Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 217
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
uncontaminated. All stories of rape and violence, and the infinitely diversified excesses of human brutality, would have been tenderness, and beauty, and fragrance to this: for the mind of Henrietta was corrupted, and her will consented.
What a mockery is enumeration in a case like mine! At this distant period it is a sort of consolation to me, to analyse and count up the different ingredients of which my cup was composed; but, at the time itself, it was all one mighty drench of misery, in which nothing was distinguished. My soul was chaos. A thick cloud, the ‘dunnest smoke of hell’ came over me. I was wrapped round with five-fold darkness, a smother, that stopped my breath, and penetrated through all the coverings and integuments of the body, and turned my very bones into jelly. Oh, nothing so discomfiting, so helpless, and so hopeless, was ever felt by any other human being. Despair is a term altogether inadequate to express it. It overwhelmed me with the full sense of my misery, and left me without the power or conception, that I could any way relieve myself from, or escape it.
I was a sensible time in this deplorable condition. But then my soul, which had fled away and was gone, came back to me. I shook myself, and stretched my limbs, as a man might be supposed to do, at just coming out from a dungeon, where every thing was stagnant and poisonous, and where he seemed to have been consigned to eternal oblivion. I awoke from a sleep more deadly and oppressive, than that from which the whole world shall be roused by the last trumpet. I viewed my murderers, Clifford and Henrietta, trampling on my lifeless limbs with looks of scorn. I never saw such looks. Diabolical triumph sat on the lips of each. Inhuman laughter flayed and mangled my ears like a hundred lancets. The pointed finger, the gesture of mingled hatred and contempt, spoke their secret soul. I raised myself from the earth, and stood in an erect posture. At length they caught my eye fixed on them, and they suddenly became blank: they spoke not, they moved not, they uttered not a sound: their hue became ghastly, their features indistinct, their outline dim, they melted into air: I was left alone. All this I saw with a depth of apprehension, and a graduating of vision, that, as it appears to me, exceeded all the realities of my preceding life.
Full of this vision, my blood seethed and bubbled in my veins. I exclaimed with all the energy of rage: ‘They insult and despise me; they count me for nothing. Yes, I know they think, the moment I hear of their execrable crime, I shall become transfixed and insensible; my heart shall burst with a thousand flaws; I shall be like one struck with heaven’s lightning, and turned at once into a brittle and marrowless cinder. They are mistaken. There is a vivifying principle within me, that they remember not: vengeance, inextinguishable vengeance! They think, that the world is theirs; that they walk, crowned with garlands, and welcomed with choruses of joy, that they have no enemy to contend with. By heaven, it is not so! I will pursue them for ever; they shall feel me. ‘Sleep shall, neither night nor day, hang upon their pent-house lids’; through toilsome and insupportable years their flesh shall waste and be dried up with sorrow. They shall become as miserable, if possible, as by their wanton and savage cruelty they have made the brother of Henrietta.
‘Henrietta, I foolishly flattered myself, was bound to me by indissoluble ties of nature, flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone. She has cast me off; she treats me as an alien to her blood; she regards me with indifference; she places her delight in inflicting on me the most dreadful injury. By heaven, I will not be thus treated with impunity. Thou hast rejected me; I also will reject thee. I renounce all kindred. All weakness, fondness, tenderness past, the nameless arts and endearments by which thou hast wound thyself round my soul, shall preserve no traces in the volume of my brain. I am vengeance, and nothing else. I felt that I have nothing of human nature left within me. “My heart is turned to stone: I strike it, and it hurts my hand.” I will pursue her for ever. If she has children – Ha! they will be the children of Clifford – living, substantial beings, in whom the blood of Clifford and of Mandeville shall be mingled together! – Can nature sustain such monsters? – Will not the demons themselves, tenants of the deepest hell, laugh with unhuman joy to behold them? -1 will steal them from her; I will teach them to hate her; I will make them my instruments of vengeance. How it will delight me, what mitigation will it bring to the fire than burns within me, to see their infant fingers stream with their parents’ blood!’
