Devereux — Complete

Let me be brief here on the black fraud that ensued. Among the other arts of Jean Desmarais, was that of copying exactly any handwriting. He was then in London, in your service. Montrenil sent for him to come to the neighbourhood of Devereux Court. Meanwhile, the priest had procured from the notary who had drawn up, and who now possessed, the will of my unsuspecting uncle, that document. The notary had been long known to, and sometimes politically employed by, Montreuil, for he was half-brother to that Oswald, whom I have before mentioned as the early comrade of the priest and Desmarais. This circumstance, it is probable, first induced Montreuil to contemplate the plan of a substituted will. Before Desmarais arrived, in order to copy those parts of the will which my uncle’s humour had led him to write in his own hand, you, alarmed by a letter from my uncle, came to the Court, and on the same day Sir William (taken ill the preceding evening) died. Between that day and the one on which the funeral occurred the will was copied by Desmarais; only Gerald’s name was substituted for yours, and the forty thousand pounds left to him—a sum equal to that bestowed on myself—was cut down into a legacy of twenty thousand pounds to you. Less than this Montreuil dared not insert as the bequest to you: and it is possible that the same regard to probabilities prevented all mention of himself in the substituted will. This was all the alteration made. My uncle’s writing was copied exactly; and, save the departure from his apparent intentions in your favour, I believe not a particle in the effected fraud was calculated to excite suspicion. Immediately on the reading of the will, Montreuil repaired to me and confessed what had taken place.

“Aubrey,” he said, “I have done this for your sake partly; but I have had a much higher end in view than even your happiness or my affectionate wishes to promote it. I live solely for one object,—the aggrandizement of that holy order to which I belong; the schemes of that order are devoted only to the interests of Heaven, and by serving them I serve Heaven itself. Aubrey, child of my adoption and of my earthly hopes, those schemes require carnal instruments, and work, even through Mammon, unto the goal of righteousness. What I have done is just before God and man. I have wrested a weapon from the hand of an enemy, and placed it in the hand of an ally. I have not touched one atom of this wealth, though, with the same ease with which I have transferred it from Morton to Gerald, I might have made my own private fortune. I have not touched one atom of it; nor for you, whom I love more than any living being, have I done what my heart dictated. I might have caused the inheritance to pass to you. I have not done so. Why? Because then I should have consulted a selfish desire at the expense of the interests of mankind. Gerald is fitter to be the tool those interests require than you are. Gerald I have made that tool. You, too, I have spared the pangs which your conscience, so peculiarly, so morbidly acute, might suffer at being selected as the instrument of a seeming wrong to Morton. All required of you is silence. If your wants ever ask more than your legacy, you have, as I have, a claim to that wealth which your pleasure allows Gerald to possess. Meanwhile, let us secure to you that treasure dearer to you than gold.”

If Montreuil did not quite blind me by speeches of this nature, my engrossing, absorbing passion required little to make it cling to any hope of its fruition. I assented, therefore, though not without many previous struggles, to Montreuil’s project, or rather to its concealment; nay, I wrote some time after, at his desire and his dictation, a letter to you, stating feigned reasons for my uncle’s alteration of former intentions, and exonerating Gerald from all connivance in that alteration, or abetment in the fraud you professed that it was your open belief had been committed. This was due to Gerald; for at that time, and for aught I know, at the present, he was perfectly unconscious by what means he had attained his fortune: he believed that your love for Isora had given my uncle offence, and hence your disinheritance; and Montreuil took effectual care to exasperate him against you, by dwelling on the malice which your suspicions and your proceedings against him so glaringly testified. Whether Montreuil really thought you would give over all intention of marrying Isora upon your reverse of fortune, which is likely enough from his estimate of your character; or whether he only wished by any means to obtain my acquiescence in a measure important to his views, I know not, but he never left me, nor ever ceased to sustain my fevered and unhallowed hopes, from the hour in which he first communicated to me the fraudulent substitution of the will till we repaired together to London. This we did not do so long as he could detain me in the country by assurances that I should ruin all by appearing before Isora until you had entirely deserted her.

