Mrs. Gore
(1799-1861)
I am, as your conjectures have rightly assured you, of British origin; ay!—and in its highest degree—nobly born and nobly bred. There was a time, too, when flattering voices assured me that the blood of the Herberts spoke in my air, in my lofty brow, in my sternness of eye and lip; but since I have been a dweller in this land of exile, all consciousness of unavailing dignity has quailed into the drooping of despair. I dare not meet the searching eye of Heaven—w hy should I presume to brave the scrutiny of my fellow-men?—I have fallen beneath them; my glory has departed from me!
We were very young—my sister Dorathea and myself—w hen our mother died; leaving us to become the consolation of the kindest of fathers, the Lord Herbert of Wrocksley, a staunch and valued adherent to the falling cause of King James. I was scarcely ten years old when we stood together sobbing beside his knee in our black weeds; but little Dora was seven years my junior, and the innocent’s smiles of infancy soon came shining through her tears. When our father bade me take her to me to be my child, and watch over her with a mother’s heeding, I was proud of my charge,—and I loved her too; for Dora was then and ever the fairest and gentlest thing that could be moulded into a human form. My sweet, sweet sister!—how good and how fair she was!
My father willed not that we should too early encounter the enfeebling atmosphere of London. His own residence in the metropolis was that of a true courtier, arbitrary and repining; but his frequent visits to Wrocksley Court, where our childhood and youth were passed, enabled him to note with accuracy his children’s development of strength and accomplishment: I will not say our mental progress, for the inborn faculties of the mind defy such transitory observation. The rashness of his confidence indeed, announced a deficiency either of penetration or of opportunity. Unconscious of the despotic character of my disposition, he continued to place my little sister rather under my guidance than that of our common preceptress, Mistress Shirley, a weak and interested woman, in whose estimation my heirship to my father’s lands, as well as my prematurity of talent, afforded me a most undue preference. Dora was timid, and somewhat feeble in constitution: her voice was low; her step tremulous; her eyes, when harshly addressed, instantly suffused with tears: but then her smiles were of the same quick prompting; and when she flung back the fair hair from her mild blue eyes, her looks had all the soothing promise of the rainbow. Yes! my sister was indeed holy and beautiful as the visible bond of a divine covenant.
I was just eighteen when my father, anxious for my appearance at court, even under the unpropitious aspect which it already began to wear, removed me by the most unnatural transition from the lonely seclusion of Wrocksley, to the brilliant orgies of Whitehall. Yet I was not dazzled by the novelty of my position. My haughtiness of heart rendered me superior to the influence of flattery; my innate pride preserved me from the weakness of vanity.
You will readily believe that, gifted with my advantages, and protected by the lavish favour of the king, I had many suitors. It was my destiny, however, to be addressed by those only whom I regarded with indifference—indifference, tempered in some instances by contempt; in others, by aversion. The Lady Miranda Herbert was spoken of, and written of, and sighed for, as the leading beauty of the court: she was adored, but it was with that love which is akin to hatred; her ungentle scornfulness was manifest even to her worshippers; nay, when the young Lord Lovell withdrew his suit from my harsh rejection, he was moved to exclaim in parting bitterness, “Miranda, the affection you despise will one day be avenged!” In my triumph I laughed his menaces to scorn; but, woe is me! they were not uttered in vain.
I can scarcely remember through what chance of society I first became acquainted with Sir Wilmot Worsley. There was nothing sufficiently striking in his appearance to have attracted my interest had he addressed me in the deferential terms to which I was accustomed; but while his appointment in the queen’s household necessarily ensured our meeting at all the festivals of the court, I perceived that the personal charms so incessantly hymned in my ears were powerless to draw him into the little circle of my votaries. In him my vanity encountered its first obstacle; and I was too much of a woman not to determine upon surmounting, at any cost, so determined an opposition. I conquered, too! but my victory was dearly bought. In the progress of my attempt, I became aware that the eyes I had seen fixed with coldness, or disapprobation, upon my own demeanour, were occasionally animated by the most varying and intellectual expression; that the address which had been directed so calmly, so regretfully to myself, was graced at other times by the most refined perfection of courtly breeding; that Worsley’s low intense voice was in itself a captivating music; and that the words of its breathing were ineffaceable from the hearts of those to whom they were addressed with fervour. My hour, in short, was come; I loved him! and with the deeper and the purer interest, that I was long uncertain of the nature of his feelings towards me.
I was long in doubt, I repeat, of the character of Worsley’s feelings; but it was the doubting of a woman’s heart,—sanguine and restless, and varying with the alternate caprices of hope and confidence. He never, indeed, said that he loved me: but it was at my side he rode in the ring; it was my hand that he still claimed in the midnight masking; it was to commune with me only that he lingered, when the royal barges swept by moonlight over the Thames during the summer nights. It is true that he was often abstracted and inattentive; but the scattered words of his lips came tempered with a grace and an interest unknown to the flippant loquacity of others.
