tences, delayed his marriage; but, to reconcile her to this separation, he now gave repeated promises of returning to conclude the nuptials, as soon as the affair, which thus suddenly call ed him to France, should permit. Soothed, in some degree, by these assurances, she suffered him to depart; and, soon after, her relative, Montoni, arriving at Udolpho, renewed the addresses which she had before refused, and which she now again rejected. Meanwhile, her thoughts were constantly with the Marquis de Villeroi, for whom she suffered all the delirium of Italian love, cherished by the solitude to which she confined herself; for she had now lost all taste for the pleasures of society and the gaiety of amusement. Her only indulgences were to sigh and weep over a miniature of the Marquis; to visit the scenes that had witnessed their happiness; to pour forth her heart to him in writing, and to count the weeks, the days, which must intervene before the period that he had mentioned as probable for his return. But this period passed without bringing him; and week after week followed in heavy and almost intolerable expectation. During this interval, Laurentini's fancy, occupied incessantly by one idea, became disordered; and, her whole heart being devoted to one object, life became hateful to her, when she believed that object lost. Several months passed, during which she heard nothing from the Marquis de Villeroi, and her days were marked, at intervals, with the frenzy of passion and the sullenness of despair. She secluded herself from all visitors, and sometimes remained in her apartment for weeks together, refusing to speak to every person, except her favourite female attendant, writing scraps of letters, reading again and again those she had received from the Marquis, weeping over his picture, and speaking to it, for many hours, upbraiding, reproaching, and caressing it alternately. At length, a report reached her that the Marquis had married in France, and after suffering all the extremes of love, jealousy, and indignation, she formed the desperate resolution of going secretly to that country, and, if the report proved true, of attempting a deep revenge. To her favourite woman only she confided the plan of her journey, and she engaged her to partake of it. Having collected her jewels, which, descending to her from many branches of her family, were of immense value, and all her cash, to a very large amount, they were packed in a trunk, which was privately conveyed to a neighbouring town, whither Laurentini, with this only servant, followed, and thence proceeded secretly to Leghorn, where they embarked for France. When, on her arrival in Languedoc, she found that the Marquis de Villeroi had been married for some months, her despair almost deprived her of reason, and she alternately pro jected and abandoned the horrible design of murdering the Marquis, his wife, and herself. At length she contrived to throw herself in his way, with an intention of reproaching him for his conduct, and of stabbing herself in his presence; but when she again saw him, who so long had been the constant object of her thoughts and affections, resentment yielded to love; her resolution failed; she trembled with the conflict of emotions that assailed her heart, and fainted away. The Marquis was not proof against her beauty and sensibility; all the energy with which he had first loved returned; for his passion had been resisted by prudence, rather than overcome by indifference; and, since the honour of his family would not permit him to marry her, he had endeavoured to subdue his love, and had so far succeeded as to select the then Marchioness for his wife, whom he loved at first with a tempered and rational affection. But the mild virtues of that amiable lady did not recompense him for her indifference, which appeared, notwithstanding her efforts to conceal it; and he had for some time suspected that her affections were engaged by another person, when Laurentini arrived in Languedoc. This artful Italian soon perceived that she had regained her influence over him, and, soothed by the discovery, she determined to live and to employ all her enchantments to win his consent to the diabolical deed, which she believed was necessary to the security of her happiness. She conducted her scheme with deep dissimulation and patient perseverance, and, having completely estranged the affections of the Marquis from his wife, whose gentle goodness and unimpassioned manners had ceased to please, when contrasted with the captivations of the Italian, she proceeded to awaken in his mind the jealousy of pride, for it was no longer that of love, and even pointed out to him the person to whom she affirmed the Marchioness had sacrificed her honour; but Laurentini had first extorted from him a solemn promise to forbear avenging himself upon his rival. This was an important part of her plan, for she knew, that, if his desire of vengeance was restrained towards one party, it would burn more fiercely towards the other, and he might then, perhaps, be prevailed on to assist in the horrible act, which would release him from the only barrier that withheld him from making her his wife. The innocent