Since he had last returned, the coldness was converted into cruelty, active, malicious, fiendish cruelty. Hard words, incessant taunts, curses—nay, blows! Yet still, faithful to the end and fond, she still loved him. Still would have laid down the dregs of the life which had been so happy till she knew him, and which he had made so wretched, to win one of his old fond smiles, one of his once caressing tones, one of his heartfelt kisses.
Alas! alas! Theresa! Too late, it was all too late!
He had learned, for the first time, in London, the value of his rank, his wealth, his position. He had been flattered by men of lordly birth, fêted and fondled by the fairest and noblest ladies of the land. He had learned to be ambitious—he had begun to thirst for social eminence, for political ascendency, for place, power, dominion. His talents had created a favorable impression in high quarters—his enthusiasm and daring rashness had made an effect—he was already a marked man among the conspirators, who were aiming to pull down the sovereignty of the Stuarts. Hints had been even thrown out to him, of the possibility of allying himself to interests the most important, through the beautiful and gorgeous daughter of one of the oldest of the peers of England. The hint had been thrown out, moreover, by a young gentleman of his own county—by one who had seen Theresa. And when he started and expressed his wonder, and alluded tremulously to his wife, he had been answered by a smile of intelligence, coupled with an assurance that every one understood all about Theresa Allan; and that surely he would not be such a fool as to sacrifice such prospects for a little village paramour. “The story of the concealed wedding took in nobody, my lad,” the speaker added, “except those, like myself, who chose to believe any thing you chose to assert. Think of it, mon cher; and, believe me, that liaison will be no hindrance.”
And Jasper had thought of it. The thought had never been, for one moment, absent from his mind, sleeping or waking, since it first found admission to the busy chambers of his brain. From that unfortunate day, his life had been but one series of plots and schemes, all base, atrocious, horrible—some even murderous.
Since that day his cruelty had not been casual; it had a meaning, and a method, both worthy of the arch fiend’s devising.
He sought first deliberately to break her heart, to kill her without violence, by the action of her own outraged affections—and then, when that failed, or rather when he saw that the process must needs be too slow to meet his accursed views, he aimed at driving her to commit suicide—thus slaying, should he succeed in his hellish scheme, body and soul together of the woman whom he had sworn before God’s holy altar, with the most solemn adjuration, to love, comfort, honor, and keep in sickness and in health—the woman whose whole heart and soul were his absolute possession; who had never formed a wish, or entertained a thought, but to love him and to make him happy. And this—this was her reward. Could she, indeed, have fully conceived the extent of the feelings which he now entertained toward her, could she have believed that he really was desirous of her death, was actually plotting how he might bring it about, without dipping his hand in her blood, or calling down the guilt of downright murder on his soul, I believe he would have been spared all further wickedness.
To have known that he felt toward her not merely casual irritation, that his conduct was not the effect of a bad disposition, or of an evil temper only, but that determined hatred had supplanted the last spark of love in his soul, and that he was possessed by a resolution to rid himself of the restraint which his marriage had brought upon him, by one means or another—to have known this, I say, would have so frozen her young blood, would have so stricken her to the heart, that, if it had not slain her outright, it would have left her surely—perhaps happier even to be such—a maniac for the poor remnant of her life.
That morning, at an early hour, he had ridden forth, with two or three dogs at his heel, and the game-keeper, James Alderly, better known in that neighborhood as Black Jem, who had of late been his constant companion, following him.
Dinner-time had passed—supper-time—yet he came not; and the deserted creature was yet watching wistfully, hopefully for his return.
Suddenly, far off among the stems of the distant trees, she caught a glimpse of a moving object; it approached; it grew more distinct—it was he, returning at a gallop, as he seldom now returned to his distasteful home, with his dogs careering merrily along by his side, and the grim-visaged keeper spurring in vain to keep up with the furious speed at which he rode, far in the rear of his master.