Morton, hitherto I have written as if my veins were filled with water, instead of the raging fire that flows through them until it reaches my brain, and there it stops, and eats away all things,—even memory, that once seemed eternal! Now I feel as I approach the consummation of—ha—of what—ay, of what? Brother, did you ever, when you thought yourself quite alone, at night, not a breath stirring,—did you ever raise your eyes, and see exactly opposite to you a devil?—a dread thing, that moves not, speaks not, but glares upon you with a fixed, dead, unrelenting eye?—that thing is before me now and witnesses every word I write. But it deters me not! no, nor terrifies me. I have said that I would fulfil this task, and I have nearly done it; though at times the gray cavern yawned, and I saw its rugged walls stretch—stretch away, on either side, until they reached hell; and there I beheld—but I will not tell you till we meet there! Now I am calm again: read on.

We could not discover Isora nor her home: perhaps the priest took care that it should be so; for, at that time, what with his devilish whispers and my own heart, I often scarcely knew what I was or what I desired; and I sat for hours and gazed upon the air, and it seemed so soft and still that I longed to make an opening in my forehead that it might enter there, and so cool and quiet the dull, throbbing, scorching anguish that lay like molten lead in my brain; at length we found the house. “To-morrow,” said the Abbe, and he shed tears over me,—for there were times when that hard man did feel,—“to-morrow, my child, thou shalt see her; but be soft and calm.” To-morrow came; but Montreuil was pale, paler than I had ever seen him, and he gazed upon me and said, “Not to-day, Son, not to-day; she has gone out, and will not return till nightfall.” My brother, the evening came, and with it came Desmarais; he came in terror and alarm. “The villain Oswald,” he said, “has betrayed all; he drew me aside and told me so. ‘Hark ye, Jean,’ he whispered, ‘hark ye: your master has my brother’s written confession and the real will; but I have provided for your safety, and if he pleases it, for Montreuil’s. The packet is not to be opened till the seventh day; fly before then. But I know,” added Desmarais, “where the packet is placed;” and he took Montreuil aside, and for a while I heard not what they said; but I did overhear Desmarais at last, and I learned that it was your bridal night.

What felt I then? The same tempestuous fury,—the same whirlwind and storm of heart that I had felt before, at the mere anticipation of such an event? No; I felt a bright ray of joy flash through me. Yes, joy; but it was that joy which a conqueror feels when he knows his mortal foe is in his power and when he dooms that enemy to death. “They shall perish, and on this night,” I said inly. “I have sworn it; I swore to Isora that the bridal couch should be stained with blood, and I will keep the oath!” I approached the pair; they were discussing the means for obtaining the packet. Montreuil urged Desmarais to purloin it from the place where you had deposited it, and then to abscond; but to this plan Desmarais was vehemently opposed. He insisted that there would be no possible chance of his escape from a search so scrutinizing as that which would necessarily ensue, and he evidently resolved not alone to incur the danger of the theft. “The Count,” said he, “saw that I was present when he put away the packet. Suspicion will fall solely on me. Whither should I fly? No: I will serve you with my talents, but not with my life.” “Wretch,” said Montreuil, “if that packet is opened, thy life is already gone.” “Yes,” said Desmarais; “but we may yet purloin the papers, and throw the guilt upon some other quarter. What if I admit you when the Count is abroad? What if you steal the packet, and carry away other articles of more seeming value? What, too, if you wound me in the arm or the breast, and I coin some terrible tale of robbers, and of my resistance, could we not manage then to throw suspicion upon common housebreakers,—nay, could we not throw it upon Oswald himself? Let us silence that traitor by death, and who shall contradict our tale? No danger shall attend this plan. I will give you the key of the escritoire: the theft will not be the work of a moment.” Montreuil at first demurred to this proposal, but Desmarais was, I repeat, resolved not to incur the danger of the theft alone; the stake was great, and it was not in Montreuil’s nature to shrink from peril, when once it became necessary to confront it. “Be it so,” he said, at last, “though the scheme is full of difficulty and of danger: be it so. We have not a day to lose. To-morrow the Count will place the document in some place of greater safety, and unknown to us: the deed shall be done to-night. Procure the key of the escritoire; admit me this night; I will steal disguised into the chamber; I will commit the act from which you, who alone could commit it with safety, shrink. Instruct me exactly as to the place where the articles you speak of are placed. I will abstract them also. See that if the Count wake, he has no weapon at hand. Wound yourself, as you say, in some place not dangerous to life, and to-morrow, or within an hour after my escape, tell what tale you will. I will go, meanwhile, at once to Oswald; I will either bribe his silence—ay, and his immediate absence from England—or he shall die. A death that secures our own self-preservation is excusable in the reading of all law, divine or human.” I heard, but they deemed me insensible: they had already begun to grow unheeding of my presence. Montreuil saw me, and his countenance grew soft. “I know all,” I said, as I caught his eye which looked on me in pity, “I know all: they are married. Enough!—with my hope ceases my love: care not for me.”

