W. H. Ainsworth Collection: 20+ Historical Novels, Gothic Romances & Adventure Classics E-Book
William Harrison Ainsworth
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
The "W. H. Ainsworth Collection" encompasses over twenty of Ainsworth's most notable historical novels, gothic romances, and adventure classics, presenting a rich tapestry of Victorian-era literature. Ainsworth's works, characterized by their intricate plots, vivid historical detail, and captivating characterizations, often explore themes of social justice, morality, and the supernatural. His narrative style blends melodrama with an acute sense of place, weaving complex stories set against the backdrop of turbulent historical events, such as the Wars of the Roses and the English Civil War, thereby immersing readers in both the thrilling and tumultuous contexts of his era. William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) was a prominent figure in the 19th-century literary landscape, emerging from the Romantic tradition and establishing himself through serialized novels that captivated a readership eager for escapism and moral commentary. His background as a solicitor influenced his keen insights into social issues, while his friendships with literary contemporaries, including Charles Dickens, further shaped his narrative voice, blending dramatic flair with a deep sense of historical authenticity. This collection is an essential read for enthusiasts of historical fiction and gothic literature, offering a comprehensive glimpse into Ainsworth's boundless imagination. Readers will discover rich characters and compelling plots that not only entertain but also provoke thought about the societal issues of the past, making it both an enriching and enjoyable literary experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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W. H. Ainsworth Collection: 20+ Historical Novels, Gothic Romances & Adventure Classics
Table of Contents
Introduction
This collection assembles more than twenty works by William Harrison Ainsworth, gathering a substantial array of his historical novels, gothic romances, adventure narratives, and a trio of shorter tales. Its purpose is to present the breadth of his narrative imagination and the coherence of his historical vision within one accessible volume. By spanning episodes from Tudor and Stuart England through the turmoil of civil conflict and the reverberations of Jacobite insurrections, it invites readers to follow the arc of a prolific Victorian storyteller. The result is a panoramic survey of settings, characters, and crises that together illuminate how Ainsworth dramatized the past for a popular readership.
The contents are devoted to narrative fiction. The core is long-form historical romance and adventure, including city chronicles anchored to famous monuments, court-centered intrigues, regional sagas, and roguish exploits. Complementing the novels are three short stories that demonstrate his skill in concentrated mood and incident: one steeped in gothic atmosphere, one shaped by mercantile London, and one unfolding as a nocturnal episode abroad. There are no plays, poems, essays, letters, or diaries in this volume. Instead, the focus remains on storytelling that blends researched historical backdrops with the momentum of melodrama, suspense, and vivid scene-painting.
Across the collection, unifying themes emerge with striking consistency. Power, conscience, and loyalty are tested under pressure—at court, under siege, and in the shadow of the scaffold—while faith, superstition, and rumor shape private choices and public events. Ainsworth repeatedly treats architecture and landscape as active presences: towers, castles, cathedrals, streets, and moorlands witness human ambition and calamity. He juxtaposes spectacle with intimacy, setting state pageantry against the endurance of common people during plague, war, or persecution. Moral ambiguity courses through his portrayals of plotters, rebels, and outlaws, inviting readers to weigh law, justice, and mercy amid the contingencies of history.
Stylistically, the collection showcases hallmarks that made Ainsworth widely read in his century. He favors rapid pacing arranged in vivid episodes; dramatic set pieces that crystallize crowd energy, ceremonial display, or nocturnal pursuit; and richly detailed descriptions grounded in antiquarian curiosity. Topographical specificity—streets, chambers, crypts, and battlements—is matched by a diction that often nods to older chronicles without becoming forbidding. The orchestration of threat and reprieve sustains momentum, while shifts between high life and low life broaden perspective. His shorter tales distill these effects, proving that his atmosphere, suspense, and historical color could be compressed without loss of intensity.
The significance of these works lies in their successful melding of entertainment with an accessible sense of historical time and place. Ainsworth popularized episodes and locales that have since become part of the cultural imagination, not through academic exposition but by staging history as engrossing narrative. He dramatizes conspiracy, crisis, and survival without reducing them to mere pageant, and he democratizes the field of vision by alternating among monarchs, magistrates, rebels, citizens, and crowds. For readers today, the collection offers a valuable record of how nineteenth-century fiction reanimated earlier centuries and helped shape enduring images of national memory.
The range of settings underscores the ambition of his project. London appears in multiple guises—its palaces, prisons, churches, lanes, and river—rendered as an organism that can nurture, enthrall, or endanger. Royal residences and fortresses frame courtly drama, while northern landscapes open into witchcraft trials, sieges, and regional loyalties. Episodes of escape and pursuit traverse roads, forests, and coastlines, and a continental interlude hints at the broader horizons of his curiosity. The shorter pieces reinforce these preoccupations: compressed gothic menace, urban moral testing, and a foreign-night adventure that pivots on chance and character, all echoing and amplifying the novels’ concerns.
Readers may approach the collection thematically—by courts and conspiracies, by city and province, by siege narratives and flight tales—or follow their curiosity through individual settings that speak most immediately. Either way, the works reward attention to the interplay between documented detail and imaginative reconstruction. Ainsworth’s method is to build a credible scaffold of place, ritual, and custom, then propel living figures across it with urgency and color. The result is fiction that remains legible and engaging: generous with incident, attentive to locale, and animated by the tensions of belief, authority, and survival. This volume invites a sustained, rewarding rediscovery.
Historical Context
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882) wrote across the high-Victorian decades when historical romance, the Gothic revival, and mass serialization converged. A disciple of Walter Scott's antiquarian method yet attuned to London's popular theatres, he issued Rookwood (1834) and then edited Bentley's Miscellany (1839-1841), later founding Ainsworth's Magazine (1842-1854). Collaboration with illustrators such as George Cruikshank and Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) fused image and text, shaping reception of The Tower of London, Jack Sheppard, Windsor Castle, and Old Saint Paul's. Manchester-born, Ainsworth drew on provincial archives as readily as metropolitan lore, creating a national canvas from Lancashire to Westminster and from Tudor chambers to Jacobite highways.