Marchioness, meanwhile, observed, with extreme grief, the alteration in her husband's manners. He became reserved and thoughtful in her presence; his conduct was austere, and sometimes even rude; and he left her, for many hours together, to weep for his unkindness, and to form plans for the recovery of his affection. His conduct afflicted her the more, because, in obedience to the command of her father, she had accepted his hand, though her affections were engaged to another, whose amiable disposition she had reason to believe would have insured her happiness. This circumstance Laurentini had discovered soon after her arrival in France, and had made ample use of it in assisting her designs upon the Marquis, to whom she adduced such seeming proof of his wife's infidelity, that, in the frantic rage of wounded honour, he consented to destroy his wife. A slow poison was administered, and she fell a victim to the jealousy and subtlety of Laurentini, and to the guilty weakness of her husband. But the moment of Laurentini's triumph, the moment to which she had looked forward for the completion of all her wishes, proved only the commencement of a suffering that never left her to her dying hour. The passion of revenge, which had in part stimulated her to the commission of this atrocious deed, died even at the moment when it was gratified, and left her to the horrors of unavailing pity and remorse, which would probably have empoisoned all the years she had promised herself with the Marquis de Villeroi, had her expectations of an alliance with him been realized. But he, too, had found the moment of his revenge to be that of remorse as to himself, and detestation as to the partner of his crime; the feeling which he had mistaken for conviction, was no more; and he stood astonished and aghast, that no proof remained of his wife's infidelity, now that she had suffered the punishment of guilt. Even when he was informed that she was dying, he had felt suddenly and unaccountably reassured of her innocence; nor was the solemn assurance she made him in her last hour capable of affording him a stronger conviction of her blameless conduct. In the first horrors of remorse and despair, he felt inclined to deliver up himself, and the woman who had plunged him into this abyss of guilt, into the hands of justice; but when the paroxysm of his suffering was over, his intention changed. Laurentini, however, he saw only once afterwards, and that was, to curse her as the instigator of his crime, and to say, that he spared her life only on condition that she passed the rest of her days in prayer and penance. Overwhelmed with disappointment, on receiving contempt and abhorrence from the man for whose sake she had not scrupled to stain her conscience with human blood, and touched with horror of the unavailing crime she had committed, she renounced the world, and retired to the monastery of St Clair, a dreadful victim to unresisted passion. The Marquis, immediately after the death of his wife, quitted Chateau-le-Blanc, to which he never returned, and endeavoured to lose the sense of his crime amidst the tumult of war, or the dissipations of a capital; but his efforts were vain ; a deep dejection hung over him ever after, for which his most intimate friends could not account, and he at length died, with a degree of horror nearly equal to that which Laurentini had suffered. The physician, who had observed the singular appearance of the unfortunate Marchioness after death, had been bribed to silence; and, as the surmises of a few of the servants had proceeded no farther than a whisper, the affair had never been investigated. Whether this whisper ever reached the father of the Marchioness, and if it did, whether the difficulty of obtaining proof deterred him from prosecuting the Marquis de Villeroi, is uncertain; but her death was deeply lamented by some part of her family, and particularly by her brother, M. St Aubert; for that was the degree of relationship which had existed between Emily's father and the Marchioness; and there is no doubt that he suspected the manner of her death. Many letters passed between the Marquis and him, soon after the decease of his beloved sister, the subject of which was not known, but there is reason to believe that they related to the cause of her death; and these were the papers, together with some letters of the Marchioness, who had confided to her brother the occasion of her unhappiness, which St Aubert had so solemnly enjoined his daughter to destroy; and anxiety for her peace had probably made him forbid her to inquire into the melancholy story to which they alluded. Such, indeed, had been his affliction on the premature death of this his favourite sister, whose unhappy marriage had from the first excited his tenderest pity, that he never could hear her named, or mention her himself after her death, except to Madame St Aubert. From Emily, whose sensibility he feared to awaken, he had so carefully concealed her history and name, that she was ignorant, till now, that she ever had such a relative as the Marchioness de Villeroi ; and from this motive he had enjoined silence to his only surviving sister, Madame Cheron, who had