Montreuil embraced and spoke to me in kindness and in praise. He assured me that you had kept your wedding so close a secret that he knew it not, nor did even Desmarais, till the evening before,—till after he had proposed that I should visit Isora that very day. I know not, I care not, whether he was sincere in this. In whatever way one line in the dread scroll of his conduct be read, the scroll was written in guile, and in blood was it sealed. I appeared not to notice Montreuil or his accomplice any more. The latter left the house first. Montreuil stole forth, as he thought, unobserved; he was masked, and in complete disguise. I, too, went forth. I hastened to a shop where such things were procured; I purchased a mask and cloak similar to the priest’s. I had heard Montreuil agree with Desmarais that the door of the house should be left ajar, in order to give greater facility to the escape of the former; I repaired to the house in time to see Montreuil enter it. A strange, sharp sort of cunning, which I had never known before, ran through the dark confusion of my mind. I waited for a minute, till it was likely that Montreuil had gained your chamber; I then pushed open the door, and ascended the stairs. I met no one; the moonlight fell around me, and its rays seemed to me like ghosts, pale and shrouded, and gazing upon me with wan and lustreless eyes. I know not how I found your chamber, but it was the only one I entered. I stood in the same room with Isora and yourself: ye lay in sleep; Isora’s face—O God! I know no more—no more of that night of horror—save that I fled from the house reeking with blood,—a murderer,—and the murderer of Isora!

Then came a long, long dream. I was in a sea of blood,—blood-red was the sky, and one still, solitary star that gleamed far away with a sickly and wan light was the only spot, above and around, which was not of the same intolerable dye. And I thought my eyelids were cut off, as those of the Roman consul are said to have been, and I had nothing to shield my eyes from that crimson light, and the rolling waters of that unnatural sea. And the red air burned through my eyes into my brain, and then that also, methought, became blood; and all memory,—all images of memory,—all idea,—wore a material shape and a material colour, and were blood too. Everything was unutterably silent, except when my own shrieks rang over the shoreless ocean, as I drifted on. At last I fixed my eyes—the eyes which I might never close—upon that pale and single star; and after I had gazed a little while, the star seemed to change slowly—slowly—until it grew like the pale face of that murdered girl, and then it vanished utterly, and all was blood!

This vision was sometimes broken, sometimes varied by others, but it always returned; and when at last I completely woke from it, I was in Italy, in a convent. Montreuil had lost no time in removing me from England. But once, shortly after my recovery, for I was mad for many months, he visited me, and he saw what a wreck I had become. He pitied me; and when I told him I longed above all things for liberty—for the green earth and the fresh air, and a removal from that gloomy abode—he opened the convent gates and blessed me, and bade me go forth. “All I require of you,” said he, “is a promise. If it be understood that you live, you will be persecuted by inquiries and questions which will terminate in a conviction of your crime: let it therefore be reported in England that you are dead. Consent to the report, and promise never to quit Italy nor to see Morton Devereux.”

I promised; and that promise I have kept: but I promised not that I would never reveal to you, in writing, the black tale which I have now recorded. May it reach you! There is one in this vicinity who has undertaken to bear it to you: he says he has known misery; and when he said so, his voice sounded in my ear like yours; and I looked upon him, and thought his features were cast somewhat in the same mould as your own; so I have trusted him. I have now told all. I have wrenched the secret from my heart in agony and with fear. I have told all: though things which I believe are fiends have started forth from the grim walls around to forbid it; though dark wings have swept by me, and talons, as of a bird, have attempted to tear away the paper on which I write; though eyes, whose light was never drunk from earth, have glared on me; and mocking voices and horrible laughter have made my flesh creep, and thrilled through the marrow of my bones,—I have told all; I have finished my last labour in this world, and I will now lie down and die.

