"Save one--you forget the verse, 'There is a sin unto death.'"

"But we know not what that is, and while life lasts the greatest sinner may return; the prayer of the dying thief was heard, so will yours be heard and answered."

"Vain, vain, I tell you, Ellen; I cannot pray; the Spirit left me long ago. I know the very night--the very hour--he left; that night I sold myself to the devil, the night I agreed to the diabolic plot against you, Ellen. Since then I have never felt aught save remorse, no desire to be better; prayer has frozen on my lips, I am a reprobate."

"You think too darkly. Oh! try and pray with me; resist the evil spirit, and he will flee from you."

The Countess knelt down beside the wretched man, and offered up a fervent prayer to heaven for him. He heard it with a cold, gloomy expression, and when she ceased, only said, "I cannot say amen; I tried, but it is impossible; believe me, Ellen, I am lost,--and, what is more, I mourn not my lost heaven. I want not paradise, but rest. Could I rest for ever in the dark grave 'twill be enough. I have seen you, I have heard you forgive me; the voice I loved in better days to hear has thrilled through me; I have had all I want, leave me to finish life as I deserve. Why should you or my brother trouble yourselves more?"

Tears of sorrow again coursed the Countess's cheek, as she bent over her old lover, and, taking his hand, said, "Do you love me, Edward?"

"Love you? yes; beyond all things earthly and divine. Ellen, you are the only being I love," answered the Viscount, with wild emotion.

"Then, if you love me, you will try and prepare for that place where I humbly hope--nay, believe--after death I shall live; you would not wish to be parted both in time and in eternity?"

"Ellen, you ask an impossibility. Ask anything else. No, it is not my wish, but so it must be. In this life I have seen you afar off, in the life that is to come I must see you afar off too. Oh! that we had never met. Do you recollect what I said when on my knees, which were never bent to man or to G.o.d since that moment? did I not say your refusal would drive me to desperation? see what it has done. I do not blame you; I have myself to blame: but ours was an ill-starred acquaintance--an ill-starred love. No, no, you will mourn for me here; you will sometimes give a pa.s.sing thought to one who adored you so, for never was needle truer to the north than in weal and woe my heart has been to you. This is all I ask; and for me, I am not worthy to love you,--you are like a star I may look up to and worship, but which is at once shrined far above my affection or my hate."

For a long while after the Viscount ceased no word was uttered by either. The scene was at once a striking and a sad one. The prisoner had sunk back on his side, and, resting on his left elbow, gazed on the lovely being who knelt beside him with her hands clasped, and her eyes turned heavenwards. Her lips moved as though she were breathing a fervent pet.i.tion for her brother. How marked was the contrast between the expression of those two!--vice had sullied the handsome features of one; virtue had lent a purer radiance to the sweet face of the other.

How strange the contrast of their hearts!--one like the glacier, cold, dead, unmelting; the other like the warm sunbeam, which, alas! throws its brightness, but thaws not the icy ma.s.s it shines on. How different were their thoughts!--one was thinking with remorse on his wretched past life, without hope of a future; the other, whilst mourning over the falsehood which had worked such a ruin, was still ardent with hope that in due time her prayers would be answered; and as the mastless, rudderless vessel, tossed and well nigh wrecked on the tumultuous billows, can yet be refitted, and with a wise captain and pilot steer her way to the haven she was bound for, so would this erring man forget, in that plenitude of rest, peace, and happiness, the storms and tempests, shoals and rocks, of the voyages that had brought him thither.

This silence might have lasted still longer had not the entrance of Giacomo broken it.

"My lady," said he, "Milord wishes to see you; would you follow me?"

The Countess rose. "Adieu, then, for the present, Edward; I shall pray for you, and you will show your love to me by thinking more calmly. I will come and see you again soon, and I hope in another place than this."

She held her hand out with a mournful smile; the Viscount seized it and pressed it to his lips, his heart was too full to allow him to frame the word "adieu." The lady turned away; he watched her till the dark door shut her out from his view, then, sitting up, took the small phial from his breast, laid the letter on the bed beside him, drew the cork, and tossed it from him. "I have nothing more to live for since I have seen her; there is no spot on earth I could live at, and feel she was another's wife," thought the hapless man. "Farewell, Ellen! a long farewell."

