“I had a letter this morning from Miss Medwyn,” says Mr. Dawe. “She says that Damian pronounces Maud perfectly well, and has sent her away in Maximilla’s care from Glarewoods.”
“Mr. Damian is doting; but that doesn’t excuse his writing libels,” said Lady Vernon, flushing a bright scarlet, and then growing deadly pale. “I had a letter of insinuation and insult from him this morning, which he shall rue. I’m glad Maud is set at liberty without my sanction; let her kill me, or kill herself; what does it matter, compared with the tragedy she threatened, and which is now impossible!”
Mr. Dawe nodded, and in a few moments said:
“I have seen Mr. Tintern.”
“The wretch!” whispered she, looking down steadfastly on the floor, with cheeks still flushed, and baleful eyes; you might have fancied a Canidia looking down on the blood of her enemy. “He was the contriver of all that misery. He thought that you would provide for the young man. He is utterly false.”
“I believe he had quite other intentions for the young lady,” said Dawe.
“Don’t believe it; what better could a country squire do for his daughter? Mr. Tintern never goes straight to anything. You never discover what he intends, except by his bad acting. And to think of their having caught my beautiful boy in their toils! When he came here ill, he looked so like my own noble Elwyn, the sight of him almost broke my heart. You must bring him to see me; I have made up my mind to tell him everything. He shall know his father, and his poor, broken-hearted mother.”
“Well, Barbara, I fear you are exerting yourself too much. One thing I mention for your consideration. Use your power of appointment under the will in favour of Tintern, and you can dictate his settlements for your son, and thus provide for him handsomely.”
“It is too late. I executed a deed which excludes him irrevocably; and it is in Mr. Coke’s custody.”
“You might have consulted me, or some one, with more caution than yourself, Barbara, before taking such a step,” said Dawe, after a pause.
“It is taken, and no power on earth can recal it,” she said, coldly.
“It is a pity,” said Dawe. After a short silence, “I am told there is not a nicer girl in England than Ethel Tintern.”
“I hope she mayn’t live long,” said Lady Vernon, in her cold tones. “‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ Let His justice be done, and my poor Elwyn released from the wicked companion who deceived him. Ill as I am,” she continued, after a pause, “I have written to Mr. Coke to come down to consult upon the letter of that slanderous old man, Mr. Damian; I have walked with God all my days, why will he not spare me one drop in this dreadful cup? I have lived a life of virtue. I have done my duty. I have nothing to retract; nothing to repent of. I will see Maud’s face no more. She has never been a child to me. She has been the source of half my misery. Another parent would leave her with a curse. I turn from her in silence. Good people understand and honour me. The wicked I trample under my feet. ‘These speak evil of those things which they know not.’” She made her quotation with a low utterance, and with a slow and bitter emphasis. She was talking, as it were, to herself. “‘Woe unto them, for they have gone in the way of Cain, and perished in the gainsaying of Core. These are spots in your feasts of charity. Trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness — for ever.’”
She turned as she said this, and Mr. Dawe thought she was weeping, for he heard one or two little sobs.
Latimer, a minute after, in the adjoining room, heard a hoarse voice calling her in strange loud accents. At sound of this discordant summons, through Latimer’s brain, with a sure omen, flashed a dreadful suspicion.
Now she is in the room, she does not know how, stooping over the chair, calling distractedly, “My lady! my lady!” in an ear that will never hear sound again. She is holding her up in the chair, but the head sinks and rolls, this way or that, as the weight inclines. “’Tis a faint! ’tis a faint! my God! ’Tis only a faint!” Latimer cries wildly in her terror.
Mr. Dawe has thrown open the shutter, the window itself; and the fitful autumn air eddies in, and the elegant little lace coiffure and its long, dark, grey-and-blue silk ribbons flutter about the dead face and open mouth. Mr. Dawe has sprinkled water on her face. It streams over it as rain would over a marble bust.
Latimer despairs; she cries out with terror, “What is it, what is it? Is she gone? Oh! she’s gone, she is gone! she’s gone!”
Mr. Dawe at the door is calling for help, and soon many feet and voices are in the room. Strange liberties are taken with awful Lady Vernon’s sanctuary. The shutters are thrown open, the curtains dragged back, furniture is wheeled out of the way, huddled together. “My lady’s” Bible lies flat on its face on the floor with its covers open, beside a gilt candlestick and broken candle; broken, too, lies the pretty malachite paper-cutter which dead and buried Vicar Howard owned long since, which he had given her three-and-twenty years ago, and which ever since his death has always been beside her. On the carpet are strewn letters and two or three books, and the gold mounted ink-bottle lies on its side on the rich table-cover, as it were in a swoon, and bleeding ink profusely, quite neglected.
The great and faultless Lady Vernon is by this time on the sofa, a shawl over her feet, her head propped with the pillow, and something under her chin to close her mouth. There are no disclosures of “making up.” The tints on her cheek fade naturally into the proper hue of death.
This solitary lady with one great and untold affection among the living, one passionate affection among the dead, is more alone than ever now. Her pride, her passion, her strong affections, her wickedness, the whole story of her life, signed, sealed, and delivered, and passed out of her keeping now.