scrupulously observed his request. It was over some of the last pathetic letters of the Marchioness, that St Aubert was weeping when he was observed by Emily on the eve of her departure from La Vallée, and it was her picture which he had so tenderly caressed. Her disastrous death may account for the emotion he had betrayed on hearing her named by La Voisin, and for his request to be interred near the monument of the Villerois, where her remains were deposited, but not those of her husband, who was buried where he died, in the north of France. The confessor who attended St Aubert in his last moments, recollected him to be the brother of the late Marchioness, when St Aubert, from tenderness to Emily, had conjured him to conceal the circumstance, and to request that the Abbess, to whose care he particularly recommended her, would do the same; a request which had been exactly observed. Laurentini, on her arrival in France, had carefully concealed her name and family, and, the better to disguise her real history, had, on entering the convent, caused the story to be circulated which had imposed on sister Frances; and it is probable that the Abbess, who did not preside in the convent at the time of her noviciation, was also entirely ignorant of the truth. The deep remorse that seized on the mind of Laurentini, together with the sufferings of disappointed passion, for she still loved the Marquis, again unsettled her intellects, and after the first paroxysms of despair were passed, a heavy and silent melancholy had settled upon her spirits, which suffered few interruptions from fits of frenzy till the time of her death. During many years, it had been her only amusement to walk in the woods near the monastery, in the solitary hours of night, and to play upon a favourite instrument, to which she sometimes joined the delightful melody of her voice in the most solemn and melancholy airs of her native country, modulated by all the energetic feeling that dwelt in her heart. The physician who had attended her, recommended it to the superior to indulge her in this whim, as the only means of soothing her distempered fancy; and she was suffered to walk in the lonely hours of night, attended by the servant who had accompanied her from Italy; but as the indulgence transgressed against the rules of the convent, it was kept as secret as possible; and thus the mysterious music of Laurentini had combined, with other circumstances, to produce a report that not only the chateau, but its neighbourhood, was haunted. Soon after her entrance into this holy community, and before she had shewn any symptoms of insanity there, she made a will, in which, after bequeathing a considerable legacy to the convent, she divided the remainder of her personal property, which her jewels made very valuable, between the wife of Monsieur Bonnac, who was an Italian lady, and her relation, and the nearest surviving relative of the late Marchioness de Villeroi. As Emily St Aubert was not only the nearest but the sole relative, this legacy descended to her, and thus explained to her the whole mystery of her father's conduct. The resemblance between Emily and her unfortunate aunt had frequently been observed by Laurentini, and had occasioned the singular behaviour which had formerly alarmed her; but it was in the nun's dying hour, when her conscience gave her perpetually the idea of the Marchioness, that she became more sensible than ever of this likeness, and, in her frenzy, deemed it no resemblance of the person she had injured, but the original herself. The bold asser tion that had followed on the recovery of her senses, that Emily was the daughter of the Marchioness de Villeroi, arose from a suspicion that she was so; for, knowing that her rival, when she married the Marquis, was attached to another lover, she had scarcely scrupled to believe that her honour had been sacrificed, like her own, to an unresisted passion. Of a crime, however, to which Emily had suspected, from her frenzied confession of murder, that she had been instrumental in the Castle of Udolpho, Laurentini was innocent; and she had herself been deceived concerning the spectacle that formerly occasioned her so much terror, and had since compelled her, for a while, to attribute the horrors of the nun to a consciousness of a murder committed in that castle. It may be remembered, that in a chamber of Udolpho hung a black veil, whose singular situation had excited Emily's curiosity, and which afterwards disclosed an object that had overwhelmed her with horror; for, on lifting it, there appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within a recess of the wall a human figure, of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle, was, that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible on the features and hands. On such an object it will be readily believed that no person could endure to look twice. Emily, it may be recollected, had, after the first glance, let the veil drop, and her terror had prevented her from ever after provoking a renewal of such suffering as she had then experienced.-Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax. The history of it is somewhat extraordinary, though not without example in the records of that fierce severity which monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind. A member of the house of Udolpho having committed some offence against the prerogative of the church, had been condemned to the penance of contemplating, during certain hours of the day, a waxen image, made to resemble a human body in the state to which it is reduced after death. This penance, serving as a memento of the condition at which he must himself arrive, had been designed to reprove the pride of the Marquis of Udolpho, which had formerly so much exasperated that of the Romish church; and he had not only superstitiously observed this penance himself, which he had believed was to obtain a pardon for all his sins, but had made it a condition in his will, that his descendants should preserve the image, on pain of forfeiting to the church a certain part of his domain, that they also might profit by the humiliating moral it conveyed. The pure, therefore, had been suffered to retain its sta tion in the wall of the chamber, but his descendants excused themselves from observing the penance to which he had been enjoined. This image was so horribly natural, that it is not surprising Emily should have mistaken it for the object it resembled, nor, since she had heard such an extraordinary account concerning the disappearing of the late lady of the castle, and had such experience of the character of Montoni, that she should have believed this to be the murdered body of the Lady Laurentini, and that he had been the contriver of her death. The situation in which she had discovered it, occasioned her, at first, much surprise and perplexity; but the vigilance with which the doors of the chamber, where it was deposited, were afterwards secured, had compelled her to believe that Montoni, not daring to confide the secret of her death to any person, had suffered her remains to decay in this obscure chamber. The ceremony of the veil, however, and the circumstance of the doors having been left open, even for a moment, had occasioned her much wonder and some doubts; but these were not sufficient to overcome her suspicion of Montoni; and it was the dread of his terrible vengeance that had sealed her lips in silence, concerning what she had seen in the west chamber. Emily, in discovering the Marchioness de Villeroi to have been the sister of Mons. St Aubert, was variously affected; but, amidst the sorrow which she suffered for her untimely death, she was released from an anxious and painful conjecture, occasioned by the rash assertion of Signora Laurentini, concerning her birth and the honour of her parents. Her faith in St Aubert's principles would scarcely allow her to suspect that he had acted dishonourably; and she felt such reluctance to believe herself the daughter of any other, than her whom she had always considered and loved as a mother, that she would hardly admit such a circumstance to be possible; yet the likeness which it had frequently been affirmed she bore to the late Marchioness, the former behaviour of Dorothée, the old housekeeper, the assertion of Laurentini, and the mysterious attachment which St Aubert had discovered, awakened doubts as to his connection with the Marchioness, which her could neither vanquish nor confirm. From these, however, she was now relieved, and all the circumstances of her father's conduct were fully explained; but her heart was oppressed by the melancholy catastrophe of her amiable. relative, and by the awful lesson which the history of the nun exhibited, the indulgence of whose passions had been the means of leading her gradually to the commission of a crime, from the prophecy of which in her early years she would have recoiled in horror, and exclaimed, that it could not be !--a crime, which whole reason AFTER the late discoveries, Emily was distinguished at the chateau by the Count and his family, as a relative of the house of Villeroi, and received, if possible, more friendly attention than had yet been shewn her. Count de Villefort's surprise at the delay of an answer to his letter, which had been directed to Valancourt at Estuviere, was mingled with satisfaction for the prudence which had saved Emily from a share of the anxiety he now suffered, though when he saw her still drooping under the effect of his former error, all his resolution was necessary to restrain him from relating the truth, that would afford her a momentary relief. The approaching nuptials of the Lady Blanche now divided his attention with this subject of his anxiety, for the inhabitants of the chateau were already busied in preparations for that event, and the arrival of Mons. St Foix was daily expected. In the gaiety which surrounded her, Emily vainly tried to participate, her spirits being depressed by the late discoveries, and by the anxiety concerning the fate of Valancourt, that had been occasioned by the description of his manner, when he had delivered the ring. She seemed to perceive in it the gloomy wildness of despair; and, when she considered to what that despair might have urged him, her heart sunk with terror and grief. The state of suspense, as to his safety, to which she believed