Much of Ainsworth's oeuvre stages the Tudor and early Stuart transformation of English polity and religion. The court of Henry VIII at Windsor and the fall of Anne Boleyn (1536), the Marian succession (1553) and Lady Jane Grey's tragedy, and the surveillance state focused in the Tower of London provide recurrent frameworks. He invokes the Privy Council and Star Chamber, whose authority culminated before its abolition in 1641 by the Long Parliament. The Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605 under James I, and the shifting status of St Paul's Cathedral before the Great Fire, connect Windsor Castle, The Tower of London, Guy Fawkes, Cardinal Pole, The Star Chamber, and Old Saint Paul's.
The mid-seventeenth century Civil Wars and their aftershocks supply Ainsworth with siegecraft, exile, and clandestine flight. Between 1642 and 1651, royalist strongholds in Lancashire, notably Lathom House, endured protracted assaults (the leaguer of 1644), while Charles I's execution in 1649 and the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell reconfigured allegiance. After the Battle of Worcester (3 September 1651), Charles II's escape through Boscobel in Shropshire and along the Sussex coast toward Brighton underpins royalist legend, later evoked at Ovingdean. Aftershocks persisted in the Jacobite risings of 1715 at Preston and 1745 at Manchester and Derby, animating Preston Fight and The Good Old Times.
London's material and moral topography anchors Ainsworth's historical imagination. The plague year of 1665 and the Great Fire of 2-5 September 1666 devastate the medieval city and its cathedral, forming the catastrophe cycle of Old Saint Paul's. Earlier and later, he charts the Tower precincts, the Thames reaches from Westminster to Southwark, the City's markets at Cheapside, Smithfield's executions, and the gate of Temple Bar. The Old London Merchant looks to the mercantile life of the Square Mile, its guilds and countinghouses near Guildhall and Lombard Street, while state power and imprisonment recur from the Tower to Newgate, binding civic commerce to sovereign authority across centuries.
Ainsworth's fascination with crime and spectacle participates in, and helped provoke, the Newgate controversy of 1838-1840. Jack Sheppard revisits the thief's escapes from Newgate (1724) and the ritual passage to Tyburn, while Rookwood folds Dick Turpin's apocryphal ride to York into a broader meditation on outlawry and inheritance. These narratives intersect with the culture of criminal biography, broadsides, and gallows literature that flourished along the Strand and in Grub Street. Stage adaptations drew censure from the Lord Chamberlain, illuminating Victorian anxieties about class imitation and urban disorder. Financial modernity and temptation, persistent in The Miser's Daughter and Auriol, deepen this cityscape of risk and desire.
Religion, belief, and the porous frontier between theology and superstition recur throughout. The English Reformation and Counter-Reformation frame Cardinal Pole's diplomacy and Mary I's restoration of Catholic rites (1553-1558), while anti-Catholic repression following 1605 shapes Guy Fawkes and the politics of surveillance. Lancashire's status as a recusant heartland shadows The Lancashire Witches, which draws on the Pendle trials of 1612 held at Lancaster Castle under Justices James Altham and Edward Bromley, and on King James's treatise Daemonologie (1597). The Star Chamber's disciplinary reach, along with Gothic revenants from The Spectre Bride to Auriol's alchemical ambitions, registers how faith, law, and fear organize communal memory.
Ainsworth repeatedly situates English history within continental upheavals. The Constable de Bourbon traces Charles de Bourbon's defection to Emperor Charles V and the Sack of Rome in May 1527 under Pope Clement VII, events that reverberated through Tudor diplomacy. Cardinal Pole's long exile among Italian courts and his legatine service to popes Paul III and Julius III braid Rome to London's confessional politics. The short tale A Night's Adventure in Rome converses with the Grand Tour economy that carried Britons to the Forum, the Corso, and the catacombs. Such crossings underscore how French and Italian wars of religion refract through English fears, policies, and plots.
Ainsworth's historical tableaux belong to a nineteenth-century culture of heritage and mobility. Antiquaries catalogued ruins; the Society of Antiquaries of London fostered research; engravers and illustrators rendered Windsor Castle, the Tower, and St Paul's as patriotic emblems. Railways after 1830 linked Manchester, Preston, and Brighton to the metropolis, enabling readers to visit Lathom's site, Pendle Hill, or Boscobel. Literacy reforms and cheap weekly numbers widened audiences after the 1832 Reform Act, as Chartism and urban growth sharpened appetite for past crises. Within this ecosystem, from Bentley's Miscellany to Ainsworth's Magazine, works like Chetwynd Calverley survey county houses and lineage, turning sites into scenes and memory into narrative.
Synopsis (Selection)
Rookwood
A Gothic romance of inheritance and outlawry, where the Rookwood family’s buried secrets intersect with the exploits of highwayman Dick Turpin and his legendary ride.
Jack Sheppard
A Newgate tale tracing the rise of the real-life thief from apprentice to folk hero, marked by audacious prison escapes and the lure of London’s underworld.
The Tower of London
A panoramic Tudor chronicle centered on the fortress, following plots and perils around Lady Jane Grey and Princess Elizabeth while unfolding the Tower’s history and lore.
Guy Fawkes
A dramatization of the Gunpowder Plot, portraying the conspirators’ scheme and its human costs while blending romance, faith, and touches of the supernatural.
Old Saint Paul's
An epic of London during the Great Plague and the Great Fire, interweaving personal dramas with the city’s calamities under the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral.
The Miser's Daughter
A domestic-historical romance about love and avarice, where a tyrannical miser’s hoarded wealth imperils his daughter’s happiness and draws dangerous intrigues.
Windsor Castle
A pageant of Henry VIII’s court at Windsor, intertwining royal intrigue and romance with local legend such as Herne the Hunter.
The Lancashire Witches
A sweeping tale of the Pendle witch trials, fusing folk belief and supernatural incident with legal persecution on the Lancashire moors.
Auriol
A Gothic fantasia about a man sustained by an elixir of life and bound to a diabolic pact, pursued across time by a relentless, shape-shifting creditor.
The Star Chamber
A court and court-intrigue romance set under Charles I, exposing the Star Chamber’s arbitrary justice as nobles and commoners become ensnared in vendettas.
Ovingdean Grange
A Royalist adventure after Worcester, in which Charles II’s escape hinges on disguises, secret allies, and dangers along England’s southern coast.
Cardinal Pole
A portrait of Mary I’s reign through Cardinal Pole, charting the restoration of Catholicism, court faction, and the strains of religious persecution.
The Constable de Bourbon
A Renaissance war romance tracing the great constable’s break with Francis I and campaigns in Italy, culminating in high-stakes betrayal and siege.