A servant is galloping by this time halfway to Shillingsworth to bring the doctor, the Roydon doctor not yet having returned, and Mr. Dawe wishing some skilled inspection, in the case of so great a lady.
All goes on as usual. The little town recovers from its momentary stupor. The scepticism of startled people subsides, and the great conviction is established. Lady Vernon of Roydon is dead.
Mr. Dawe remains at the Verney Arms; Mr. Coke arrives, letters are flying in all directions. Lady Vernon’s will has never been executed. She had not been able quite to make up her mind upon some points, and had no idea that her hour was so near.
The letters that radiate from the Hall to many scores of other homes, chiefly of the great, announce that the physicians agree in referring the sad event to heart-complaint, developed with unusual rapidity.
CONCLUSION.
The remainder of my story pretty nearly tells itself.
In Lady Vernon’s secret marriage with the vicar, Elwyn Howard, there was no taint of guilt. There was extreme rashness. Each honestly believed that the wicked person whom he had married in his romantic nonage, and lived with little more than a week, had been dead for years. Her own family had not only published her death, but sworn to the fact, and actually administered some trifling property of hers. It was not until after his marriage, not his seeking, but urged upon him by the wayward and impassioned girl, that the dreadful uncertainty of the situation was, for the first time, suspected. The story is curious, but true. The spoiled girl had revealed her passion to no one. It was not until circumstances compelled her to choose between confidence or exposure, that she disclosed her situation. Mr. Dawe was the sole confidant of her parents in this dark emergency in secret family history. By his advice the young lady and her father set out as if for a short tour on the Continent. The journey diverged and really ended in a sequestered place near a little Welsh village. Here the child of this illfated and invalid marriage was born. Mr. Dawe undertook to direct every particular respecting its early care, its subsequent education, and final position in life.
They were to leave in a day or two, and to return home, in a little time, by a very wide circuit, having taken e
very precaution necessary for a complete mystification of the good gossips of Roydon, when who should light upon them, traversing a path through the very grounds of the house they inhabited, but about the most unlikely man in the world to be found in that sequestered corner, Sir Amyrald Vernon, the young lady’s rejected suitor. He saw signs of alarm and agitation in both, on recognising him, by no means to be accounted for by an accidental meeting with a rejected lover.
They departed; but he remained, and without disclosing their real names, he made himself master of their secret. He tracked Mr. Dawe, and insisted that he should be taken into confidence, and took such a tone, that with the advice of the young lady’s father, Mr. Dawe told him the facts of the case, which, painful as they were, yet supplied an answer to suspicions of a more degrading kind.
It was the possession of this secret that enabled him, after the death of the vicar, to bend the proud young lady to his will.
I now turn to Charles Marston and Maud Vernon, who, in due time, there being no longer any let or hindrance, were united. At present they live very much abroad; and, when in England, they do not stay at Roydon, which the young lady associates with many painful recollections, but at their beautiful house of Darrel Abbey.
Doctor Malkin was one of those persons whom Lady Vernon’s death disappointed. He wishes very much he had been a little less active in managing that Glarewoods business. But who could have supposed that Lady Vernon would have died before the appointments she intended for him were filled up? He has no liking for the young lady. But for reasons of his own he never hints at the Glarewoods secret, and the good people of Roydon were led to believe that Maud, during her absence, had been making a little tour for her health.
Antomarchi, finding old Damian resolute against committing to him, after the disclosures of which he took so strong a view, a trust so awful as the autocracy of such an empire as Glarewoods, took steps in the Court of Chancery to restrain Mr. Damian from breaking up that establishment, and selling the house and grounds.
This attempt recoiled upon Antomarchi. The court read him an astounding lecture on the facts. The press took it up; and that able adventurer found that England was no longer a field for his talents.
I have heard various accounts of the after adventures of that brilliant rogue, some of which represent him in sore straits; others, following dark and downward paths, and picking gold and silver, but in danger, all the while, of breaking his neck, and lost sight of by the decent upper world.
Mr. Tintern is not quite ruined after all, but he has had to sell nearly all his estates, except the Grange, and a rental of about seven hundred a year. He lives in France; and refuses to see Ethel; and I heard this morning from old Puntles, whom I happened to meet, that he has just had a slight paralytic attack. His temper continues precisely in the state in which his misfortunes left it.
The Reverend Michael Doody has been presented to one of the comfortable livings in the gift of the Roydon Vernons. He is a good deal sobered, and has lost something of his wild spirits and eccentricities. But his energy and goodnature are unabated. It is said that he has cast eyes of affection on a niece of Mr. Puntles. But of this I have heard only as rumour, and must, therefore, speak with reserve.
Vivian and Ethel are as happy as any two people, except perhaps Charles Marston, now Lord Warhampton, and his good and beautiful young wife, can be. Charles and Maud have, indeed, little on earth to desire, for an heir is born to the title of Warhampton, and that heir is not without merry little companions in the nursery. Maximilla almost lives with her old friend Maud, and over the gateway of Warhampton stands, in well-chiselled relief, the time-honoured device of The Rose and the Key.
