely a poor mortal may indulge the wish, that God's time of release may not be postponed beyond the power of bearing the weight of life. My years, if mentioned, would not, perhaps, appear to be many; but age, in the sense in which I take it, cannot be calculated by circumvolutions of the sun. There is an age of the spirit independently of that of the body; and to calculate that, we must have a measure of the effects of misfortune, and pain, and injury, on nerves toned in all the keys that rise in gradation, from the sensations of creatures a little above the brutes, to the sensibilities of individuals a little lower than the angels. In this view, I am indeed aged as the sons of Levi; for my soul, like the people of Pharaoh, has been smitten with boils and blains, by the poisoned bite of the serpent tongue of civilisation. The spirit of the Indian under his plantain-tree, lives till the body is sick of it; and with a mistaken humanity, he is exposed in the desert, that the wants of the flesh may kill the spirit that yearns to live, and to rejoice again in the return of the seasons, with their fruits and flowers; but the spirit of civilised man or woman is often dead long before the mortal tenement exhibits any decay; for, though spotted fever and limping palsy have passed on, and touched not the flesh, the spirit has been visited by plagues a thousand times more deadly, that rise from the refinements of civilised life. It is these that have made me aged, and weary of remaining longer here; and I am not doubtful that, when I record what I have suffered from two causes—first, my own—yes, I affirm it—my own goodness; and, secondly, the evils inherent in the state of society in which we live—every one will acknowledge that I have little more to wait for on this side of time, and that the sooner I am dissolved, the better it may be for myself, and those who sympathise in griefs that death alone can alleviate.

Brought up in the manse of C——, by a pious father, the clergyman of the parish, a learned man—and by a mother, a woman of many virtues, who wished her daughter to be as good as herself—I enjoyed all the advantages of breeding and education; which, if turned to good account, make the ornaments of society. I cannot, and never will, admit that these advantages were lost upon me, though they have tended to make me miserable. I was accounted fair; and I believe that my beauty—a gift so much valued—has had also a share, and no inconsiderable one, in the production of the peculiar evils under which I have suffered, and still suffer. I was—what none knew so well as myself—sensitive to a degree bordering on diseased irritability; but my sensitiveness was of that higher kind, which, courting and receiving impressions and impulses from virtuous thoughts and elevated feelings, tends to elevate rather than depress. The fine culture I received from my father, co-operating with my refined sensibilities, produced in me the most exquisitely minute perceptions of moral good and evil; so that I came to have the same delicate feeling of the graceful or the distorted in morals, that some born musicians are said to possess in regard to the tones of harmony in the world of sounds. This is not self-praise—it is truth wrung out of me; for, though possessed of many qualities which might have nourished vanity, the disrelish I ever felt of the exhibitions of a vain spirit in others would have been effectual in quelling my own, even if I had had any to quell, which assuredly I never had. I believe that the strong view in which morals were presented to me by the precepts of my father, would have operated to the production of a fine and healthy effect in one formed for the busy world; but in me, who seemed to have been formed with a connate, aspen-like, trembling sensitiveness of the traces of good and evil, his instructions, continued from day to day, and enforced by the power of his own example and that of my sainted mother, tended to give my original perceptions so strong and holy a sanction, that, at a very early period, I had become a kind of worshipper of good. Virtue has a lovely aspect to all, even to those who tremble at her beauty, from the contrast of their own ugliness; religion has the power of making her more beautiful; and systems of morals, clothed in fine language, are effective in training many hearts to a high love of this emanation from God. But I was, and I am yet, different from any individual whose moral perceptions are merely strengthened by these aids. I do not know if I make myself intelligible, but I myself feel the distinction I wish to impress: morals were to me that species of passion which in many exhibits itself only more perceptibly in regard to some other object—such as poetry, painting, sculpture, or music—with perhaps this difference, that while these natural illuminati are merely annoyed by an exhibition of distortion, I was pained—sorely, miserably pained—by vice, in whatever form it was exhibited to me. I was not contented with the ordinary appearances of purity. The jealousy-offering was ever in my hand; and I was always sighing to see it waving before the goddess, and offered upon the altar of virtue. I looked upon the individual in whom the "water that causes the curse" became bitter, as a creature who was rotten, and had become a curse among the people.