AUBREY DEVEREUX.

The paper dropped from my hands. Whatever I had felt in reading it, I had not flinched once from the task. From the first word even to the last, I had gone through the dreadful tale, nor uttered a syllable, nor moved a limb. And now as I rose, though I had found the being who to me had withered this world into one impassable desert; though I had found the unrelenting foe and the escaped murderer of Isora, the object of the execration and vindictiveness of years,—not one single throb of wrath, not one single sentiment of vengeance, was in my breast. I passed at once to the bedside of my brother: he was awake, but still and calm,—the calm and stillness of exhausted nature. I knelt down quietly beside him. I took his hand, and I shrank not from the touch, though by that hand the only woman I ever loved had perished.

“Look up, Aubrey!” said I, struggling with tears which, despite of my most earnest effort, came over me; “look up: all is forgiven. Who on earth shall withhold pardon from a crime which on earth has been so awfully punished? Look up, Aubrey; I am your brother, and I forgive you. You are right: my childhood was harsh and fierce; and had you feared me less you might have confided in me, and you would not have sinned and suffered as you have done now. Fear me no longer. Look up, Aubrey, it is Morton who calls you. Why do you not speak? My brother, my brother,—a word, a single word, I implore you.”

For one moment did Aubrey raise his eyes, one moment did he meet mine. His lips quivered wildly: I heard the death-rattle; he sank back, and his hand dropped from my clasp. My words had snapped asunder the last chord of life. Merciful Heaven! I thank Thee that those words were the words of pardon!

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH THE HISTORY MAKES A GREAT STRIDE TOWARDS THE FINAL CATASTROPHE.—THE RETURN TO ENGLAND, AND THE VISIT TO A DEVOTEE

AT night, and in the thrilling forms of the Catholic ritual, was Aubrey Devereux consigned to earth. After that ceremony I could linger no longer in the vicinity of the hermitage. I took leave of the Abbot and richly endowed his convent in return for the protection it had afforded to the anchorite, and the Masses which had been said for his soul. Before I left Anselmo, I questioned him if any friend to the Hermit had ever, during his seclusion, held any communication with the Abbot respecting him. Anselmo, after a little hesitation, confessed that a man, a Frenchman, seemingly of no high rank, had several times visited the convent, as if to scrutinize the habits and life of the anchorite; he had declared himself commissioned by the Hermit’s relations to make inquiry of him from time to time; but he had given the Abbot no clew to discover himself, though Anselmo had especially hinted at the expediency of being acquainted with some quarter to which he could direct any information of change in the Hermit’s habits or health. This man had been last at the convent about two months before the present date; but one of the brothers declared that he had seen him in the vicinity of the well on the very day on which the Hermit died. The description of this stranger was essentially different from that which would have been given of Montreuil, but I imagined that if not the Abbe himself, the stranger was one in his confidence or his employ.

I now repaired to Rome, where I made the most extensive though guarded inquiries after Montreuil, and at length I learned that he was lying concealed, or rather unnoticed, in England, under a disguised name; having, by friends or by money, obtained therein a tacit connivance, though not an open pardon. No sooner did I learn this intelligence, than I resolved forthwith to depart to that country. I crossed the Alps, traversed France, and took ship at Calais for Dover.

