Эдвард Бульвер-Литтон
Pelham — Volume 07
"I pass on to the time when I discovered that I had been either intentionally or unconsciously deceived, and that my enemy yet lived! lived in honour, prosperity, and the world's blessings. The information was like removing a barrier from a stream hitherto pent into quiet and restraint. All the stormy thoughts, feelings, and passions so long at rest rushed again into a terrible and tumultuous action. The newly-formed stratum of my mind was swept away; everything seemed a wreck, a chaos, a convulsion of jarring elements; but this is a trite and tame description of my feelings; words would be but commonplace to express the revulsion which I experienced: yet, amidst all, there was one paramount and presiding thought, to which the rest were as atoms in the heap,—the awakened thought of vengeance!-but how was it to be gratified?
"Placed as Tyrrell now was in the scale of society, every method of retribution but the one formerly rejected seemed at an end. To that one, therefore, weak and merciful as it appeared to me, I resorted; you took my challenge to Tyrrell; you remember his behaviour: Conscience doth indeed make cowards of us all! The letter enclosed to me in his to you contained only the commonplace argument urged so often by those who have injured us; namely, the reluctance at attempting our life after having ruined our happiness. When I found that he had left London my rage knew no bounds: I was absolutely frantic with indignation; the earth reeled before my eyes; I was almost suffocated by the violence—the whirlpool— of my emotions. I gave myself no time to think,—I left town in pursuit of my foe.
"I found that—still addicted, though, I believed, not so madly as before, to the old amusements—he was in the neighbourhood of Newmarket, awaiting the races shortly to ensue. No sooner did I find his address than I wrote him another challenge, still more forcibly and insultingly worded than the one you took. In this I said that his refusal was of no avail; that I had sworn that my vengeance should overtake him; and that sooner or later, in the face of heaven and despite of hell, my oath should be fulfilled. Remember those words, Pelham, I shall refer to them hereafter.
"Tyrrell's reply was short and contemptuous: he affected to treat me as a madman. Perhaps (and I confess that the incoherence of my letter authorized such suspicion) he believed I really was one. He concluded by saying that if he received more of my letters, he should shelter himself from my aggressions by the protection of the law.
"On receiving this reply, a stern, sullen, iron spirit entered into my bosom. I betrayed no external mark of passion; I sat down in silence; I placed the letter and Gertrude's picture before me. There, still and motionless, I remained for hours. I remember well I was awakened from my gloomy revery by the clock, as it struck the first hour of the morning. At that lone and ominous sound, the associations of romance and dread which the fables of our childhood connect with it rushed coldly and fearfully into my mind: the damp dews broke out upon my forehead and the blood curdled in my limbs. In that moment I knelt down and vowed a frantic and deadly oath—the words of which I would not now dare to repeat—that before three days expired, hell should no longer be cheated of its prey. I rose,—I flung myself on my bed, and slept.
"The next day I left my abode. I purchased a strong and swift horse; and, disguising myself from head to foot in a long horseman's cloak, I set off alone, locking in my heart the calm and cold conviction that my oath should be kept. I placed, concealed in my dress, two pistols; my intention was to follow Tyrrell wherever he went, till we could find ourselves alone, and without the chance of intrusion. It was then my determination to force him into a contest, and that no trembling of the hand, no error of the swimming sight, might betray my purpose, to place us foot to foot, and the mouth of each pistol almost to the very temple of each antagonist. Nor was I deterred for a moment from this resolution by the knowledge that my own death must be as certain as my victim's. On the contrary, I looked forward to dying thus, and so baffling the more lingering, but not less sure, disease which was daily wasting me away, with the same fierce, yet not unquiet delight with which men have rushed into battle, and sought out a death less bitter to them than life.
"For two days, though I each day saw Tyrrell, fate threw into my way no opportunity of executing my design. The morning of the third came,— Tyrrell was on the race-ground; sure that he would remain there for some hours, I put up my wearied horse in the town, and, seating myself in an obscure corner of the course, was contented with watching, as the serpent does his victim, the distant motions of my enemy. Perhaps you can recollect passing a man seated on the ground and robed in a horseman's cloak. I need not tell you that it was I whom you passed and accosted. I saw you ride by me; but the moment you were gone I forgot the occurrence. I looked upon the rolling and distant crowd as a child views the figures of the phantasmagoria, scarcely knowing if my eyes deceived me, feeling impressed with some stupefying and ghastly sensation of dread, and cherishing the conviction that my life was not as the life of the creatures that passed before me.
"The day waned: I went back for my horse; I returned to the course, and, keeping at a distance as little suspicious as possible, followed the motions of Tyrrell. He went back to the town, rested there, repaired to a gaming-table, stayed in it a short time, returned to his inn, and ordered his horse.