He then emptied the contents of the bottle over his throat: it was prussic acid, and with fearful rapidity did its fatal work! he felt the hand of death on him whilst he was even swallowing it, sank back, uttered a faint cry of distress, and ceased to live, in less than a minute after swallowing the dreadful draught! So died he, poor erring man! So died he who should have been a peer of England, and yet ended his life a prisoned brigand, a suicide!

When the Earl sent for the Countess it was to inform her that he had procured the necessary pardon for his brother.

"He is in an unhappy state of mind," said the Countess, "but I have hopes that the very fear of unworthiness he has is the first fruits of repentance, and the foretaste of better thoughts."

"G.o.d grant it may be so," said the Earl; "but now let us go and tell him the good tidings; it will doubtless have a favourable effect on him, for freedom engenders far better thoughts than captivity."

Together they sought the gaol once more, eager to bear the glad tidings.

When they entered, the Countess hastened forward: the fixed features, the gla.s.sy eye and clenched hands, the empty phial beside him, told the dread truth, and with a cry of terror, she sank in a dead swoon at the side of the hapless victim. The Earl, terrified at the dangerous effect it might produce on his wife, and shocked at the catastrophe, called for a.s.sistance, himself bore the senseless lady from the terrible scene, and attended to her first. It was long ere she recovered the dreadful shock she had sustained, and even when her consciousness returned she wept in such an hysterical manner, as to alarm her husband not a little. When she reached the villa she became calmer, but it was many days ere she again left her room.

The Earl, after seeing his wife in safety, returned to the prison, and long gazed in silence on the remains of the wretched suicide: he found too the letter addressed to the Countess; it was a very sad one.

"December 25. Castel Capuano.

"When you read this I shall have ceased to breathe: life has to me been a weary load, and I am glad to shake it off. It might have been far different, and 'tis the thought of what might have been makes the present hour so bitter. You might have been mine, and I might have been great, and good! but what matters what might have been, I have to do with what _is_. No joy to look back on, no heaven to look forward to, I am a heartbroken man. I have been the dupe of others,--my crimes have been my misfortune rather than fault. I have no redeeming trait save love to you; can the guilty love the guiltless--the vile love the pure? my pa.s.sion answers all, 'I loved the right, the wrong pursued.' I have been a bane to my family, I might have been a blessing! You forgive me, Ellen: it is all I want! Forget such a one as I ever lived. I ask the tribute of one tear at my sad fate; you will not deny my last request. Oh!

Ellen, it gives the sting to death, this separation from you, but it must be so. Farewell!

"Sometimes in quiet hours think of his luckless fate, who loved you too well,

"Ever your deeply attached,

"ARTHUR DE VERE."

"P.S. This is the first, and will be the last time I ever signed my real name. Ask my brother, to whom I have been so unworthy a brother, to see that my remains are decently interred. Tell my story on my tombstone, then bury me out of sight and out of mind.

This last act of my wretched career may be the worst, life has lost its charm--pardon me the pain this crime may give you."

When the Earl read this letter to his wife it was with bitter grief she heard his last, worst deed--and we need not say she often thought of that misguided man, shed not one but many, many a tear, and thus fulfilled his last pet.i.tion. Ah, what an end had her young lover come to!

The remains of Viscount de Vere were interred in the grounds of the Villa Reale, and over his tomb rose a marble fane with the following inscription--

Here lies ARTHUR PLANTAGENET VERE DE VERE-- Viscount De Vere, EARL OF WENTWORTH, a t.i.tle to which he never succeeded!

By an unaccountable fate--stolen in his infancy; misguided in his manhood.

He died by his own hand on the 25th of December, MDCCXXIX.

Aged x.x.xIX.

"Oh breathe not his name, let it sleep in the shade Where cold and unhonoured his relics are laid."