Entertaining these sentiments, I loved to expatiate upon the beauties of my favourite subject, with a glow of eloquence that struck even the godly visiters of the manse with surprise and admiration. I often, also, in my visits among my father's parishioners, exhibited the same warm enthusiasm, couching my sentiments in the gorgeous clothing of a young fancy enamoured of a deified personification of what I conceived to be the only true good and the only true beauty upon earth. But I was no apostle under the influence of a proselytising spirit; for I only visited the virtuous, because I loved them, and those of an evil reputation I avoided with a thrilling horror, as creatures diseased and dangerous to approach. Those who believed me a religious enthusiast—and there were many who entertained that opinion of me—knew nothing of my real nature; for, though my father's precepts had had all due effect upon me, religion, far from being the origin of my feelings, lent merely a sanction to them, showing the final cause of my enthusiastic views, and turning them to that account in the contemplation of an after world, that ought to have been at all times their end and object. I was rather a lover of virtue for its beauty: my feeling was an impassioned taste, luxuriating on every virtuous act, and dwelling with inexpressible delight on every cultivator of my favourite subject. A consequence of this was the horror of vicious persons, which I possessed to a degree that made my father suspect that my passion was not the religious one, which is unavoidably accompanied with pity for the misguided votary of sin, and a straining effort to reclaim him to the paths of virtue. He was to a certain extent right; but I question much if, with all his learning, he possessed knowledge enough of the various peculiarities of human nature, to enable him to analyse my character, or to understand the peculiarities of one under the dominion of a passion for ethics.

I was, moreover, of a remarkably tender constitution of body—the consequence of early weakness, as well, perhaps, as of that irritable temperament which fed and was nourished in turn by the high-strung sensibilities of my spirit. Up to the age of fifteen, I was subject to a species of fit, or nervous syncope; and I always found that, after an attack of these enervating prostrations of my physical powers, my mind recurred to my favourite subject with greater keenness, supplying my excited fancy with brilliant images of virtuous sacrifices, such as I had read of in the old classic authors, which I could read in the original; and these, again, swelled my heart, lighted my eye, and lent an eloquence to my tongue, which dwelt on the daring of Mutius, the sacrifice of Lucretia, the heroism of Brutus, the friendship of Damon, and the determination of Virginius. Exhausted by the swell of emotions produced by these subjects, I fell back upon the quieter, but no less delicious, theme of a Howard's philanthropy; and ended with the contemplation of those instances of private charity which had come under my own eye. I never felt happier than when in these moods; and my mother, who knew my passion, contributed to its gratification, by directing me to such recorded examples of worth as she knew where to find among my father's books.

Possessed of these views and feelings, so unsuitable to the cold maxims of the world, and with a weak and irritable constitution, I was ill prepared for the loss which was now, when I was in my twentieth year, impending over me—the death of both my parents, who, attacked by the same disease—some putrid species of typhus—died within a week of each other, leaving me, their only child, as much unprovided for in regard to worldly wants, as I was unfitted for making up the deficiency by my personal exertions. My father left nothing but the furniture in the manse, which was all required to pay up some advances of stipend which had been made to him by several of the heritors, and which the extreme scantiness of his income necessitated him to have recourse to. I was a beggar, imbued with notions to make the people of the world admire and pity, and gifted with a countenance so beautiful (why need I spare the vain word, when I now admit that age and pain have made me ugly?), that, with art, might have realised a fortune, or, with folly, might have ruined me. I sought the protection of a spendthrift uncle and a good aunt—the latter resident in the town of Stirling, an old lady of fortune, a Mrs Greville, who admired my principles, and possessed generosity enough to enable her to offer to repay the pleasures of my companionship by her house and her friendship. My tender frame, operated upon by the intense grief I had felt in the loss of my parents, sustained a shock which would have proved fatal to me, if the assuasive attentions of that angelic being had not contributed to the recovery of my health. Her protection was much, her kindness valuable; but above all was I blessed in the possession of a friend who reduced to practice, though she could not feel as I felt, the principles of virtue I had so long cherished with the fondness of a ruling passion. But my situation was now changed. In my father's manse I saw little of the world; but what came under my observation was congenial to my mind, and gratified my feelings by the exhibition of goodness as well of deed as of sentiment. The evil I saw was out-of-doors, and I eschewed it as a serpent which would beguile by the spiral turns of its insidious lines of beauty, and the shining hues of the colours of false loveliness. In our society at home, or in the houses of the parishioners, it never came under my experience, except by the report of crimes which grated on my irritable feelings, and pained me to a much greater extent than people of ordinary sensibilities may well comprehend. In my new residence, I was necessitated to mix with the world. My aunt saw much company, composed of the mixed inhabitants of the town, and I accompanied her to various parties where the fashionable vices were cultivated, as all fashionable things are, with an affected contempt of honest plainness and unadorned simplicity.

