Throughout that livelong night, the thunder roared and rolled incessantly, and from moment to moment the whole firmament seemed to yawn asunder, showing its inner vaults, sheeted with living and coruscant fire, while ever and anon long, arrowy, forked tongues, of incandescent brightness, darted down from the zenith, cleaving the massive storm-clouds with a crash that made the whole earth reel and shudder.
Never, within the memory of man, had such a storm been known at that season of the year. Huge branches, larger than trees of ordinary size, were rent from the gigantic oaks by the mere force of the hurricane, and whirled away like straws before its fury. The rain fell not in drops or showers, but in vast sheeted columns. The rills were swollen into rivers, the rivers covered the lowland meadows, expanded into very seas. Houses were unroofed, steeples and chimneys hurled in ruin to the earth, cattle were killed in the open fields, unscathed by lightning, by the mere weight of the storm.
Yet through that awful turmoil of the elements, which kept men waking, and bold hearts trembling from the Land’s End to Cape Wrath, Jasper St. Aubyn slept as calmly as an infant, with his head pillowed on the soft bosom of his innocent and lovely wife. And she, though the tempest roared around, and the thunder crashed above her, so that she could not close an eye in sleep; though she believed that to-morrow she was about to fly from her native land, her home, never, perhaps, to see them more; though she looked forward to a life of toil and wandering, of hardship, and of peril as an exile’s wife, perhaps to a death of horror, as a traitor’s confederate, she blessed God with a grateful heart, that he had restored to her her husband’s love, and watched that dear sleeper, dreaming a waking dream of perfect happiness.
But him no dreams, either sleeping or waking, disturbed from his heavy stupor, or diverted from his hellish purpose. So resolute, so iron-like in its unbending pertinacity was that young, boyish mind, that having once resolved upon his action, not all the terrors of heaven or of hell could have turned him from it.
There lay beneath one roof, on one marriage bed, ay, clasped in one embrace, the resolved murderer, and his unconscious victim. And he had tasted the honey of her lips, had fondled, had caressed her to the last, had sunk to sleep, lulled by the sweet, low voice of her who, if his power should mate his will, would never look upon a second morrow.
And here, let no one say such things cannot be, save in the fancy of the rhapsodist or the romancer; such things are impossible—for not only is there nothing under the sun impossible to human power, or beyond the aim of human wickedness, but such things are and have been, and will be again, so long as human passion exists uncontrolled by principle.
Such things have been among ourselves, and in our own day, as he who writes has seen, and many of those who read must needs remember—and such things were that night at Widecomb.
With the first dappling of the dawn, the rage of the elements sunk into rest, the winds sighed themselves to sleep, the pelting torrents melted into a soft, gray mist; only the roar of the distant waters, mellowed into a strange fitful murmur, was heard in the general tranquillity which followed the loud uproar.
Wearied with her involuntary watching, Theresa fell asleep also, still clasping in her fond arms the miserable, guilty thing which she had sworn so fatally, and kept her vow so faithfully, to love, honor, and obey.
When the sun rose, the wretched man awoke from his deep and dreamless deep; and as his eye fell on that innocent, sweet face, calm as an infant’s, and serene, though full of deep thoughts and pure affections, he did start, he did shudder, for one second’s space—perhaps for that fleeting point of time, he doubted. But if it were so, he nerved himself again almost without an effort, disengaged himself gently from the embrace of her entwined arms, with something that sounded like a smothered curse, and stalked away in sullen gloom, leaving her buried in her last natural slumber.