Meanwhile, the state of public affairs wholly withdrew my father’s observation from myself and my attachments; and even when he addressed Sir Wilmot, their conversation turned upon the intrigues of the Protestant faction, or the unpopular and unfeeling pertinacity of the queen. For myself, engrossed by the influence of a new feeling, I remained wholly and strangely unconscious of the critical position of my native country; and throughout the extent of England, there probably existed not a person upon whom the final blow of the Revolution fell with a more startling abruptness than myself,—under whose very eyes the wires had been affixed to its state puppets.
My father hesitated not to follow the fortunes of a prince whose errors he deplored; but to whom, although himself of the Reformed Church, he felt his loyalty devoted beyond the intervention of sectarian zeal. And I, even if Sir Wilmot Worsley had not been destined to share the exile of his king—how cheerfully, how rejoicingly, would I have accompanied my indulgent and partial parent to his retreat at St. Germain’s. But in Lord Herbert’s opposition to my entreaties for permission to share his flight, he was for the first time absolute. He bade me return to Wrocksley, and become a protectress to his orphan Dorathea, trusting to better times for our reunion. He cared not, he said, that his daughters should be apportioned as the prize of some needy papist; he chose that we at least should remain true to our country and its established creed; and, placing us audibly under the protection and the blessing of Heaven, Lord Herbert departed with his master; thus abandoning his private for his public duties. Verily he had his reward!
Even as my father’s resolve had decreed, I returned to that home wherein Dora had been sporting away her happy hours of childhood; I returned, and oh! with how changed a spirit! At once refined and humiliated—elevated and degraded—I was touched, as by a wizard’s wand, into the tenderest and sweetest charities of womanhood. My look, my voice, my bearing were no longer the same: like the statue of the ancient sculptor, my obduracy was softened by the soul within;—I loved!—and with the doubting of a humbled heart.
Had I been assured of Worsley’s affection,—had we parted in the plighted confidence of lovers,—such was my trust in his nobleness of heart and hand, that during his absence I should not have endured one single uneasy hour. But it was not so. His attentions had been but those of a friend and a brother; he was deeply involved in the disastrous troubles of the times; he was gone forth into voluntary exile,—and how might the recollection of Miranda prevail against the active interests in which his feelings and his fortunes were now engaged? He might forget me—perhaps had already forgotten me!—and I—there was not an opinion—a word—a look of his that I did not treasure within my heart of hearts. The echoes of his voice,—I seemed to hear them in my solitude; the fastidious delicacy of his principles, which had rendered so many things worthless in my sight; the cold, but high-bred elegance of his demeanour,—all haunted my remembrance, till I scorned myself for such abject worship of one who had given me no right to make him the god of my idolatry. I scorned myself; yet still I went on loving as before!
I had none to whom I could disclose the conflict in my mind. I have said that our preceptress was a weak and frivolous woman; and Dorathea was yet too much of a child to be entrusted with my secret. I should have regarded it as pollution to breathe the name of love in ears so pure and so unsuspecting as hers.
Meanwhile the time passed on. Years were added to years, and still my father was detained in exile; and while I devoted my solitary hours to the care and maintenance of his estate, as well as to the perfecting of Dorathea’s education, my youth ebbed imperceptibly away; and, absorbed by an engrossing interest, I remained unconscious of the gradual decay of my beauty. I knew that I had improved in every quality sanctified by Worsley’s approbation; that I had cultivated each gift and each virtue of his choice; and as to mere personal loveliness, he had seemed to hold it so lightly that I had long become indifferent to its possession.
But although my father’s peculiar position, as well as my own inclinations, determined me to remain buried in the strict seclusion of Wrocksley Court, I own I was gratified by an opportunity afforded, through the kindness of a near relation of my deceased mother, to acquaint my young sister in some slight measure with the diversions of the capital; and scarcely had she departed for London, leaving me to dream away my solitude during her absence, when one evening,—one calm, fragrant, balmy spring evening,—I saw a stranger of noble and familiar aspect advancing along the green alley leading to my garden bower, and in another moment Worsley himself was beside me. The beating of my heart had not misled my expectations. He was the bearer of a letter from my father, authorising him to become our inmate. “Mistress Shirley’s protection,” wrote Lord Herbert, “will be a sanction to Wilmot’s temporary residence at Wrocksley, inasmuch as he is already my son by adoption and affection,—a tie I trust to see eventually confirmed by his marriage with a beloved daughter.” With my father’s letter in my bosom, and Worsley at my side, judge whether I was happy! judge whether the soul-sickness of those long years of absence was repaid!
I could not but observe that Sir Wilmot was duly sensible of the alteration which time, and the chastening of sorrow, had wrought in my disposition; that he regarded me with something of an exulting tenderness, as if conscious of having been instrumental in the change. Nor did my amended prospects and actual happiness tend to recloud my brow, or chill my frank, joyous, yet subdued demeanour. There was not one jarring thought within my mind, one discordant feeling within my heart, as day after day I sat by Worsley’s side beneath the green and shadowy shelter of the Wrocksley beechwoods, listening to his prolonged details of the exiled court, or claiming his interest, in turn, for my descriptions of Dora’s innocent beauty and elegance of mind, or my eager anticipation of my father’s speedy and prosperous return.