Though my aunt was herself a good woman, and admired the high-coloured, and, it may be, unnatural views I took of human life, she never understood the secret parts of my mental constitution, but took me simply for one who entertained a somewhat strong sense of the beauty of a good life, and who therefore could mix with society of acknowledged honesty as the world goes, without allowing the frailty of human nature to interfere with my own views, and far less with my comfort and peace of mind. My beauty made her proud of me; and I was soon introduced to scenes which stirred all the antipathies that, as the result of my past modes of thinking and feeling, lay strong within my heart, and ready to be called forth by a departure in others from the rules of life I had so long loved. The first view I got of the mysteries of card-playing—in the house of Captain Semple, of Tennet, who lived in town, only a few doors removed from where I lived—produced an effect of pain upon me similar to that which Mozart declared he felt when his harmony was lost in discordance. They played for what they called high stakes; and there was exhibited, on a lesser scale, the keen avaricious eye, the forced, choking laugh, the lying smile, the trembling hand, and burning brow of the gambler of the London grade. The whole family engaged in this play. I recollect, at this distant period, the effect produced upon me by the agonised countenance of the beautiful Catherine Semple, the eldest daughter, when she lost a high stake, and yet turned the expression of the worst look of the devil into a smile far more hideous than that which it concealed. Nor was the effect less painful that was produced upon my high-wrought sensibilities by the cruel triumph that burned in the beautiful blue eye of Esther her sister, who had pocketed the hard-won earnings of a poor surgeon, and seemed to feed on the poisoned garbage of his depression and disappointment. The face of her mother, who looked on, partook alternately of the expression of those of her daughters; and while I, a stranger, beheld with pain the first principles of goodness subverted, and the fairest samples of God's creatures penetrated to the core by the worst feelings of our fallen nature, she, their parent, sympathised with a daughter's deceit and revenge, or gloried in her triumph over what might be the approaches of ruin to a fallen creature. I went home after that exhibition dispirited and miserable; the chords of the moral harp, that had so long responded to the sweet sounds of a virtue imagined, felt, and dreamed of, as a beatific vision, were disrupted and torn asunder; and I imagined that the individuals who had thus laid upon it their sacrilegious hands were worthy of a hatred unqualified by pity, as destroyers of the most beautiful fabric ever erected by God's love. These were not the gloomy views of the monastic ascetic, or the religious enthusiast—for I was neither. I was, indeed, peculiarly formed; but I knew not my peculiarity, and even now I could scarcely abate one ray of the effulgence that, if you please, blinded me to the factitious virtues of the juste milieu of a bad world's morality.