Boscobel
A narrative of Charles II’s perilous flight and concealment after Worcester, highlighting humble Royalist allies and the famed refuge of the Royal Oak.
The Good Old Times (The Manchester Rebels of the Fatal '45)
A local chronicle of the 1745 Jacobite rising as it reaches Manchester, following townspeople who join the Prince’s cause and the consequences that follow.
Preston Fight
An account of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion focused on the urban battle of Preston, depicting strategy, confusion, and courage on both sides.
The Leaguer of Lathom
A Civil War siege romance recounting the Countess of Derby’s staunch defense of Lathom House against Parliamentarian forces.
Chetwynd Calverley
A tale of a wayward heir navigating love, debt, and honor in provincial and metropolitan society, balancing sensation, scandal, and reckoning.
The Spectre Bride
A Gothic tale of a nobleman ensnared by a mysterious bride whose spectral secret leads him toward a fateful nuptial bargain.
The Old London Merchant
A moral sketch of a steadfast trader confronted by temptation and family peril, set amid the bustle and hazards of old London.
A Night's Adventure in Rome
A nocturnal travel-adventure in which a visitor to Rome is swept through alleys, ruins, and clandestine plots before daybreak.
W. H. Ainsworth Collection: 20+ Historical Novels, Gothic Romances & Adventure Classics
Novels
Rookwood
MEMOIR
William Harrison Ainsworth was born in King Street, Manchester, February 4, 1805, in a house that has long since been demolished. His father was a solicitor in good practice, and the son had all the advantages that educational facilities could afford. He was sent to the Manchester grammar-school, and in one of his early novels has left an interesting and accurate picture of its then condition, which may be contrasted with that of an earlier period left by the “English opium-eater.” At sixteen, a brilliant, handsome youth, with more taste for romance and the drama than for the dry details of the law, he was articled to a leading solicitor of Manchester. The closest friend of his youth was a Mr. James Crossley, who was some years older, but shared his intellectual taste and literary enthusiasm. A drama written for private theatricals, in his father’s house was printed in Arliss’s Magazine, and he also contributed to the Manchester Iris, the Edinburgh Magazine, and the London Magazine. He even started a periodical, which received the name of The Bœotian, and died at the sixth number. Many of the fugitive pieces of these early days were collected in volumes now exceedingly rare: “December Tales” (London, 1823), which is not wholly from his pen; the “Works of Cheviot Tichburn” (London, 1822; Manchester, 1825), dedicated to Charles Lamb; and “A Summer Evening Tale” (London, 1825).
“Sir John Chiverton” appeared in 1826, and for forty years was regarded as one of his early works; but Mr. John Partington Aston has also claimed to be its author. In all probability, both of these young men joined in the production of the novel which attracted the attention of Sir Walter Scott. On the death of his father, in 1824, Ainsworth went to London to finish his legal education, but whatever intentions he may have formed of humdrum study and determined attention to the details of a profession in which he had no interest, were dissipated by contact with the literary world of the metropolis. He made the acquaintance of Mr. John Ebers, who at that time combined the duties of manager of the Opera House with the business of a publisher. He it was who issued “Sir John Chiverton,” and the verses forming its dedication are understood to have been addressed to Anne Frances (“Fanny”) Ebers, whom Ainsworth married October 11, 1826. Ainsworth had then to decide upon a career, and, acting upon the suggestion of Ebers, his father-in-law, he began business as a publisher; but after an experience of about eighteen months he abandoned it. In this brief interval he introduced the Hon. Mrs. Norton, and Ude, the cook, to the discerning though unequal admiration of the British public. He was introduced to Sir Walter Scott, who wrote the “Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee” for an annual issued by him. Ainsworth gave him twenty guineas for it, which Sir Walter accepted, but laughingly handed over to the little daughter of Lockhart, in whose London house they had met. Ainsworth’s literary aspirations still burned with undiminished ardor, and several plans were formed only to be abandoned, and when, in the summer of 1830, he visited Switzerland and Italy, he was as far as ever from the fulfilment of his desires. In 1831 he visited Chesterfield and began the novel of “Rookwood,” in which he successfully applied the method of Mrs. Radcliffe to English scenes and characters. The finest passage is that relating Turpin’s ride to York, which is a marvel of descriptive writing. It was written, apparently in a glow of inspiration, in less than a day and a half. “The feat,” he says, “for feat it was, being the composition of a hundred novel pages in less than twenty-four hours, was achieved at ‘The Elms,’ a house I then occupied at Kilburn.” The success of “Rookwood” was marked and immediate. Ainsworth at a bound reached popularity. This was in 1834, and in 1837 he published “Crichton,” which is a fine piece of historical romance. The critics who had objected to the romantic glamor cast over the career of Dick Turpin were still further horrified at the manner in which that vulgar rascal, Jack Sheppard, was elevated into a hero of romance. The outcry was not entirely without justification, nor was it without effect on the novelist, who thenceforward avoided this perilous ground. “Jack Sheppard” appeared in Bentley’s Miscellany, of which Ainsworth became editor in March, 1840, at a monthly salary of £51. The story is powerfully written. In 1841 he received £1000 from the Sunday Times for “Old St. Paul’s,” and he, in 1848, had from the same source another £1000 for the “Lancashire Witches.” In 1841 he began the publication of Ainsworth’s Magazine, which came to an end in 1853, when he acquired the New Monthly Magazine, which he edited for many years. This was the heyday of Ainsworth’s reputation alike in literature and in society. His home at Kensal Manor House became famous for its hospitality, and Dickens, Thackeray, Landseer, Clarkson Stanfield, Talfourd, Jerrold, and Cruikshank were among his guests. The list of his principal historical novels, with their dates of issue, may now be given: “Rookwood,” 1834; “Crichton,” 1837; “Jack Sheppard,” 1839; “Tower of London,” 1840; “Guy Fawkes,” 1841; “Old St. Paul’s, a Tale of the Plague and the Fire of London,” 1841; “Windsor Castle,” 1843; “St. James, or the Court of Queene Anne,” 1844; “Star Chamber,” 1854; “Constable of the Tower,” 1861; “The Lord Mayor of London,” 1862; “Cardinal Pole,” 1863; “John Law, the Projector,” 1864; “The Constable de Bourbon,” 1866; “Talbot Harland,” 1870; “Boscobel,” 1872; “The Manchester Rebels, or the Fatal ‘45,” 1873; and “The Goldsmith’s Wife,” 1874. These novels all met with a certain amount of success, but those of later years did not attain the striking popularity of his earlier efforts. Many have been translated into various modern languages, and the editions of his various works are so numerous that some twenty-three pages of the British Museum catalogue are devoted to his works. The scenery and history of his native country had a perennial interest for him, and a certain group of his novels — that is, the “Lancashire Witches,” “Guy Fawkes,” “The Manchester Rebels,” etc. — may almost be said to form a novelist’s history of Lancashire from the pilgrimage of grace until the early part of the present century.
