Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges. William Makepeace Thackeray
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with her small white hands clasped together, and quivering lips and hollow eyes.
“Not to reproach me,” he continued, after a pause, “My grief is sufficient as it is.”
[pg 167]
“Take back your hand—do not touch me with it!” she cried. “Look! there's blood on it!”
“I wish they had taken it all,” said Esmond; “if you are unkind to me.”
“Where is my husband?” she broke out. “Give me back my husband, Henry? Why did you stand by at midnight and see him murdered? Why did the traitor escape who did it? You, the champion of your house, who offered to die for us! You that he loved and trusted, and to whom I confided him—you that vowed devotion and gratitude, and I believed you—yes, I believed you—why are you here, and my noble Francis gone? Why did you come among us? You have only brought us grief and sorrow; and repentance, bitter, bitter repentance, as a return for our love and kindness. Did I ever do you a wrong, Henry? You were but an orphan child when I first saw you—when he first saw you, who was so good, and noble, and trusting. He would have had you sent away, but, like a foolish woman, I besought him to let you stay. And you pretended to love us, and we believed you—and you made our house wretched, and my husband's heart went from me: and I lost him through you—I lost him—the husband of my youth, I say. I worshipped him: you know I worshipped him—and he was changed to me. He was no more my Francis of old—my dear, dear soldier. He loved me before he saw you; and I loved him; oh, God is my witness how I loved him! Why did he not send you from among us? 'Twas only his kindness, that could refuse me nothing then. And, young as you were—yes, and weak and alone—there was evil, I knew there was evil in keeping you. I read it in your face and eyes. I saw that they boded harm to us—and it came, I knew it would. Why did you not die when you had the small-pox—and I came myself and watched you, and you didn't know me in your delirium—and you called out for me, though I was there at your side. All that has happened since, was a just judgement on my wicked heart—my wicked jealous heart. Oh, I am punished—awfully punished! My husband lies in his blood—murdered for defending me, my kind, kind, generous lord—and you were by, and you let him die, Henry!”
These words, uttered in the wildness of her grief, by one who was ordinarily quiet, and spoke seldom except with [pg 168] a gentle smile and a soothing tone, rung in Esmond's ear; and 'tis said that he repeated many of them in the fever into which he now fell from his wound, and perhaps from the emotion which such passionate, undeserved upbraidings caused him. It seemed as if his very sacrifices and love for this lady and her family were to turn to evil and reproach: as if his presence amongst them was indeed a cause of grief, and the continuance of his life but woe and bitterness to theirs. As the Lady Castlewood spoke bitterly, rapidly, without a tear, he never offered a word of appeal or remonstrance; but sat at the foot of his prison-bed, stricken only with the more pain at thinking it was that soft and beloved hand which should stab him so cruelly, and powerless against her fatal sorrow. Her words as she spoke struck the chords of all his memory, and the whole of his boyhood and youth passed within him; whilst this lady, so fond and gentle but yesterday—this good angel whom he had loved and worshipped—stood before him, pursuing him with keen words and aspect malign.
“I wish I were in my lord's place,” he groaned out. “It was not my fault that I was not there, madam. But Fate is stronger than all of us, and willed what has come to pass. It had been better for me to have died when I had the illness.”
“Yes, Henry,” said she—and as she spoke she looked at him with a glance that was at once so fond and so sad, that the young man, tossing up his arms, wildly fell back, hiding his head in the coverlet of the bed. As he turned he struck against the wall with his wounded hand, displacing the ligature; and he felt the blood rushing again from the wound. He remembered feeling a secret pleasure at the accident—and thinking, “Suppose I were to end now, who would grieve for me?”
This haemorrhage, or the grief and despair in which the luckless young man was at the time of the accident, must have brought on a deliquium presently; for he had scarce any recollection afterwards, save of some one, his mistress probably, seizing his hand—and then of the buzzing noise in his ears as he awoke, with two or three persons of the prison around his bed, whereon he lay in a pool of blood from his arm.
It was now bandaged up again by the prison surgeon, who happened to be in the place; and the governor's wife [pg 169] and servant, kind people both, were with the patient. Esmond saw his mistress still in the room when he awoke from his trance; but she went away without a word; though the governor's wife told him that she sat in her room for some time afterward, and did not leave the prison until she heard that Esmond was likely to do well.
Days afterwards, when Esmond was brought out of a fever which he had, and which attacked him that night pretty sharply, the honest keeper's wife brought her patient a handkerchief fresh washed and ironed, and at the corner of which he recognized his mistress's well-known cipher and viscountess's crown. “The lady had bound it round his arm when he fainted, and before she called for help,” the keeper's wife said; “poor lady; she took on sadly about her husband. He has been buried to-day, and a many of the coaches of the nobility went with him—my Lord Marlborough's and my Lord Sunderland's, and many of the officers of the Guards, in which he served in the old king's time; and my lady has been with her two children to the king at Kensington, and asked for justice against my Lord Mohun, who is in hiding, and my lord the Earl of Warwick and Holland, who is ready to give himself up and take his trial.”
Such were the news, coupled with assertions about her own honesty and that of Molly her maid, who would never have stolen a certain trumpery gold sleeve-button of Mr. Esmond's that was missing after his fainting fit, that the keeper's wife brought to her lodger. His thoughts followed to that untimely grave, the brave heart, the kind friend, the gallant gentleman, honest of word and generous of thought (if feeble of purpose, but are his betters much stronger than he?) who had given him bread and shelter when he had none; home and love when he needed them; and who, if he had kept one vital secret from him, had done that of which he repented ere dying—a wrong indeed, but one followed by remorse, and occasioned by almost irresistible temptation.
Esmond took his handkerchief when his nurse left him, and very likely kissed it, and looked at the bauble embroidered in the corner. “It has cost thee grief enough,” he thought, “dear lady, so loving and so tender. Shall I take it from thee and thy children? No, never! Keep it, and wear it, my little Frank, my pretty boy. If I cannot [pg 170] make a name for myself, I can die without one. Some day, when my dear mistress sees my heart, I shall be righted; or if not here or now, why, elsewhere; where Honour doth not follow us, but where Love reigns perpetual.”
'Tis needless to narrate here, as the reports of the lawyers already have chronicled them, the particulars or issue of that trial which ensued upon my Lord Castlewood's melancholy homicide. Of the two lords engaged in that said matter, the second, my lord the Earl of Warwick and Holland, who had been engaged with Colonel Westbury, and wounded by him, was found not guilty by his peers, before whom he was tried (under the presidence of the Lord Steward, Lord Somers); and the principal, the Lord Mohun, being found guilty of the manslaughter (which, indeed, was forced upon him, and of which he repented most sincerely), pleaded his clergy; and so was discharged without any penalty. The widow of the slain nobleman, as it was told us in prison, showed an extraordinary spirit; and, though she had to wait for ten years before her son was old enough to compass it, declared she would have revenge of her husband's murderer. So much and suddenly had grief, anger, and misfortune appeared to change her. But fortune, good or ill, as I take it, does not change men and women. It but develops their characters. As there are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up the pen to write, so the heart is a secret even to him (or her) who has it in his own breast. Who hath not found himself surprised into revenge, or action, or passion, for good or evil; whereof the seeds lay within him, latent and unsuspected, until the occasion called them forth? With the death of her lord, a change seemed to come over the whole conduct and mind of Lady Castlewood; but of this we shall speak in the right season and anon.
The lords being tried then before their peers at Westminster, according to their privilege, being brought from the Tower