Some nights afterwards, I accompanied my aunt to the house of Mrs Ball, also a neighbour, and one who could afford to live in a style that, in such a town as Stirling, might be conceived to be high. She had a daughter, Anne, and a son, George, an attorney, both accomplished and handsome, and wearing on their faces the external appearances of simplicity and goodness. The recollections of Semple's family were still busy with my heart, and I trembled to approach another assemblage of fashionable people. I was placed in the midst of a large tea coterie, and expected to hear a conversation suited to the views of human life I so fondly cherished. Stories of generosity, of age assuaged, bereavement ameliorated, want supplied, and hunger and nakedness fed and clothed, must, I thought, issue from such a quiet-looking assemblage of people, brought together apparently for no other purpose than to promote the cause of their own happiness, which surely might be best done by contemplating the means of the happiness of others. Having had one of my fits in the fore part of the day, I was more irritable than usual; but having got, in some measure, quit of the pain produced by the moral discordance that had, some days before, grated so painfully on my weak nerves, I expected to be able to join in a conversation which could not fail to embrace a part of my favourite theme. I was again destined to be made miserable. I was placed in the midst of a species of moral cannibals, who preyed ruthlessly and jestingly on the misfortunes and miseries of their fellow-creatures. Pecuniary embarrassments, matrimonial disagreements, detections of dishonesty, elopements, infidelities—everything that might render an individual worthy of pity or hatred—was treated in the same tone of concealed satisfaction. The burst of loud laughter followed on the heels of the whine of hollow sympathy; the sneer mixed its cutting sarcasm with the lying tribute to suffering worth; and through all, over all, in all, there was the spirit of evil, in its worst, its ugliest form, rejoicing—secretly, no doubt, but not the less certainly—in the defection of mortals from God's law, and their devarication from my standard of moral beauty.

I experience a difficulty now, though then it would have been easy for me to describe what I felt on the occasion of this new display of this, to me, the ugliest parts of the hated system of evil which prevails in the world. The beautiful visions I had formed in my day-dreams, and which I had cherished as the source of my greatest happiness, appeared to me to have little or no relation to earth, or to earth's inhabitants; and a gloomy melancholy stole over me, and retained the dominion of my mind, in spite of every effort to shake it off. I endeavoured to make my feelings understood by Mrs Greville; but she, though participant in my views of moral perfection, could not comprehend why the turpitude of men should have the effect of making a good person incapable of enjoying what was truly virtuous in nature, and far less why it should produce a gloomy misery in those who were themselves truly good. What people cannot comprehend, they sometimes state to others, for the sake of assistance to their understandings; and my aunt, in the openness of her heart, stated my peculiarities to some friends, who coloured them to suit their fancies, and then communicated them to the families of the Semples, the Balls, and several others. My views, as I afterwards learned, were considered by these people as an impeachment of their morals; and I was set down as an arch-hypocrite, who wished to rear a character for goodness on the ruin of the reputation of others. The state of despondency into which I fell, precipitated me into a succession of my old nervous fits, and it was not for some time that I was again prevailed upon to visit the scenes where my feelings were exposed to such causes of laceration; but when I did again accompany my friend in her accustomed visits, I found that I had become unwelcome: oblique sneers, short, cutting taunts, and pointed insinuations, were directed against me; and though I then knew nothing of the cause, I felt, with that trembling sensitiveness which was peculiar to me, the poignancy of the poison of a hatred that was scarcely attempted to be concealed.