Such was the train of reflections that Holloway’s intelligence produced within me. From the state of a man, palsied with astonishment and horror, which was the first effect, I mounted into supernatural energy. I commanded my horse to be made ready. My guardian had watched all my motions with the utmost stretch of anxiety. He saw my extraordinary sinking of soul: that was what he expected. Yet it went to so terrible an extreme, that it did not fail to alarm him. He saw the altered current of my feelings, which of necessity manifested itself in violence of action, and every possible contortion of the body. When I came forth to mount my horse, he approached me, but with hesitation and timidity.
‘Whither go you, sir?’
‘To Henrietta.’
‘Will you not allow my nephew to accompany you?’
‘No; I will be attended by my groom only.’
Holloway dared press me no further. Beside, that he was partly satisfied with this. My groom, as well as every one about me, was his implement.
Of my journey I remember nothing. I reached the Cottage of the New Forest, without any accident that could defeat my purpose.I saw my sister. I met her, as Clifford had done in his first visit to Beaulieu, and nearly on the same spot: it was one of her favourite haunts. I alighted, and gave my horse to the servant. Henrietta started as she beheld me, and almost fell to the ground. I supported her, and solemnly led [her] to a bank. My voice had a depth, and a hollow, inward sound, like what we attribute to a ghost, returned from the mansion of departed spirits.
‘Henrietta, this is a meeting, not like those I so well remember in the purlieus of the Forest. This is not like the meeting of a brother and a sister. I come to you for the last time.
‘You add to my knowledge of human nature. I thought you an angel of light; I see you a demon from hell. “It was not an enemy; then I could have borne it: it was not he that hated me; then I would have hid myself from him: but it was thou my equal, my guide, and my acquaintance, from whose lips I have received sweet counsel” I know not how oft, with whom I have worshipped God, and lost myself transportingly amidst the magnificence of nature.
‘Henrietta, why have you deceived me? I was hardly born to love. It is my disposition to walk gloomily among my fellow-creatures, and scarcely waste a thought upon them. I shut myself up disdainfully in my own contemplations, and basked in the majesty of desolation. Why did you draw me out of this? What boots it, that you are my sister? This is mere vulgar prejudice, the common stuff of the earth. It is dangerous to call forth the love of such a one as I am!
‘You made me believe – what did you not make me believe? every thing that was lying and hypocritical – that you cared for me, that you loved me, that you were anxious for my welfare, that you sympathized in my joys and my sorrows, that you studied to prepare for me good counsel, and to lead me in the path of honour and happiness. – Pooh, pooh, there was none of this!
It was thus that you laid bare my bosom to your dagger’s point, that you stripped me of the armour with which nature had covered my bursting heart, and threw down all my defences. I else had walked the world in safety, not untried, not untortured, not undistressed – but with such trials and tortures as I could have sustained.’
Henrietta was surprised at the collectedness of my discourse; she knew she had used me unworthily; she was weighed down with the consciousness of guilt.
‘But is this true?’ I pursued, suddenly changing my tone. ‘Deny it! Fall, fall instantly on your knees, and swear it is false! You are not married? Who told me that you were? You are not the wife of — ? Then must it never be!
Oh, Henrietta, I adjure you by all that is holy, and all that is sacred! for my sake, for your own sake! eschew the greatest of crimes! Crime, as in itself it is; to throw away the paragon of creation, upon a miscreant, an apostate, the abhorrence and the refuse of universal nature! What will England think of you? What will your whole sex? What name or place will you retain in the diversified society of living men?
‘And for the sake of this crime, this abhorred mixture, this unnatural pollution, this worse than incest, you would destroy your brother! Here I am. Dispose of me as you please. I do not set my life at a pin’s fee. For any thing that would do you honour, and do you grace, I would die a thousand times. Nothing would give me greater transport, than to sacrifice all I have, and all I am, for you. Those eyes, that figure, that heaven-descended aspect, the smile I have seen on those lips, I value beyond a million of worlds. But, to see them consigned to every thing that is leprous, and that is horrible – that will I never!