"In all these motions I followed the object of my pursuit; and my heart bounded with joy when I at last saw him set out alone and in the advancing twilight. I followed him till he left the main road. Now, I thought, was my time. I redoubled my pace, and had nearly reached him, when some horsemen appearing, constrained me again to slacken my pace. Various other similar interruptions occurred to delay my plot. At length all was undisturbed. I spurred my horse, and was nearly on the heels of my enemy, when I perceived him join another man: this was you; I clenched my teeth and drew my breath, as I once more retreated to a distance. In a short time two men passed me, and I found that, owing to some accident on the road, they stopped to assist you. It appears, by your evidence on a subsequent event, that these men were Thornton and his friend Dawson; at the time they passed too rapidly, and I was too much occupied in my own dark thoughts, to observe them: still I kept up to you and Tyrrell, sometimes catching the outlines of your figures through the moon, light, at others (with the acute sense of anxiety), only just distinguishing the clang of your horses' hoofs on the stony ground. At last a heavy shower came on: imagine my joy when Tyrrell left you and rode off alone!
"I passed you, and followed my enemy as fast as my horse would permit; but it was not equal to Tyrrell's, which was almost at its full speed. However, I came, at last, to a very steep and almost precipitous descent. I was forced to ride slowly and cautiously; this, however, I the less regarded, from my conviction that Tyrrell must be obliged to use the same precaution. My hand was on my pistol with a grasp of premeditated revenge, when a shrill, sharp, solitary cry broke on my ear.
"No sound followed: all was silence. I was just approaching towards the close of the descent, when a horse without its rider passed me. The shower had ceased, and the moon broke from the cloud some minutes before; by its light I recognized the horse rode by Tyrrell; perhaps, I thought, it has thrown its master, and my victim will now be utterly in my power. I pushed hastily forward in spite of the hill, not yet wholly passed. I came to a spot of singular desolation: it was a broad patch of waste land, a pool of water was on the right, and a remarkable and withered tree hung over it. I looked round, but saw nothing of life stirring. A dark and imperfectly developed object lay by the side of the pond; I pressed forward: merciful God! my enemy had escaped my hand, and lay in the stillness of death before me!"
"What!" I exclaimed, interrupting Glanville, for I could contain myself no longer, "it was not by you then that Tyrrell fell?" With these words, I grasped his hand; and, excited as I had been by my painful and wrought-up interest in his recital, I burst into tears of gratitude and joy. Reginald Glanville was innocent: Ellen was not the sister of an assassin!
After a short pause, Glanville continued:
"I gazed upon the upward and distorted face, in a deep and sickening silence; an awe, dark and undefined, crept over my heart: I stood beneath the solemn and sacred heavens, and felt that the hand of God was upon me; that a mysterious and fearful edict had gone forth; that my headlong and unholy wrath had, in the very midst of its fury, been checked, as if but the idle anger of a child; that the plan I had laid in the foolish wisdom of my heart had been traced, step by step, by an all-seeing eye, and baffled in the moment of its fancied success by an inscrutable and awful doom. I had wished the death of my enemy: lo! my wish was accomplished, —how, I neither knew nor guessed; there, a still and senseless clod of earth, without power of offence or injury, he lay beneath my feet: it seemed as if, in the moment of my uplifted arm, the Divine Avenger had asserted His prerogative,—as if the angel which had smitten the Assyrian had again swept forth, though against a meaner victim; and while he punished the guilt of a human criminal, had set an eternal barrier to the vengeance of a human foe!
"I dismounted from my horse, and bent over the murdered man. I drew from my bosom the miniature, which never forsook me, and bathed the lifeless resemblance of Gertrude in the blood of her betrayer. Scarcely had I done so, before my ear caught the sound of steps; hastily I thrust, as I thought, the miniature in my bosom, remounted, and rode hurriedly away. At that hour, and for many which succeeded to it, I believe that all sense was suspended. I was like a man haunted by a dream, and wandering under its influence! or as one whom a spectre pursues, and for whose eye the breathing and busy world is but as a land of unreal forms and flitting shadows, teeming with the monsters of darkness and the terrors of the tomb.