Probably no more vivid account has been written of the great fire and plague of London than that given in “Old St. Paul’s.” The charm of Ainsworth’s novels is not at all dependent upon the analysis of motives or subtle description of character. Of this he has little or nothing, but he realizes vividly a scene or an incident, and conveys the impression with great force and directness to the reader’s mind. Ainsworth came upon the reading world at a happy moment. People were weary of the inanities of the fashionable novel, and were ready to listen to one who had a power of vivacious narrative. In 1881, when he was in his seventy-seventh year, a pleasant tribute of respect and admiration was paid to him in his native town. The Mayor of Manchester entertained him at a banquet in the town hall September 15, 1881, “as an expression of the high esteem in which he is held by his fellow-townsmen and of his services to literature.” In proposing Mr. Ainsworth’s health, the mayor gave a curious instance of the popularity of his writings. “In our Manchester public free libraries there are two hundred and fifty volumes of Mr. Ainsworth’s different works. During the last twelve months these volumes have been read seven thousand six hundred and sixty times, mostly by the artisan class of readers. And this means that twenty volumes of his works are being perused in Manchester by readers of the free libraries every day all the year through.” It was well that this pleasant recognition was not longer delayed. The contrast was pathetically great between the tall, handsome, dandified figure presented in the portraits of him by Pickersgill and Maclise, and the bent and feeble old man who stood by and acknowledged the plaudits of those who had assembled to honor him. His last published work was “Stanley Brereton,” which he dedicated to his hospitable entertainer. He died at Reigate January 3, 1882, leaving a widow and also three daughters by his first marriage. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. With the exception of George Gleig, he was the last survivor of the brilliant group who wrote for the early numbers of Fraser’s Magazine, and, though he died in harness, had outlived nearly all the associates of the days when he first achieved fame.
TO MY MOTHER
When I inscribed this Romance to you, my dear Mother, on its first appearance, I was satisfied that, whatever reception it might meet with elsewhere, at your hands it would be sure of indulgence. Since then, the approbation your partiality would scarcely have withheld has been liberally accorded by the public; and I have the satisfaction of reflecting, that in following the dictates of affection, which prompted me to select the dearest friend I had in the world as the subject of a dedication, I have not overstepped the limits of prudence; nor, in connecting your honored name with this trifling production, involved you in a failure which, had it occurred, would have given you infinitely more concern than myself. After a lapse of three years, during which my little bark, fanned by pleasant and prosperous breezes, has sailed, more than once, securely into port, I again commit it to the waters, with more confidence than heretofore, and with a firmer reliance that, if it should be found “after many days,” it may prove a slight memorial of the warmest filial regard.
Exposed to trials of no ordinary difficulty, and visited by domestic affliction of no common severity, you, my dear Mother, have borne up against the ills of life with a fortitude and resignation which those who know you best can best appreciate, but which none can so well understand, or so thoroughly appreciate, as myself. Suffering is the lot of all. Submission under the dispensation is permitted to few. And it is my fervent hope that my own children may emulate your virtues, if they are happily spared your sorrows.
PREFACE
During a visit to Chesterfield, in the autumn of the year 1831, I first conceived the notion of writing this story. Wishing to describe, somewhat minutely, the trim gardens, the picturesque domains, the rook-haunted groves, the gloomy chambers, and gloomier galleries, of an ancient Hall with which I was acquainted, I resolved to attempt a story in the bygone style of Mrs. Radcliffe — which had always inexpressible charms for me — substituting an old English squire, an old English manorial residence, and an old English highwayman, for the Italian marchese, the castle, and the brigand of the great mistress of Romance.
While revolving this subject, I happened, one evening, to enter the spacious cemetery attached to the church with the queer, twisted steeple, which, like the uplifted tail of the renowned Dragon of Wantley, to whom “houses and churches were as capons and turkeys,” seems to menace the good town of Chesterfield with destruction. Here an incident occurred, on the opening of a vault, which it is needless to relate, but which supplied me with a hint for the commencement of my romance, as well as for the ballad entitled “The Coffin.” Upon this hint I immediately acted; and the earlier chapters of the book, together with the description of the ancestral mansion of the Rookwoods, were completed before I quitted Chesterfield.
Another and much larger portion of the work was written during a residence at Rottingdean, in Sussex, in the latter part of 1833, and owes its inspiration to many delightful walks over the South Downs. Romance-writing was pleasant occupation then.
The Ride to York was completed in one day and one night. This feat — for a feat it was, being the composition of a hundred ordinary novel pages in less than twenty-four hours — was achieved at “The Elms,” a house I then occupied at Kilburn. Well do I remember the fever into which I was thrown during the time of composition. My pen literally scoured over the pages. So thoroughly did I identify myself with the flying highwayman, that, once started, I found it impossible to halt. Animated by kindred enthusiasm, I cleared every obstacle in my path with as much facility as Turpin disposed of the impediments that beset his flight. In his company, I mounted the hill-side, dashed through the bustling village, swept over the desolate heath, threaded the silent street, plunged into the eddying stream, and kept an onward course, without pause, without hindrance, without fatigue. With him I shouted, sang, laughed, exulted, wept. Nor did I retire to rest till, in imagination, I heard the bell of York Minster toll forth the knell of poor Black Bess.
The supernatural occurrence, forming the groundwork of one of the ballads which I have made the harbinger of doom to the house of Rookwood, is ascribed, by popular superstition, to a family resident in Sussex; upon whose estate the fatal tree — a gigantic lime, with mighty arms and huge girth of trunk, as described in the song — is still carefully preserved. Cuckfield Place, to which this singular piece of timber is attached, is, I may state, for the benefit of the curious, the real Rookwood Hall; for I have not drawn upon imagination, but upon memory, in describing the seat and domains of that fated family. The general features of the venerable structure, several of its chambers, the old garden, and, in particular, the noble park, with its spreading prospects, its picturesque views of the Hall, “like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe,”— as the poet Shelley once observed of the same scene — its deep glades, through which the deer come lightly tripping down, its uplands, slopes, brooks, brakes, coverts, and groves, are carefully delineated.