‘Henrietta, have you no purity? have you no shame? It is the crown of a woman, to do nothing that is equivocal, or ambiguous, to stand clear in the sight of all, to suffer no unhallowed breath for an instant to obscure the unsullied brightness of her name, to expose herself to no comments, never, never to subject her conduct to the discussion of the vulgar and profane.
‘My sister, you had a father, you had a mother – have you forgotten them? They died Protestants. They died by the hands of blood-thirsty and barbarian Papists. They never would have suffered their daughter, to join in unhallowed union with the son of the destroyer. If they could know that such a thing was once meditated, or once named, it would stir them up from the rest of the grave. Think you see them before you! Think you see them, as they appeared in the last moments of their mortal existence. Their breasts streaming with gore shed by the accursed hand of Papists, their hands lifted up to heaven in execration of that cruel religion! Now, now, they stretch them forth to you, their daughter, and implore you, for heaven’s sake, for religion’s sake, for the sake of all that is holy, in consideration of all the ties of blood, in recollection of their lives, and of their deaths, to renounce this detested marriage!’
Henrietta was shaken by the solemnity of my address. Her resolutions in my favour had been strong, and of the most disinterested sort; her struggles had been sharp, and terrible, and severe; they had been almost too mighty for her tender nature to endure. Her language to the Montagus, when they set out on their late visit to me in Derbyshire, had been to recommend to them, ‘to use their best diligence in a question that sank so deep into her heart; to adjure them, not to be swayed by any previous impressions that might have been made on them, but to try it with all the impartiality that would be due from jurors sitting upon an issue of life and death. She had protested again and again, how much better she should be satisfied with a decision that restored to her her beloved brother, though it should cut her off from Clifford for ever.’
She was therefore in a high degree surprised at the style in which I addressed her. She found in it energy unbounded, and the deepest pathos. She found in it the most fervent and high-wrought passion. What then? There was nothing to censure in this. It would have been absurd, if it had been otherwise. She found in it no touch of insanity.
This was a moment, that was worth more than all the mines of Golconda. Henrietta, who was the jewel of the earth to me, and to whom all the rest of the world was only the crust and the setting, was mine. Her heart was mine. I could retire with her to any corner of the peopled earth that I pleased. Henrietta was saved, saved from pollution, from blasphemy, from the most execrable of crimes, saved for her sex, for her country, for her age, and for me. I never can recollect this moment without an agony, a frenzy, beyond all frenzy, and to which every thing else that bears the name, is like the mummery of a personated clown, and the antics of children. That moment is gone. Oh, that all the happiness and the virtue of the earth should depend on a moment! The clock points the hour; and man is yet as virtuous as our first progenitor before the fall; he may challenge the arch-fiend, the great accuser of the creation, to point out one speck in the precious organ with which he looks on his God. The clock strikes; and all is over; the fatal deed is done; millions of worlds cannot buy it back again; oceans of tears cannot wash it away; the stamp is fixed; the decree is gone forth; the trumpet of the Almighty proclaims it to the universe, ‘An immortal soul is fallen!’
By me this precious harvest of spotless virtue was marred. What could possess me? My soul was wrought too high; and the cord by which every thing that was dear to me was suspended, could hold no longer. My understanding had once been unsettled; and it could maintain its balance only to a certain point. At this moment, this critical, this tremendous moment, my eyes flashed fire, my brain fermented like a vessel of new wine, placed for that purpose by the hands of the maker. I raved. I talked – I know not what. I spoke of the Duke of Savoy, the pretender to the crown of England, whose claims were upheld by the infuriated and blood-thirsty Papists, the true successors to Guy Fawkes and to Garnet. My reason was unsettled. In some wild and unaccountable way I conceived Clifford to be the Duke of Savoy, and Henrietta to be his queen. My gestures were furious; my motions were alarming; I was suddenly seized with all the demonstrations of the most rooted frenzy.