Behold me, then, upon the swift seas bent upon a double purpose,—reconciliation with a brother whom I had wronged, and vengeance,—no, not vengeance, but justice against the criminal I had discovered. No! it was not revenge: it was no infuriate, no unholy desire of inflicting punishment upon a personal foe which possessed me; it was a steady, calm, unwavering resolution, to obtain justice against the profound and systematized guilt of a villain who had been the bane of all who had come within his contact, that nerved my arm and engrossed my heart. Bear witness, Heaven, I am not a vindictive man! I have, it is true, been extreme in hatred as in love; but I have ever had the power to control myself from yielding to its impulse. When the full persuasion of Gerald’s crime reigned within me, I had thralled my emotion; I had curbed it within the circle of my own heart, though there, thus pent and self-consuming, it was an agony and a torture; I had resisted the voice of that blood which cried from the earth against a murderer, and which had consigned the solemn charge of justice to my hands. Year after year I had nursed an unappeased desire; nor ever when it stung the most, suffered it to become an actual revenge. I had knelt in tears and in softness by Aubrey’s bed; I had poured forth my pardon over him; I had felt, while I did so,—no, not so much sternness as would have slain a worm. By his hand had the murderous stroke been dealt; on his soul was the crimson stain of that blood which had flowed through the veins of the gentlest and the most innocent of God’s creatures; and yet the blow was unavenged and the crime forgiven. For him there was a palliative, or even a gloomy but an unanswerable excuse. In the confession which had so terribly solved the mystery of my life, the seeds of that curse, which had grown at last into MADNESS, might be discovered even in the first dawn of Aubrey’s existence. The latent poison might be detected in the morbid fever of his young devotion, in his jealous cravings of affection, in the first flush of his ill-omened love,—even before rivalship and wrath began. Then, too, his guilt had not been regularly organized into one cold and deliberate system: it broke forth in impetuous starts, in frantic paroxysms; it was often wrestled with, though by a feeble mind; it was often conquered by a tender though a fitful temper; it might not have rushed into the last and most awful crime, but for the damning instigation and the atrocious craft of one, who (Aubrey rightly said) could wield and mould the unhappy victim at his will. Might not, did I say? Nay, but for Montreuil’s accursed influence, had I not Aubrey’s own word that that crime never would have been committed? He had resolved to stifle his love,—his heart had already melted to Isora and to me,—he had already tasted the sweets of a virtuous resolution, and conquered the first bitterness of opposition to his passion. Why should not the resolution thus auspiciously begun have been mellowed into effect? Why should not the grateful and awful remembrance of the crime he had escaped continue to preserve him from meditating crime anew? And (oh, thought, which, while I now write, steals over me and brings with it an unutterable horde of emotions!) but for that all-tainting, all-withering influence, Aubrey’s soul might at this moment have been pure from murder and Isora—the living Isora—by my side!

What wonder, as these thoughts came over me, that sense, feeling, reason, gradually shrank and hardened into one stern resolve? I looked as from a height over the whole conduct of Montreuil. I saw him in our early infancy with no definite motive (beyond the general policy of intrigue), no fixed design, which might somewhat have lessened the callousness of the crime, not only fomenting dissensions in the hearts of brothers; not only turning the season of warm affections, and yet of unopened passion, into strife and rancour, but seizing upon the inherent and reigning vice of our bosoms, which he should have seized to crush, in order only by that master-vice to weave our characters, and sway our conduct to his will, whenever a cool-blooded and merciless policy required us to be of that will the minions and the tools. Thus had he taken hold of the diseased jealousy of Aubrey, and by that handle, joined to the latent spring of superstition, guided him on his wretched course of misery and guilt. Thus, by a moral irresolution in Gerald had he bowed him also to his purposes, and by an infantine animosity between that brother and myself, held us both in a state of mutual hatred which I shuddered to recall. Readily could I now perceive that my charges or my suspicions against Gerald, which, in ordinary circumstances, he might have dispassionately come forward to disprove, had been represented to him by Montreuil in the light of groundless and wilful insults; and thus he had been led to scorn that full and cool explanation which, if it had not elucidated the mystery of my afflictions, would have removed the false suspicion of guilt from himself and the real guilt of wrath and animosity from me.

The crime of the forged will, and the outrage to the dead and to myself, was a link in his woven guilt which I regarded the least. I looked rather to the black and the consummate craft by which Aubrey had been implicated in that sin; and my indignation became mixed with horror when I saw Montreuil working to that end of fraud by the instigation not only of a guilty and unlawful passion, but of the yet more unnatural and terrific engine of frenzy,—of a maniac’s despair. Over the peace, the happiness, the honour, the virtue of a whole family, through fraud and through blood, this priest had marched onward to the goal of his icy and heartless ambition, unrelenting and unrepenting; “but not,” I said, as I clenched my hand till the nails met in the flesh, “not forever unchecked and unrequited!”