The superstition of a fallen branch affording a presage of approaching death is not peculiar to the family I have mentioned. Many other old houses have been equally favored: in fact, there is scarcely an ancient family in the kingdom without a boding sign. For instance, the Breretons of Brereton, in Cheshire, were warned by the appearance of stocks of trees floating, like the swollen bodies of long-drowned men, upon the surface of a sombre lake — called Blackmere, from the inky color of its waters — adjoining their residence; and numerous other examples might be given. The death-presage of the Breretons is alluded to by Drayton in the “Polyolbion.”
It has been well observed by Barry Cornwall, “that the songs which occur in dramas are more natural than those which proceed from the author in person.” With equal force does the reasoning apply to the romance, which may be termed the drama of the closet. It would seem strange, on a first view, that an author should be more at home in an assumed character than his own. But experience shows the position to be correct. Conscious he is no longer individually associated with his work, the writer proceeds with all the freedom of irresponsibility. His idiosyncrasy is merged in that of the personages he represents. He thinks with their thoughts, sees with their eyes, speaks with their tongues. His strains are such as he himself —per se— would not, perhaps could not, have originated. In this light he may be said to bring to his subject not one mind, but several; he becomes not one poet, but many; for each actor in his drama has a share, and an important share, in the lyrical estro to which he gives birth. This it is which has imparted any verve, variety, or dramatic character they possess, to the ballads contained in this production. Turpin I look upon as the real songster of “Black Bess;” to Jerry Juniper I am unquestionably indebted for a flash melody which, without his hint, would never have been written, while to the sexton I owe the solitary gleam of light I have been enabled to throw upon the horrors and mystery of the churchyard.
As I have casually alluded to the flash song of Jerry Juniper, I may, perhaps, be allowed to make a few observations upon this branch of versification. It is somewhat curious, with a dialect so racy, idiomatic, and plastic as our own cant, that its metrical capabilities should have been so little essayed. The French have numerous chansons d’argot, ranging from the time of Charles Bourdigné and Villon down to that of Vidocq and Victor Hugo, the last of whom has enlivened the horrors of his “Dernier Jour d’un Condamné” by a festive song of this class. The Spaniards possess a large collection of Romances de Germania, by various authors, amongst whom Quevedo holds a distinguished place. We, on the contrary, have scarcely any slang songs of merit. With a race of depredators so melodious and convivial as our highwaymen, this is the more to be wondered at. Had they no bards amongst their bands? Was there no minstrel at hand to record their exploits? I can only call to mind one robber who was a poet — Delany, and he was an Irishman. This barrenness, I have shown, is not attributable to the poverty of the soil, but to the want of due cultivation. Materials are at hand in abundance, but there have been few operators. Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ben Jonson have all dealt largely in this jargon, but not lyrically; and one of the earliest and best specimens of a canting-song occurs in Brome’s “Jovial Crew;” and in the “Adventures of Bamfylde Moore Carew” there is a solitary ode, addressed by the mendicant fraternity to their newly-elected monarch; but it has little humor, and can scarcely be called a genuine canting-song. This ode brings us down to our own time; to the effusions of the illustrious Pierce Egan; to Tom Moore’s Flights of “Fancy;” to John Jackson’s famous chant, “On the High Toby Spice Flash the Muzzle,” cited by Lord Byron in a note to “Don Juan;” and to the glorious Irish ballad, worth them all put together, entitled “The Night Before Larry Was Stretched.” This facetious performance is attributed to the late Dean Burrowes, of Cork. It is worthy of note that almost all modern aspirants to the graces of the Musa Pedestris are Irishmen. Of all rhymesters of the “Road,” however, Dean Burrowes is, as yet, most fully entitled to the laurel. Larry is quite “the potato!”
And here, as the candidates are so few, and their pretensions so humble,
I can’t help putting in my claim for praise.
I venture to affirm that I have done something more than has been accomplished by my predecessors, or contemporaries, with the significant language under consideration. I have written a purely flash song, of which the great and peculiar merit consists in its being utterly incomprehensible to the uninformed understanding, while its meaning must be perfectly clear and perspicuous to the practised patterer of Romany, or Pedlar’s French. I have, moreover, been the first to introduce and naturalize amongst us a measure which, though common enough in the Argotic minstrelsy of France, has been hitherto utterly unknown to our pedestrian poetry. Some years afterwards, the song alluded to, better known under the title of “Nix My Dolly, Pals — Fake Away!” sprang into extraordinary popularity, being set to music by Rodwell, and chanted by glorious Paul Bedford and clever little Mrs. Keeley.
Before quitting the subject of these songs, I may mention that they probably would not have been written at all if one of the earliest of them — a chance experiment — had not excited the warm approbation of my friend, Charles Ollier, author of the striking romance of “Ferrers.” This induced me to prosecute the vein accidentally opened.
Turpin was the hero of my boyhood. I had always a strange passion for highwaymen, and have listened by the hour to their exploits, as narrated by my father, and especially to those of “Dauntless Dick,” that “chief minion of the moon.” One of Turpin’s adventures in particular, the ride to Hough Green, which took deep hold of my fancy, I have recorded in song. When a boy, I have often lingered by the side of the deep old road where this robbery was committed, to cast wistful glances into its mysterious windings; and when night deepened the shadows of the trees, have urged my horse on his journey, from a vague apprehension of a visit from the ghostly highwayman. And then there was the Bollin, with its shelvy banks, which Turpin cleared at a bound; the broad meadows over which he winged his flight; the pleasant bowling-green of the pleasant old inn at Hough, where he produced his watch to the Cheshire squires, with whom he was upon terms of intimacy; all brought something of the gallant robber to mind. No wonder, in after-years, in selecting a highwayman for a character in a tale, I should choose my old favorite, Dick Turpin.
In reference to two of the characters here introduced, and drawn from personages living at the time the tale was written, it may be mentioned that poor Jerry Juniper met his death from an accident at Chichester, while he was proceeding to Goodwood races; and that the knight of Malta — Mr. Tom, a brewer of Truro, the self-styled Sir William Courtenay, who played the strange tricks at Canterbury chronicled in a song given in these pages — after his release from Banning Heath Asylum, was shot through the head while leading on a mob of riotous Kentish yeomen, whom he had persuaded that he was the Messiah!