"It was not till the next day that I missed the picture. I returned to the spot; searched it carefully, but in vain; the miniature could not be found: I returned to town, and shortly afterwards the newspapers informed me of what had subsequently occurred. I saw, with dismay, that all appearances pointed to me as the criminal, and that the officers of justice were at that moment tracing the clew which my cloak and the color of my horse afforded them. My mysterious pursuit of Tyrrell, the disguise I had assumed, the circumstance of my passing you on the road and of my flight when you approached, all spoke volumes against me. A stronger evidence yet remained, and it was reserved for Thornton to indicate it; at this moment my life is in his hands. Shortly after my return to town, he forced his way into my room, shut the door, bolted it, and, the moment we were alone, said, with a savage and fiendish grin of exultation and defiance, 'Sir Reginald Glanville, you have many a time and oft insulted me with your pride, and more with your gifts: now it is my time to insult and triumph over you; know that one word of mine could sentence you to the gibbet.'
"He then minutely summed up the evidence against me, and drew from his pocket the threatening letter I had last written to Tyrrell. You remember that therein I said my vengeance was sworn against him, and that, sooner or later, it should overtake him. 'Couple,' said Thornton, coldly, as he replaced the letter in his pocket,—'couple these words with the evidence already against you, and I would not buy your life at a farthing's value.'
"How Thornton came by this paper, so important to my safety, I know not: but when he read it I was startled by the danger it brought upon me; one glance sufficed to show me that I was utterly at the mercy of the villain who stood before me; he saw and enjoyed my struggles.
"'Now,' said he, 'we know each other: at present I want a thousand pounds; you will not refuse it me, I am sure; when it is gone, I shall call again; till then you can do without me.' I flung him a check for the money, and he departed.
"You may conceive the mortification I endured in this sacrifice of pride to prudence; but those were no ordinary motives which induced me to submit to it. Fast approaching to the grave, it mattered to me but little whether a violent death should shorten a life to which a limit was already set, and which I was far from being anxious to retain: but I could not endure the thought of bringing upon my mother and my sister the wretchedness and shame which the mere suspicion of a crime so enormous would occasion them; and when my eye caught all the circumstances arrayed against me, my pride seemed to suffer a less mortification even in the course I adopted than in the thought of the felon's gaol and the criminal's trial,—the hoots and execrations of the mob, and the death and ignominious remembrance of the murderer.
"Stronger than either of these motives was my shrinking and loathing aversion to whatever seemed likely to unrip the secret history of the past. I sickened at the thought of Gertrude's name and fate being bared to the vulgar eye, and exposed to the comment, the strictures, the ridicule of the gaping and curious public. It seemed to me, therefore, but a very poor exertion of philosophy to conquer my feelings of humiliation at Thornton's insolence and triumph, and to console myself with the reflection that a few months must rid me alike of his exactions and my life.
"But, of late, Thornton's persecutions and demands have risen to such a height that I have been scarcely able to restrain my indignation and control myself into compliance. The struggle is too powerful for my frame: it is rapidly bringing on the fiercest and the last contest I shall suffer, before 'the wicked shall cease from troubling, and the weary be at rest.' Some days since I came to a resolution, which I am now about to execute: it is to leave this country and take refuge on the Continent. There I shall screen myself from Thornton's pursuit and the danger which it entails upon me; and there, unknown and undisturbed, I shall await the termination of my disease.
"But two duties remained to me to fulfil before I departed; I have now discharged them both. One was due to the warmhearted and noble being who honoured me with her interest and affection,—the other to you. I went yesterday to the former; I sketched the outline of that history which I have detailed to you. I showed her the waste of my barren heart, and spoke to her of the disease which was wearing me away. How beautiful is the love of woman! She would have followed me over the world,—received my last sigh, and seen me to the rest I shall find at length; and this without a hope, or thought of recompense, even from the worthlessness of my love.
"But enough!—of her my farewell has been taken. Your suspicions I have seen and forgiven; for they were natural: it was due to me to remove them; the pressure of your hand tells me that I have done so; but I had another reason for my confessions. I have worn away the romance of my heart, and I have now no indulgence for the little delicacies and petty scruples which often stand in the way of our real happiness. I have marked your former addresses to Ellen, and, I confess, with great joy; for I know, amidst all your worldly ambition and the encrusted artificiality of your exterior, how warm and generous is your real heart,—how noble and intellectual is your real mind: and were my sister tenfold more perfect than I believe her, I do not desire to find on earth one more deserving of her than yourself. I have remarked your late estrangement from Ellen; and while I guessed, I felt that, however painful to me, I ought to remove, the cause: she loves you—though perhaps you know it not—much and truly; and since my earlier life has been passed in a selfish inactivity, I would fain let it close with the reflection of having served two beings whom I prize so dearly, and the hope that their happiness will commence with my death.
"And now, Pelham, I have done; I am weak and exhausted, and cannot bear more—even of your society, now. Think over what I have last said, and let me see you again to-morrow: on the day after, I leave England forever."