In the little intercourse I had as yet had with the new world of sad reality into which I had entered, I had heard the characters of good people so fearfully belied and reviled, that I attributed the painful treatment I thus received to the same malevolent spirit that dictated the malicious scandal which seemed to penetrate almost every family I had yet visited. I inquired for no cause in myself; for I had done or said nothing to create merited individual hatred. It was the working of the same spirit of evil that generally prevailed, extended to me, a poor orphan, living on the dependence of a kind relation. It was one thing to see evil done towards others, and to feel it applied to one's-self; and the pain I formerly felt was increased by the dread that I might yet be thrown upon that world which presented to me such fearful indications of cruelty and vice. It will soon be seen whether it was my good or evil fortune, at this gloomy period, to meet with one who appeared really to understand the constitution of my mind, to appreciate the exalted views I entertained of virtue, and to sympathise with me in the pain produced by the discordance between the actual state of society and what I so fondly wished it to be. Augustus Merling, proprietor of a fine property called the Park, yielding him about £1500 a-year, and who lived, for a great part of the year, in town with his widowed mother, visited my aunt, and often saw me. I have said I was possessed of much beauty, and the fact is undoubted; but there was still about me that aspen-like sensitiveness, derived from the nervous attacks to which I was enslaved, operating on a mind of originally fine structure, that the very look of man or woman, if boldly thrown upon me, whether from curiosity or confidence, made me shrink intuitively, and look confused or abashed; and I never could conceive that all the beauty I possessed could make amends for or overcome the prejudices against me originating in that cause. I was in this respect, however, entirely wrong. My sensitiveness gave me an interest in the eyes of Augustus, who, the moment he saw me, was so struck with the beauty of my face, and that very shrinking of my manner, that he inquired at Mrs Greville every particular concerning me; and got such an account as, he himself afterwards confessed, increased his curiosity by the mystic obscurity in which my aunt's inability to understand me had wrapped all the peculiar attributes of my mind. He had felt some anticipative impression of a sympathy between our thoughts and feelings; and our intercourse—for he sought me the more fervently the more I retired from him—soon satisfied him he was right in his estimate of my character. I am certain he understood me thoroughly, and I believe he was the only individual I had yet met who fathomed the mysteries of a heart only too good and pure for the world in which we live. But, if I was surprised and pleased with this, what may be conceived to be my feelings, when I at last found, in a beautiful youth of fortune, the very moral counterpart of myself, with all my exalted views of my beloved and cherished goodness and moral loveliness! Often as the pen of poet has been employed in the description of the feelings of mortals under the influence of the tender passion, sublimed by the elevating power of virtuous purity, I am satisfied that small approach has been made to the reality of the love that soon bound me and Augustus together as creatures made after the same model, and yet different from all mankind. If other matters did not hurry me forward, I could exhibit the thrilling details of a bliss which is thought to be peculiar to the regions above. I would only be afraid that the analysis would require to be carried so deep into the attenuated fibres of constitutions so seldom seen and so little understood, that I would be charged with my imputed error of applying unearthly visions to things of earthly mould. Love has become a by-word, because it is too often mixed with the impurities of vulgar natures; but such love as ours might tend to elevate and throw over the rapt fancies of imaginative beings a forecast of that exquisite bliss which awaits mankind in the regions of heaven.

But, even in this sweet dream, the evil of the world was destined to follow me. I had taken from two ladies the object of their love or ambition. Catherine Semple and Anne Ball, whom I have already mentioned, had been severally intended by their mothers as the wife of Augustus—a match to which the young rivals themselves were as much inclined as their mothers, as well from the personal qualities of Augustus, as from his wealth and property. I was hated by these ladies before as a hypocrite. I was now the successful rival apparently destined to blast all the cherished hopes of their love or ambition—and yet guiltless of even the thought of the earthly and debased feelings of what is known as rivalship. Our love was soon known to both the families, chiefly through the medium of George Ball, who acted as the man of business of Mrs Greville, and in that capacity was often a visiter at the house. The effect of the intelligence was intense and stirring; and, through the simple medium of my aunt, I heard myself denounced as one who carried virtue on my face and tongue; simulated nervous sensibility, to give effect to my affected distaste of vice; and who yet bore within my bosom, for a heart, the poisonous cockatrice, whose eggs were the guile and deceit that work more evil in the world than open-faced, unblushing vice. These statements were corroborated by what I myself saw; for when I again met the young ladies—and it was more by chance than intention—I was struck by the intensity with which they, even in the presence of others, expressed by look and manner the hatred they carried in their hearts against me, guiltless as I was of thought or deed inimical to them or any other mortal on earth. The enmity thus flared upon me, with such strength of feeling, was experienced in the height of the delicious dream of love in which I was entranced; and, softened and mellowed as I was with the sweet enjoyment of the actual experience in Augustus of the visions of perfection I had so devotedly cherished, I felt again, and in an increased degree, the pain which the workings of evil seemed fated to produce in me.