If the design of Romance be, what it has been held, the exposition of a useful truth by means of an interesting story, I fear I have but imperfectly fulfilled the office imposed upon me; having, as I will freely confess, had, throughout, an eye rather to the reader’s amusement than his edification. One wholesome moral, however, may, I trust, be gathered from the perusal of this Tale; namely, that, without due governance of the passions, high aspirations and generous emotions will little avail their possessor. The impersonations of the Tempter, the Tempted, and the Better Influence may be respectively discovered, by those who care to cull the honey from the flower, in the Sexton, in Luke, and in Sybil.
The chief object I had in view in making the present essay was to see how far the infusion of a warmer and more genial current into the veins of old Romance would succeed in reviving her fluttering and feeble pulses. The attempt has succeeded beyond my most sanguine expectation. Romance, if I am not mistaken, is destined shortly to undergo an important change. Modified by the German and French writers — by Hoffman, Tieck, Hugo, Dumas, Balzac, and Paul Lecroix (le Bibliophile Jacob)— the structure commenced in our own land by Horace Walpole, Monk Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Maturin, but left imperfect and inharmonious, requires, now that the rubbish which choked up its approach is removed, only the hand of the skilful architect to its entire renovation and perfection.
And now, having said my say, I must bid you, worthy reader, farewell. Beseeching you, in the words of old Rabelais, “to interpret all my sayings and doings in the perfectest sense. Reverence the cheese-like brain that feeds you with all these jolly maggots; and do what lies in you to keep me always merry. Be frolic now, my lads! Cheer up your hearts, and joyfully read the rest, with all ease of your body, and comfort of your reins.”
Kensal Manor-House,December 15, 1849.
BOOK 1 THE WEDDING RING
It has been observed, and I am apt to believe it is an observation which will generally be found true, that before a terrible truth comes to light, there are certain murmuring whispers fly before it, and prepare the minds of men for the reception of the truth itself.
Gallick Reports: Case of the Count Saint Geran.
CHAPTER 1 THE VAULT
Let me know, therefore, fully the intent Of this thy dismal preparation— This talk fit for a charnel.
Webster.
Within a sepulchral vault, and at midnight, two persons were seated. The chamber was of singular construction and considerable extent. The roof was of solid stone masonry, and rose in a wide semicircular arch to the height of about seventeen feet, measured from the centre of the ceiling to the ground floor, while the sides were divided by slight partition-walls into ranges of low, narrow catacombs. The entrance to each cavity was surrounded by an obtusely-pointed arch, resting upon slender granite pillars; and the intervening space was filled up with a variety of tablets, escutcheons, shields, and inscriptions, recording the titles and heraldic honors of the departed. There were no doors to the niches; and within might be seen piles of coffins, packed one upon another, till the floor groaned with the weight of lead. Against one of the pillars, upon a hook, hung a rack of tattered, time-out-of-mind hatchments; and in the centre of the tomb might be seen the effigies of Sir Ranulph de Rokewode, the builder of the mausoleum, and the founder of the race who slept within its walls. This statue, wrought in black marble, differed from most monumental carved-work, in that its posture was erect and lifelike. Sir Ranulph was represented as sheathed in a complete suit of mail, decorated with his emblazoned and gilded surcoat, his arm leaning upon the pommel of a weighty curtal-axe. The attitude was that of stern repose. A conically-formed helmet rested upon the brow; the beaver was raised, and revealed harsh but commanding features. The golden spur of knighthood was fixed upon the heel; and, at the feet, enshrined in a costly sarcophagus of marble, dug from the same quarry as the statue, rested the mortal remains of one of “the sternest knights to his mortal foe that ever put speare in the rest.”
Streaming in a wavering line upon the roof, the sickly flame of a candle partially fell upon the human figures before alluded to, throwing them into darkest relief, and casting their opaque and fantastical shadows along the ground. An old coffin upon a bier, we have said, served the mysterious twain for a seat. Between them stood a bottle and a glass, evidences that whatever might be the ulterior object of their stealthy communion, the immediate comfort of the creature had not been altogether overlooked. At the feet of one of the personages were laid a mattock, a horn lantern — from which the candle had been removed — a crowbar, and a bunch of keys. Near to these implements of a vocation which the reader will readily surmise, rested a strange superannuated terrier with a wiry back and frosted muzzle; a head minus an ear, and a leg wanting a paw. His master, for such we shall suppose him, was an old man with a lofty forehead, covered with a singularly shaped nightcap, and clothed, as to his lower limbs, with tight, ribbed, gray worsted hose, ascending externally, after a bygone fashion, considerably above the knee. The old man’s elbow rested upon the handle of his spade, his wrist supported his chin, and his gray glassy eyes, glimmering like marsh-meteors in the candle-light, were fixed upon his companion with a glance of searching scrutiny.
The object of his investigation, a much more youthful and interesting person, seemed lost in reverie, and alike insensible to time, place, and the object of the meeting. With both hands grasped round the barrel of a fowling-piece, and his face leaning upon the same support, the features were entirely concealed from view; the light, too, being at the back, and shedding its rays over, rather than upon his person, aided his disguise. Yet, even thus imperfectly defined, the outline of the head, and the proportions of the figure, were eminently striking and symmetrical. Attired in a rough forester’s costume, of the mode of 1737, and of the roughest texture and rudest make, his wild garb would have determined his rank as sufficiently humble in the scale of society, had not a certain loftiness of manner, and bold, though reckless deportment, argued pretensions on the part of the wearer to a more elevated station in life, and contradicted, in a great measure, the impression produced by the homely appearance of his habiliments. A cap of shaggy brown fur, fancifully, but not ungracefully fashioned, covered his head, from beneath which, dropping, in natural clusters over his neck and shoulders, a cloud of raven hair escaped. Subsequently, when his face was more fully revealed, it proved to be that of a young man, of dark aspect, and grave, melancholy expression of countenance, approaching even to the stern, when at rest; though sufficiently animated and earnest when engaged in conversation, or otherwise excited. His features were regular, delicately formed, and might be characterized as singularly handsome, were it not for a want of roundness in the contour of the face which gave the lineaments a thin, worn look, totally distinct, however, from haggardness or emaciation. The nose was delicate and fine; the nostril especially so; the upper lip was short, curling, graceful, and haughtily expressive. As to complexion, his skin had a truly Spanish warmth and intensity of coloring. His figure, when raised, was tall and masculine, and though slight, exhibited great personal vigor.