THE END
WILLING TO DIE
Sheridan Le Fanu’s last novel, the unnervingly-titled Willing to Die, was published posthumously in three volumes by Hurst and Blackett in 1873, having been serialised in All the Year Round earlier that year.
An undated portrait of Le Fanu
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
CHAPTER XIX.
CHAPTER XX.
CHAPTER XXI.
CHAPTER XXII.
CHAPTER XXIII.
CHAPTER XXIV.
CHAPTER XXV.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHAPTER XXVII.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CHAPTER XXX.
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHAPTER XXXII.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CHAPTER XXXV.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
CHAPTER XL.
CHAPTER XLI.
CHAPTER XLII.
CHAPTER XLIII.
CHAPTER XLIV.
CHAPTER XLV.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CHAPTER XLVII.
CHAPTER XLVIII.
CHAPTER XLIX.
CHAPTER L.
CHAPTER LI.
CHAPTER LII.
CHAPTER LIII.
CHAPTER LIV.
CHAPTER LV.
CHAPTER LVI.
CHAPTER LVII.
CHAPTER LVIII.
CHAPTER LIX.
CHAPTER LX.
CHAPTER LXI.
CHAPTER LXII.
CHAPTER LXIII.
CHAPTER LXIV.
CHAPTER LXV.
CHAPTER LXVI.
CHAPTER LXVII.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
CHAPTER LXIX.
CHAPTER LXX.
CHAPTER LXXI.
The original title page
TO THE READER.
First, I must tell you how I intend to relate my story. Having never before undertaken to write a long narrative, I have considered and laid down a few rules which I shall observe. Some of these are unquestionably good; others, I daresay, offend against the canons of composition; but I adopt them, because they will enable me to tell my story better than, with my imperfect experience, better rules possibly would. In the first place, I shall represent the people with whom I had to deal quite fairly. I have met some bad people, some indifferent, and some who at this distance of time seem to me like angels in the unchanging light of heaven.
My narrative shall be arranged in the order of the events; I shall not recapitulate or anticipate.
What I have learned from others, and did not witness, that which I narrate, in part, from the hints of living witnesses, and, in part, conjecturally, I shall record in the historic third person; and I shall write it down with as much confidence and particularity as if I had actually seen it; in that respect imitating, I believe, all great historians, modern and ancient. But the scenes in which I have been an actor, that which my eyes have seen, and my ears heard, I will relate accordingly. If I can be clear and true, my clumsiness and irregularity, I hope, will be forgiven me.
*
My name is Ethel Ware.
I am not an interesting person by any means. You shall judge. I shall be forty-two my next birthday. That anniversary will occur on the first of May, 1873; and I am unmarried.
I don’t look quite the old maid I am, they tell me. They say I don’t look five-and-thirty, and I am conscious, sitting before the glass, that there is nothing sour or peevish in my features. What does it matter, even to me? I shall, of course, never marry; and, honestly, I don’t care to please any one. If I cared twopence how I looked, I should probably look worse than I do.
I wish to be honest. I have looked
in the glass since I wrote that sentence. I have just seen the faded picture of what may have been a pretty, at least what is called a piquant face; a forehead broad and well-formed, over which the still dark-brown hair grows low; large and rather good grey eyes and features, with nothing tragic, nothing classic — just fairly good.
I think there was always energy in my face! I think I remember, long ago, something at times comic; at times, also, something sad and tender, and even dreamy, as I fixed flowers in my hair or talked to my image in the glass. All that has been knocked out of me pretty well. What I do see there now is resolution.
There are processes of artificial hatching in use, if I remember rightly, in Egypt, by which you may, at your discretion, make the bird all beak, or all claw, all head, or all drumstick, as you please to develope it, before the shell breaks, by a special application of heat. It is a chick, no doubt, but a monstrous chick; and something like such a chick was I. Circumstances, in my very early days, hatched my character altogether out of equilibrium.
The caloric had been applied quite different in my mother’s case, and produced a prodigy of quite another sort.
I loved my mother with a very warm, but, I am now conscious, with a somewhat contemptuous affection. It never was an angry nor an arrogant contempt; a very tender one, on the contrary. She loved me, I am sure, as well as she was capable of loving a child — better than she ever loved my sister — and I would have laid down my life for her; but, with all my love, I looked down upon her, although I did not know it, till I thought my life over in the melancholy honesty of solitude.
I am not romantic. If I ever was it is time I should be cured of all that. I can laugh heartily, but I think I sigh more than most people.
I am not a bit shy, but I like solitude; partly because I regard my kind with not unjust suspicion.
I am speaking very frankly. I enjoy, perhaps you think cynically, this hard-featured self-delineation. I don’t spare myself; I need not spare any one else. But I am not a cynic. There is vacillation and timidity in that ironical egotism. It is something deeper with me. I don’t delight in that sordid philosophy. I have encountered magnanimity and self-devotion on earth. It is not true that there is neither nobility nor beauty in human nature, that is not also more or less shabby and grotesque.
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