I said, Count Frederick deemed his love for Ella to be harmless, and that he felt no scruples in giving full play to it. It was only when, in his frequent rides, he caught a glimpse of the lovers enjoying their honest happiness under their own vine and fig-tree, as one might say, that the demon of envy, then of jealousy, took possession of him. There are few who can look unmoved on the unalloyed happiness of others, nor feel one pang of envy; that can see the appropriation by another of a secretly-coveted object, even an object one has no right or title to, or expectation of, and feel no sting of jealousy. Thus was it with Count Frederick: from the window of a mansion he frequently visited in Heidelberg, he could look right up to the bower. In the recess of that window he frequently sat; and with glass in hand, following with his eye every movement of the doomed pair, he conjured up a host of demons to torment him. He knew that her faith was given to another; he was aware and resolved that he could not marry her; yet, the long and constant dwelling of his thoughts upon her, the enlistment of his feelings and affections for her, seemed, in his disordered mind, to invest him with an indefinable title; he felt the outrage done to it, and casting full rein to both anger and passion, vowed to wreak his vengeance on what he thenceforward dreamed to be his mistress, and her lover.
Alone, and in secret, did he plot his plans to circumvent them. Lost now to every feeling of shame and honor, he repelled no scheme, however base, that presented itself; and though the better and more manly exercise of his faculties drooped and withered under his scorching passion, a deeper, deadlier cunning than he ever knew before, sweltered and forged unceasingly the most crafty implements for his hellish purpose. He would trust not an iota to the assistance of other hands, but assumed the whole burden of contriving and executing upon himself. Not a breath did he breathe of his infamous design to human ears. His demeanor in public possessed all the semblance of urbanity and good feeling that he once felt; but his interior Vulcan reposed not from his craft. Every piece of information that he could unsuspectingly acquire concerning either poor Roderick or Ella, he stored up and revolved in his aristocratic mind, digesting it with his moral venom, as a viper would revolve and masticate with poison its loath-some morsel. He learned from many sources, partially from herself, the particulars of Ella’s history, as far as was known; and contrasting several portions with certain circumstances that had fallen under his observation when in England, was astonished at the result of his machinations, which now doubled upon himself, to involve him too in their fatal entanglement. Thus far he had stood apart, aloof, as it were, upon a height above his contemplated victims. His baser passions had thrown aside the drapery of virtue and honor which once veiled the lovely woman from the gaze of rude thought, and he could look down upon her very graces as an object of his intended prey; but when the artful interlocking of his web and woof turned up to his astonished eyes, in gathered forms, the whole and real picture of his contemplated deed; when his study brought to light the astounding fact that Ella could claim close kindred with the proudest titles of the British peerage, his craven spirit of profligacy slunk away, for the time awed, but not quelled, by the air of reverence, and veneration that breathed upon it. At its return, elevated, softened, warmed, but not purified, by its admixture of romance, he felt his sternest anger giving way, his haughtiest pride tottering, his very soul melting into admiration and love; he reeled from his position aloof, and writhed a whole burnt offering among the other victims to his passion. His subtle ingenuity soon brought to the crucible the extraordinary change in his sentiments toward the unconscious girl, and the analysis did not dispel the new charm that enveloped her. He saw it was perfectly natural, and the only fruit of his discovery was a resolution to bring the charm to operate upon her own mind—it would open the avenue to a secret discontent with her present position, unfold a vast and snare-beset field to the vagaries of a romantic imagination, and bring her feelings to a sympathetic appreciation of the fellowship of caste that existed between her and himself.
Full of this dark resolve, Count Frederick went forth alone one afternoon. He had designedly employed the unsuspecting Roderick to restore some old paintings that had accumulated the dust of ages. They were in a studio in town. There Roderick had labored busily all the day, and when evening drew near he was still detained by some management of the count, in order to give his lordship the opportunity for his coveted interview with Ella. He had learned at what hour she would probably be at the appointed rendezvous, and timed his evening excursion accordingly. It was a beautiful afternoon in April. From the castle heights, the sun was seen slowly creeping down the skies of France, and the changing tints of the glittering clouds, were gorgeously reflected by the distant waters of the Rhine, and the intermediate mirrors of the Neckar. Villages, hamlets, cottages, spread over the plain, rolled their black smoke in heavy volumes against the green mountains, about whose feet the lights and shadows already had begun to sketch fantastic tableaux. How naturally did the words of the Mantuan poet’s pastoral seem to spring to Count Frederick’s lips, as he stood within a few paces of the bower, gazing abroad upon the scene, observed by the startled inmate, and feigning not to observe again. Ella understood perfectly well the words of the text, and as they were feelingly and eloquently poured forth, as though spontaneously, by the handsome youth, as he threw himself upon the turf, lost her surprise in the appropriate beauty of the poet’s effusion—
Hic tamen hac mecum poteris requiescere nocte,
Frondes super virides; sunt nobis mitia poma,
Castaneæque molles, et pressi copia lactis.
Et jam summa procul villarum culmina fumant,
Majoresque codunt altis de montibus umbrae.
The last two lines he rapturously repeated several times, then turning his eyes, as though perchance toward the bower, he hastily arose, and in a moment stood blandly before Ella, apologizing for his intrusion, and in the same breath requesting the favor of one of her pastoral songs. She challenged him for a repetition of the verses, and he uttered them in so off-hand, theatrical a way, that they both burst into a laugh. The ice was broken. Never before had he so far descended from his dignity in her presence. There and alone with him, she felt the charm of this novelty, and bandied words with him willingly, for she supposed that Roderick would soon come, and she thought it would be fine to pique his jealousy a little, only to reward it the better afterward with the sweetness of perfect tranquillity. He gradually drew forth from her own lips what little she knew of her father’s history and family, and artfully beguiled away the key to her enjoyments and her regrets. He had been intimate, very intimate, he told her, with a nobleman in England, whom he now knew must be her uncle. The identity of her father’s history, even to his fall in a duel, with that of a brother of Lord B.; the same name, even a perceptible resemblance of Ella to him, rendered his assurance doubly sure. Then followed many particulars which completely set Ella’s willing mind at rest in regard to the nobility of her parentage.
So far, all was well. As he anticipated, the disclosure was to her astounding and pleasing at the same time. The shadows of incredulity that for a moment hovered before the citadel of her happiness, flitted away before the march of pleasurable emotions. Her first feelings were those of gratitude, and in the liveliness of her satisfaction, as he poured into her ears the minuter details of her family history, she could have smiled almost any thing, looked almost any reward for him who bore her the welcome tidings. She divined the emotion that quivered on his lip, fathomed the eloquence that sparkled in his eye, suffusing his whole face with its light, and trembled, trembled like an aspen, with momentary terror: but, as his glowing speech expatiated on the time-honored and world-worshiped glory and privileges of the noblesse, the spirit of high-toned chivalry that begot, that chose, that ever ornamented the knightly order of Christendom, her terrors flew to the winds, and left her trembling frame a play-thing in the frenzied hands of wilder discord than her bosom had ever known. She no longer shunned his gaze; their eyes met again and again; a shadow, as of a dream, passed over her faculties; phantoms of law and duty and religion sprang up, to clamor for their rights; hastily she breathed an acquiescence, and then spurned them away as phantoms, as disturbers of the serenity of her soul. For the first time in all her life she felt the thrill of passion; the sorcerer beheld it, and closer and closer did he wind his web around them both, until, convulsed by the mighty battery within, he leaped from his seat, folded her resistless form in her arms, imprinted one passionate kiss upon her lips, and disappeared down the precipice.