CHAPTER XVI
HAVING THUS BEGUN, I know not to what extravagance I might have proceeded, had it not chanced that, just at this instant, the young Montagus and their servants passed along in the road below. They were surprised at seeing me thus; they were alarmed at the vehemence and outrageousness of my gestures. I was alone with Henrietta. They alighted; and, accompanied by their servants, hastened across a field, which lay between the road and the foot-path where we stood. I perceived them. By one of those sudden changes to which madness is often liable, the frame of my mind became totally altered. I in some way anticipated impediment and restraint from their arrival. I fled with the rapidity of lightning; and, knowing where I had left my horses and my groom, was on my saddle in a moment. The groom, who, as I have said, had his instructions from Holloway, was aware how dangerous it would be to the purposes of my guardian, if, while suffering under an attack of frenzy, I fell into the hands of the Montagus, and seconded my purpose of escape with all his diligence.
The young gentlemen, seeing that by the opportuneness of their arrival they had driven me away, were not solicitous to pursue me, but turned their attention to my sister. She was in a state of the most distressful agitation. The unexpectedness of all that had passed, doubled the force of the impression it made upon her. She had been disconsolately meditating the trying circumstances in which she was placed, at the moment when I so unexpectedly stood before her. She had received the report of the young gentlemen upon the unfortunate state of my intellectual health. She had in some degree, with a sort of half consent, suffered it to be understood, that her decision waited upon the issue of that report. She was acquainted with the proceeding that had been commenced in the court of chancery, for putting an end to the guardianship of Holloway. Yet it might be said of her, in the most accurate sense of that phrase, that Henrietta did not know her own mind. Still she had great compunction and misgivings of soul, leading her to an unreserved union with her brother. Her passions, all that precise state of feeling which nature herself so distinctly makes the portion of a female just entering upon the state of womanhood, – not a nature gross, vulgar, and depraved – but that nature which instinctively guides the individual to a proceeding which promises most to conduce to private and general happiness, – fought on the side of Clifford. Her reasonings leaned strongly towards me. On my side was that impulse of generosity, of selfsacrifice, and unambiguous rectitude, which was so peculiarly suited to the constitution of her character, and her habits of thinking. Most devoutly she prayed to the Almighty governor of the universe, that he would graciously impart a light from above, to guide her in the difficult path she had to tread.
In the very breath that uttered this prayer, I unexpectedly stood before her. Yes; I have no doubt, that Providence itself took me by the hand, and placed me there, in answer to her prayer. The suddenness of the event, the particular moment in which it occurred, overcame her spirits, and made her unable to stand before me. Oh, that the gracious purpose of a beneficent Providence, that the finger of God stretched out to point the path of rectitude, should have been so wofully defeated! She listened to me, with an attention that seemed to turn all her faculties at once into the single faculty of hearing. I have endeavoured to record the discourse I addressed to her. I have mentioned the effect it seemed to produce on her mind. I have spoken of the horrible start of frenzy, accursed revolution! by which all these blooming hopes seem to have been dashed for ever.
Henrietta listened with that perfect singleness of heart, which never fell to the lot of any other human creature. My passion became her passion; my sobriety her sobriety. Her feelings were of a mingled and a memorable sort. Her joy was great, in the evidence that seemed to pour upon her, of the sanity of her brother, that brother, whom if she did not love more than any other human being, she at least felt, in her single and unbetrothed state, to be the mark and proper goal of her most sacred and primal duties. So great was her joy, that it was only checked and held back by a confused sense of guilt, a persuasion that she had yielded too far to the young Montagus, and their noble father, and Clifford, and every one around her, and had not examined enough for herself, and trusted to herself.
All this joy, this solemnity of soul, this new and serene beam of light that seemed to shoot through every fibre of her frame, served to render only more sharp and agonising what she felt, when I fell so unexpectedly into a fit of frenzy, as unequivocal as any human senses ever witnessed. I passed at once into a discourse the most incongruous and astounding. My gestures and actions were removed to the farthest distance possible, from those that could be incident to a being susceptible of the faculty of self-command. Henrietta observed me, with the utmost degree of terror, and the most poignant grief. She felt, that all was over, her hopes were terribly refuted, all the unfavourable reports that had been made of me were confirmed, in a way that smote her very heart. The greatest degree of misery of which she had a conception, was crowded into that moment.