A few days after the funeral, which took place at the dead hour of midnight, the Earl and Countess with their daughter left Naples by their yacht, and sailed for Leith, where they arrived safely after a long and stormy pa.s.sage. They then started for the Towers, where they lived in deep seclusion.

Mr. Scroop had meanwhile started for Italy to bring home the unfortunate daughter of his murdered father-in-law, and make arrangements with the authorities for bringing his murderers to justice, a point, however, in which they entirely failed to succeed.

CHAPTER XXII.

"Lovely in life, and unparted in death."--_Anon._

About two months after their arrival at the Towers, the Earl and Countess in the garb of deep mourning were walking together down the Holly Walk. We do not know why they chose that peculiar place, fraught with so many sad recollections; however, they silently trod the verdant path, and seated themselves on the selfsame bench where young Ravensworth had last sat, where Lady Florence and Ellen rested on the morning of his departure.

"Ellen," said the Earl, "we have now been united for twelve years, and never has one unkind word or action marred my domestic bliss; you have been my partner in joy, my solace in woe, and as our family tree is stript leaf by leaf, and we two, and our bud Augusta are alone left, I often think what should I do without you."

"My dearest Wentworth, I have often told you it is but my duty--a delightful one--to try and be a helpmate instead of hindrance to you; and I may say too during all our married life I have never seen an unkind look,--you have been my love and faithful lover in a way unhappily too rare."

"Yes, we were made for each other, Ellen; they say marriages are made in heaven: I am sure ours was, for by my union with you I have won everything in this world and the next. I have lived to see and admire your silent example, lived to see its blessed fruits in my two sisters, lived to follow and value religion, and to feel the a.s.surance that our hearts are bound not only now, but to all eternity in cords of everlasting love."

"Give to G.o.d the praise, dearest Wentworth; if I have been the unworthy instrument of leading you from earthly dross to eternal and unchangeable riches, I have been _only_ the poor instrument, but this seems my happiness; to hear my best loved speak so is the bright answer of many, many prayers. I knew they would be answered. I felt sure you were mine both upon earth and in heaven!"

"Ah, Ellen, it is in this one sees the reality of religion. What are rank, earthly honours, position, wealth, if only to be used or abused here? What are all to a dying man? Yes, it is one thing to talk of death, one thing to enjoy life, as if death existed not,--it is another to know our end is near, to feel we must soon lose all; leave the world naked as we came into it, tread out on empty s.p.a.ce, quit our firm footing below! had we then no a.s.surance that around us were the everlasting arms, what would all earthly joys do for us? but thanks to heaven, and to you for leading me to seek that treasure where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, I feel that if called to die this night I could die happy. There might be the pang mortal man must own when his breath forsakes him, there might be the human dread of the cold tomb, the pain of the wrench from those we love below, but my mind would be happy, happy in the thought I should soon see you again, and those I loved, and have darkly lost."

"True, dearest, and earth has so little left us now, it seems as if we were called to think more on heaven! Every tie seems severed but one--our daughter. I would endure to live for her and for you, but certainly most of our dear ones are beyond the grave, and there my heart often soars too."

"I have a strange presentiment, dearest Ellen, that I shall not long be spared to you. Since my brother's death I have felt the shadow of the tomb overshading me! Whether it was the awful scene of his self-destruction, or the air of the damp dungeon in which he was confined, I know not, but I have never felt the same man since. I think I shall soon go too!"

"Ah! say not so," said the Countess. "Oh, Wentworth! you must not leave us. It is a different thing to speak of death and to see our dearest fade beneath its cruel breath! You must take advice, dear, and change the air. This uncertain climate, after so long a residence in Italy, is not suiting you. Promise me you will take advice."

"It is needless, love; no doctor could avail. Remember the Weird; remember what I told you in the grot where I sought and won your hand and heart. Ours is a strange family! Coming death with us casts his shadow ever before. I have long been under that shade. No, Ellen, it is come at last; I shall never see the summer roses! Spring is now putting out her buds and early leaves, but summer's flowers will blossom over my tomb."