We will now turn to his companion, the old man with the great gray glittering eyes.
Peter Bradley, of Rookwood — comitatû Ebor — where he had exercised the vocation of sexton for the best part of a life already drawn out to the full span ordinarily allotted to mortality, was an odd caricature of humanity. His figure was lean, and almost as lank as a skeleton. His bald head reminded one of a bleached skull, allowing for the overhanging and hoary brows. Deep-seated, and sunken within their sockets, his gray orbs gleamed with intolerable lustre. Few could endure his gaze; and, aware of his power, Peter seldom failed to exercise it. He had likewise another habit, which, as it savored of insanity, made him an object of commiseration with some, while it rendered him yet more obnoxious to others. The habit we allude to, was the indulgence of wild screaming laughter at times when all merriment should be checked; and when the exhibition of levity must proceed from utter disregard of human grief and suffering, or from mental alienation.
The Vault
Wearied with the prolonged silence, Peter at length condescended to speak. His voice was harsh and grating as a rusty hinge.
“Another glass?” said he, pouring out a modicum of the pale fluid.
His companion shook his head.
“It will keep out the cold,” continued the sexton, pressing the liquid upon him: “and you, who are not so much accustomed as I am to the damps of a vault, may suffer from them. Besides,” added he, sneeringly, “it will give you courage.”
His companion answered not. But the flash of his eye resented the implied reproach.
“Nay, never stare at me so hard, Luke,” continued the sexton; “I doubt neither your courage nor your firmness. But if you won’t drink, I will. Here’s to the rest eternal of Sir Piers Rookwood! You’ll say amen to that pledge, or you are neither grandson of mine, nor offspring of his loins.”
“Why should I reverence his memory,” answered Luke, bitterly, refusing the proffered potion, “who showed no fatherly love for me? He disowned me in life: in death I disown him. Sir Piers Rookwood was no father of mine.”
“He was as certainly your father, as Susan Bradley, your mother, was my daughter,” rejoined the sexton.
“And, surely,” cried Luke, impetuously, “you need not boast of the connection! ’Tis not for you, old man, to couple their names together — to exult in your daughter’s disgrace and your own dishonor. Shame! shame! Speak not of them in the same breath, if you would not have me invoke curses on the dead! I have no reverence — whatever you may have — for the seducer — for the murderer of my mother.”
“You have choice store of epithets, in sooth, good grandson,” rejoined Peter, with a chuckling laugh. “Sir Piers a murderer!”
“Tush!” exclaimed Luke, indignantly, “affect not ignorance. You have better knowledge than I have of the truth or falsehood of the dark tale that has gone abroad respecting my mother’s fate; and unless report has belied you foully, had substantial reasons for keeping sealed lips on the occasion. But to change this painful subject,” added he, with a sudden alteration of manner, “at what hour did Sir Piers Rookwood die?”
“On Thursday last, in the night-time. The exact hour I know not,” replied the sexton.
“Of what ailment?”
“Neither do I know that. His end was sudden, yet not without a warning sign.”
“What warning?” inquired Luke.
“Neither more nor less than the death-omen of the house. You look astonished. Is it possible you have never heard of the ominous Lime-Tree, and the Fatal Bough? Why, ’tis a common tale hereabouts, and has been for centuries. Any old crone would tell it you. Peradventure, you have seen the old avenue of lime-trees leading to the hall, nearly a quarter of a mile in length, and as noble a row of timber as any in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Well, there is one tree — the last on the left hand before you come to the clock-house — larger than all the rest — a huge piece of timber, with broad spreading branches, and of I know not what girth in the trunk. That tree is, in some mysterious manner, connected with the family of Rookwood, and immediately previous to the death of one of that line, a branch is sure to be shed from the parent stem, prognosticating his doom. But you shall hear the legend.” And in a strange sepulchral tone, not inappropriate, however, to his subject, Peter chanted the following ballad:
THE LEGEND OF THE LIME-TREE
Amid the grove o’er-arched above with lime-trees old and tall — The avenue that leads unto the Rookwood’s ancient hall — High o’er the rest its towering crest one tree rears to the sky, And wide out-flings, like mighty wings, its arms umbrageously.
Seven yards its base would scarce embrace — a goodly tree I ween, With silver bark, and foliage dark, of melancholy green; And mid its boughs two ravens house, and build from year to year, Their black brood hatch — their black brood watch — then screaming disappear.
In that old tree when playfully the summer breezes sigh, Its leaves are stirred, and there is heard a low and plaintive cry; And when in shrieks the storm blast speaks its reverend boughs among, Sad wailing moans, like human groans, the concert harsh prolong.
But whether gale or calm prevail, or threatening cloud hath fled, By hand of Fate, predestinate, a limb that tree will shed; A verdant bough — untouched, I trow, by axe or tempest’s breath — To Rookwood’s head an omen dread of fast-approaching death.
Some think that tree instinct must be with preternatural power. Like ‘larum bell Death’s note to knell at Fate’s appointed hour; While some avow that on its bough are fearful traces seen, Red as the stains from human veins, commingling with the green.
Others, again, there are maintain that on the shattered bark A print is made, where fiends have laid their scathing talons dark; That, ere it falls, the raven calls thrice from that wizard bough; And that each cry doth signify what space the Fates allow.
In olden days, the legend says, as grim Sir Ranulph view’d A wretched hag her footsteps drag beneath his lordly wood. His bloodhounds twain he called amain, and straightway gave her chase; Was never seen in forest green, so fierce, so fleet a race!
With eyes of flame to Ranulph came each red and ruthless hound, While mangled, torn — a sight forlorn! — the hag lay on the ground; E’en where she lay was turned the clay, and limb and reeking bone Within the earth, with ribald mirth, by Ranulph grim were thrown.
And while as yet the soil was wet with that poor witch’s gore, A lime-tree stake did Ranulph take, and pierced her bosom’s core; And, strange to tell, what next befell! — that branch at once took root, And richly fed, within its bed, strong suckers forth did shoot.
From year to year fresh boughs appear — it waxes huge in size; And, with wild glee, this prodigy Sir Ranulph grim espies. One day, when he, beneath that tree, reclined in joy and pride, A branch was found upon the ground — the next, Sir Ranulph died!