One evening, succeeding by many weeks his arrival, while the saloon in which we were sitting was obscured by the creeping summer twilight, and we were indulging in that happy interchange of thought and feeling which summer and twilight render so intimately and sacredly confidential, occasionally interrupting ourselves by a few faint chords of the lute that lay upon my knee, the door of the chamber suddenly flew open, and Dorathea stole into my arms. I started at the sound of her sweet voice,—and so did Worsley, who was seated by my side; but when, beneath the officious lights which were now introduced into the gloomy apartment, Dora’s sylph-like, and pure and tranquil beauty became revealed, he was motionless with delighted surprise. At the first glance I enjoyed his emotion; at the second, an abyss of horror and agony seemed opening at my feet! Amid all the varying expressions I had heretofore recognised on his mutable countenance, I had never detected the rapt, the luxurious ecstasy of admiration which now thrilled from his eyes, and streamed upon his cheek. My future destiny seemed written there in characters of fire.
I seized the first pretext to escape into my own chamber—to rush with frenzied haste to the tiring-mirror on my toilet, and lo! I beheld myself for the first time reflected in the terrible portraiture of truth! Distorted by passion, bewildered by terror, I saw each altered feature withering under the touch of time and prolonged anxiety. I saw my youth faded by the tears I had shed—for him. I saw my quivering lips blanched by the anticipations of those which yet awaited me; while a still small voice reiterated in my ears, “He will forsake thee, Miranda! he will forsake thee!” Oh that I could have recalled my youth, and its disregarded beauty! Oh that I could have laid down my head and died, in a renewal of the blessed self-deception preceding Dora’s return!
I will not—I cannot detail the minute progress and justifications of my suspicions; the gradual estrangement of Worsley’s affection from myself, and the visible growth of his new passion. To feel the relaxing pressure of his hand, to mark the chilling calmness of his altered eye, to hear the unwitting change of his endearing expressions, had been comparatively easy of endurance. But it was my destined trial to behold each treasured token of tenderness successively transferred to another; to hear his intonation soften as he addressed my sister; to know his alienated looks of love fixed in rapturous admiration upon her every movement; and in time I was fated to note the fond and confiding self-abandonment with which Dorathea repaid his devotion. I could not even forewarn her of my wretchedness, or upbraid her with treachery; for how would it have served me to proclaim that man my lover, whom she had only known as—her own! No; I resigned myself to my calamity; I presumed not to wrestle with the influence of such perfection of youthful loveliness; I even imparted new graces to the mild lustre of its sweetness, by the contrast of my own sullen or agonised countenance. I resigned myself, but not unrepiningly. New and dreadful emotions seemed wakening within me, and I shuddered to contemplate the darkness of the mysterious caverns which were revealed to me within the innermost depths of my heart. I shuddered, for I scarcely yet knew what demons might be sheltered there!
I cannot but believe that Sir Wilmot Worsley was conscious and apprehensive of the dreadful struggle of passion within my bosom. Yet it was an abject weakness on his part to flee precipitately as he did from Wrocksley; so mighty was his influence, that had he spoken and pleaded and appealed to the native generosity of my heart, methinks I might have subdued my feelings into patience, under the sustaining excitement of conscious well-doing. But he fled, leaving my sister—my victim—at my merciless disposal. I knew not that he was gone to pray my father’s interference; but I did know that he had already pleaded his cause, and not in vain, in Dora’s ears; for in her gentle candour she told me all,—that she loved him, that he was hers, her own, her affianced. O mighty Heaven! how fervent in that hour was my praver for deliverance from evil; even from the evil-prompting of my secret soul!
And then came letters and tokens, with which the frenzy of my jealousy urged me to augment my tortures. I read them—I gazed upon them,—the picture, and the braided hair, and the written records of his love! I pressed them to my burning brain, my withered heart; and I thought of my wasted youth, and of my lonely age, till my soul grew dark and swollen with contending passions. And again and again I prayed that heavenly interposition would deliver me from evil! But Heaven withheld its aid, and I grew mad with the rampant wickedness of a sinful human nature; and I cursed my innocent sister, and reviled her, and smote her, and held her in stern durance, lest she should communicate my cruel dealing to—to him! And lo! one day, when, with impatient fury, I had caused her hands to be bound and her steps restrained, that she might not escape me, a stern interposing voice sounded in my ears, and my father, grey-headed and awful, stood beside us!
He demanded, with solemn utterance, wherefore I had so harshly dealt with his youngest born? And the tears stole down his venerable face as he took his dagger from its sheath, and severed the cords which bound my weeping, trembling, rescued sister. And I saw that his heart, too, was in her cause, that I had lost all, that I was alone on earth; and an evil instigation, a demon’s suggestion, put words of horror into my mouth. I told him that his Dorathea had turned unto shame; that his child had become a castaway; that my sister was the minion of Worsley’s illicit love!
The dagger was in his hand, and in his soul the pride of six centuries of unsoiled honour. It was but a blow! In a moment the sprinkling of her innocent blood was upon me—the baptism of my eternal condemnation!
Spare me, spare me your consolations, they are unavailing to a sorrow such as mine!