herself condemned, till she should return to La Vallée, appeared insupportable, and, in such moments, she could not even struggle to assume the composure that had left her mind, but would often abruptly quit the company she was with, and endeavour to soothe her spirits in the deep solitudes of the woods, that overbrowed the shore. Here the faint roar of foaming waves that beat below, and the sullen murmur of the wind among the branches around, were circumstances in unison with the temper of her mind; and she would sit on a cliff, or on the broken steps of her favourite watch-tower, observing the changing colours of the evening clouds, and the gloom of twilight draw over the sea, till the white tops of billows, riding towards the shore, could scarcely be discerned amidst the darkened waters. The lines, engraved by Valancourt on this tower, she frequently repeated with melancholy enthusiasm, and then would endeavour to check the recollections and the grief they occasioned, and to turn her thoughts to indifferent subjects. One evening, having wandered with her lute to this her favourite spot, she entered the ruined tower, and ascended a winding staircase that led to a small chamber, which was less decayed than the rest of the building, and whence she had often gazed with admiration on the wide prospect of sea and land that extended below. The sun was now setting on that tract of the Pyrenées which divides Languedoc from Rousillon, and, placing herself opposite to a small grated window, which, like the wood tops beneath, and the waves lower still, gleamed with the red glow of the west, she touched the chords of her lute in solemn symphony, and then accompanied it with her voice, in one of the simple and affecting airs to which, in happier days, Valancourt had often listened in rapture, and which she now adapted to the following lines. TO MELANCHOLY. SPIRIT of love and sorrow-hail! Thy solemn voice from far I hear, Mingling with evening's dying gale: Hail, with this sadly-pleasing tear! O at this still, this lonely hour, To paint the wild romantic dream, That meets the poet's musing eye, As on the bank of shadowy stream, He breathes to her the fervid sigh. O lonely spirit! let thy song Lead me through all thy sacred haunt; The minster's moonlight aisles along Where spectres raise the midnight chant! I hear their dirges faintly swell! Then sink at once in silence drear, While, from the pillar'd cloister's cell, Dimly their gliding forms appear! Lead where the pine-woods wave on high, Lead to the mountain's dusky head, Where, far below, in shade profound, Wide forests, plains, and hamlets, spread, And sad the chimes of vesper sound. Or guide me where the dashing oar, Just breaks the stillness of the vale, As slow it tracks the winding shore, To meet the ocean's distant sail : To pebbly banks, that Neptune laves, There pause at midnight's spectred hour, The soft tranquillity of the scene below, where the evening breeze scarcely curled the water, or swelled the passing sail that caught the last gleam of the sun, and where, now and then, a dipping oar was all that disturbed the trembling radiance, conspired with the tender melody of her lute to lull her mind into a state of gentle sadness, and she sung the mournful songs of past times; till the remembrances they awa kened were too powerful for her heart, her tears fell upon the lute, over which she drooped, and her voice trembled, and was unable to proceed. Though the sun had now sunk behind the mountains, and even his reflected light was fading from their highest points, Emily did not leave the watch-tower, but continued to indulge her melancholy reverie, till a footstep, at a little distance, startled her, and on looking through the grate, she observed a person walking below, whom, however, soon perceiving to be Mons. Bonnac, she returned to the quiet thoughtfulness his step had interrupted. After some time, she again struck her lute, and sung her favourite air; but again a step disturbed her, and, as she paused to listen, she heard it ascending the staircase of the tower. The gloom of the hour, perhaps, made her sensible to some degree of fear, which she might not otherwise have felt; for only a few minutes before she had seen Mons. Bonnac pass. The steps were quick and bounding, and, in the next moment, the door of the chamber opened, and a person entered whose features were veiled in the obscurity of twilight; but his voice could not be concealed, for it was the voice of Valancourt! At the sound, never heard by Emily without emotion, she started in terror, astonishment, and doubtful pleasure, and had scarcely beheld him at her feet, when she sunk into a seat, overcome by the various emotions that contended at her heart, and almost insensible to that voice, whose earnest and trembling calls seemed as if endeavouring to save her. Valancourt, as he hung over Emily, deplored his own rash impatience in having thus surprised her: for when he had arrived at the chateau, too anxious to await the return of the Count, who, he understood, was in the grounds, he went himself to seek him, when, as he passed the tower, he was struck by the sound of Emily's voice, and immediately ascended. |