And from that hour a fatal power has ruled that Wizard Tree, To Ranulph’s line a warning sign of doom and destiny: For when a bough is found, I trow, beneath its shade to lie, Ere suns shall rise thrice in the skies a Rookwood sure shall die!
“And such an omen preceded Sir Piers’s demise?” said Luke, who had listened with some attention to his grandsire’s song.
“Unquestionably,” replied the sexton. “Not longer ago than Tuesday morning, I happened to be sauntering down the avenue I have just described. I know not what took me thither at that early hour, but I wandered leisurely on till I came nigh the Wizard Lime-Tree. Great Heaven! what a surprise awaited me! a huge branch lay right across the path. It had evidently just fallen, for the leaves were green and unwithered; the sap still oozed from the splintered wood; and there was neither trace of knife nor hatchet on the bark. I looked up among the boughs to mark the spot from whence it had been torn by the hand of Fate — for no human hand had done it — and saw the pair of ancestral ravens perched amid the foliage, and croaking as those carrion fowl are wont to do when they scent a carcass afar off. Just then a livelier sound saluted my ears. The cheering cry of a pack of hounds resounded from the courts, and the great gates being thrown open, out issued Sir Piers, attended by a troop of his roystering companions, all on horseback, and all making the welkin ring with their vociferations. Sir Piers laughed as loudly as the rest, but his mirth was speedily checked. No sooner had his horse — old Rook, his favorite steed, who never swerved at stake or pale before — set eyes upon the accursed branch, than he started as if the fiend stood before him, and, rearing backwards, flung his rider from the saddle. At this moment, with loud screams, the wizard ravens took flight. Sir Piers was somewhat hurt by the fall, but he was more frightened than hurt; and though he tried to put a bold face on the matter, it was plain that his efforts to recover himself were fruitless. Dr. Titus Tyrconnel and that wild fellow Jack Palmer — who has lately come to the hall, and of whom you know something — tried to rally him. But it would not do. He broke up the day’s sport, and returned dejectedly to the hall. Before departing, however, he addressed a word to me in private, respecting you; and pointed, with a melancholy shake of the head, to the fatal branch. ’It is my death-warrant,’ said he, gloomily. And so it proved; two days afterwards his doom was accomplished.”
“And do you place faith in this idle legend?” asked Luke, with affected indifference, although it was evident, from his manner, that he himself was not so entirely free from a superstitious feeling of credulity as he would have it appear.
“Certes,” replied the sexton. “I were more difficult to be convinced than the unbelieving disciple else. Thrice hath it occurred to my own knowledge, and ever with the same result: first, with Sir Reginald; secondly, with thy own mother; and lastly, as I have just told thee, with Sir Piers.”
“I thought you said, even now, that this death omen, if such it be, was always confined to the immediate family of Rookwood, and not to mere inmates of the mansion.”
“To the heads only of that house, be they male or female.”
“Then how could it apply to my mother? Was she of that house? Was she a wife?”
“Who shall say she was not?” rejoined the sexton.
“Who shall say she was so?” cried Luke, repeating the words with indignant emphasis —“who will avouch that?”
A smile, cold as a wintry sunbeam, played upon the sexton’s rigid lips.
“I will bear this no longer,” cried Luke; “anger me not, or look to yourself. In a word, have you anything to tell me respecting her? if not, let me begone.”
“I have. But I will not be hurried by a boy like you,” replied Peter, doggedly. “Go, if you will, and take the consequences. My lips are sealed forever, and I have much to say — much that it behoves you to know.”
“Be brief, then. When you sought me out this morning, in my retreat with the gipsy gang at Davenham Wood, you bade me meet you in the porch of Rookwood Church at midnight. I was true to my appointment.”
“And I will keep my promise,” replied the sexton. “Draw closer, that I may whisper in thine ear. Of every Rookwood who lies around us — and all that ever bore the name, except Sir Piers himself — who lies in state at the hall — are here — not one — mark what I say — not one male branch of the house but has been suspected ——”
“Of what?”
“Of murder!” returned the sexton, in a hissing whisper.
“Murder!” echoed Luke, recoiling.
“There is one dark stain — one foul blot on all. Blood — blood hath been spilt.”
“By all?”
“Ay, and such blood! theirs was no common crime. Even murder hath its degrees. Theirs was of the first class.”
“Their wives! — you cannot mean that?”
“Ay, their wives! — I do. You have heard it, then? Ha! ha! ’tis a trick they had. Did you ever hear the old saying?
No mate ever brook wouldA Rook of the Rookwood!
A merry saying it is, and true. No woman ever stood in a Rookwood’s way but she was speedily removed — that’s certain. They had all, save poor Sir Piers, the knack of stopping a troublesome woman’s tongue, and practised it to perfection. A rare art, eh?”
“What have the misdeeds of his ancestry to do with Sir Piers,” muttered Luke, “much less with my mother?”
“Everything. If he could not rid himself of his wife — and she is a match for the devil himself — the mistress might be more readily set aside.”
“Have you absolute knowledge of aught?” asked Luke, his voice tremulous with emotion.
“Nay, I but hinted.”
“Such hints are worse than open speech. Let me know the worst. Did he kill her?” And Luke glared at the sexton as if he would have penetrated his secret soul.
But Peter was not easily fathomed. His cold, bright eye returned Luke’s gaze steadfastly, as he answered, composedly:
“I have said all I know.”
“But not all you think.”
“Thoughts should not always find utterance, else we might often endanger our own safety, and that of others.”
“An idle subterfuge — and, from you, worse than idle. I will have an answer, yea or nay. Was it poison — was it steel?”
“Enough — she died.”
“No, it is not enough. When? Where?”
“In her sleep — in her bed.”
“Why, that was natural.”
A wrinkling smile crossed the sexton’s brow.
“What means that horrible gleam of laughter?” exclaimed Luke, grasping the shoulder of the man of graves with such force as nearly to annihilate him. “Speak, or I will strangle you. She died, you say, in her sleep?”
“She did so,” replied the sexton, shaking off Luke’s hold.
“And was it to tell me that I had a mother’s murder to avenge, that you brought me to the tomb of her destroyer — when he is beyond the reach of my vengeance?”
Luke exhibited so much frantic violence of manner and gesture, that the sexton entertained some little apprehension that his intellects were unsettled by the shock of the intelligence. It was, therefore, in what he intended for a soothing tone that he attempted to solicit his grandson’s attention.
