Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 5, November 1852

Beating fretfully against imprisoning bars, Sybilla now yearned as much for love and gaiety as for marble halls. Her loss in respectability had not proved so signal as she had feared; and, in default, neglect, indifference, wasted youth, a cheerless, heartless existence now supplied the necessities of life to her misery. She forgot, wretched woman as she was, who had rendered her husband the silent, unemotional man he had become; a man without love and without anger – a barren rock, where rich and wholesome verdure used to grow. But, unfortunately, her ignorance detracted nothing from her wretchedness. Again and again, totally incapable either of reconciling herself to her lot or of mending it, she wept bitterly at the thought that it could only change with death; and naturally followed the question, by and by, which of them was likely to outlive the other? It was terrible to think that she should spend all her days in such wretchedness – should die in the midst of it; but, independent of that consideration, Godwin had grown very pale and lean lately; he ate little; and – though he complained not – frequently took medicine. He was not naturally of a strong constitution, and, taken altogether, Sybilla thought she should outlive him. This is the hard fact; the bone and substance of her frequent cogitations; but what pauses lay between, what twinges of self-repugnance now and then broke mercifully in upon them, cannot be written down – enough to say, that they grew daily fainter and fainter. What harm was there in “supposing?” And then, after a decent interval, during which Godwin got neither paler nor thinner, came the consideration – But how long first? And when Sybilla was forced to admit, that a young man like Godwin, however ailing, might well vegetate through a long series of years, she found by the feeling of dissatisfaction which crept involuntarily into her breast how much she had secretly cherished the “supposition.” Nor even after self-detection could she avoid the gracious thought that, if he lived for twenty years, he might as well live forever; but if, now, any thing should happen in – say two years (and a great many things did happen in two years) why, let us see – She would then be not quite six-and-twenty! Well, not more than two years; a year-and-a-half, say; for there would be a year for mourning, which would otherwise bring her over seven-and-twenty, which would be too old. And so Sybilla rehearsed her husband’s death and burial, and her own widowhood and restoration to happiness, and – a little, trembling, guilty thought peeped in to say – to, by that time, Lieutenant-General Sir Victor. True, she often checked these speculations – she felt they were wrong; but, time by time, with less success, until at last what is often expressed after one’s decease became with Sybilla a fixed idea before the event, that “it would be a happy release.”

Meanwhile, John kept on the weary tenor of his way, prematurely old in feature and heart – got leaner and paler; finally got into a slow fever, brought on through his own carelessness, about the time that his wife came to the above conclusion. And now it would afford strange melancholy to lift the veil from that woman’s mind as she tended by his sick-bed – terrible to watch the sudden terror which now inspired her lest her husband should die; for she felt as if her injured conscience had fled up to heaven, had impeached her thoughts, and that this was the result; that devils had power to fulfill her desire, that her soul might be damned to her desire. Strange, and more melancholy still, that when the first few days of Godwin’s illness wore away, this terror was, not supplanted, but accompanied by other feelings of a totally opposite nature! After all, was not this a providential arrangement for the happiness of both parties – a release to each from a yoke which had proved too heavy to bear – an answer to all her tears and sufferings? Of course, her thoughts were not arrayed in words so matter-of-fact as these, but it came to quite the same thing. And now these feelings reigned alternately. As Godwin grew worse, the terror increased; yet as soon as a symptom of amendment appeared, the contrary sentiment immediately assumed sway. But as time wore on, and Sybilla became accustomed to the danger, no doubt remained as to which was most powerful; and when Godwin at length recovered, and all the illness and dying, if any, had to be done over again, Sybilla felt like one betrayed.

Alas! she was now wholly in the toils of the fowler. The violence of her feelings increased day by day; and no longer to attempt description of mysteries impossible to be understood, she returned one evening from an accidental and momentary interview with Captain Hope, who was in England on leave, wrought into a determination to do that herself which it had terrified her should be done by nature on her behalf. So Godwin fell into another fever, and its accompanying symptoms were so new that, though they were less violent than previously, they alarmed him much more. He, however, was not perhaps so easy a subject for experiment as a Suffolk laborer; and whether from one cause or another – whether from observation of the symptomatic nature of his fever, or observation in the cup from which he was drinking at the time, he suddenly fell back upon his pillows one morning, shot through with the conviction that his beautiful wife was poisoning him.

The stricken man lay staring out at the window with fixed eyes awhile, but neither in anger nor horror; for presently he turned his face upon his bed and wept with all his heart. The unkindness, the ingratitude of this woman, each carried in it a sting more venomous than the sting of death; but, like the sting of death, they subdued rather than infuriated him. That she who lay in his bed and sat at his board, whom at any rate he trusted so far, whom at least he jealously protected and cared for, should drain his life from him at her leisure – to-day, to-morrow, any day, as soon as the milk came to make porridge with – smote him more with its treachery than its cruelty. Oh, what seas of anguish broke over him in that hour – casting him to and fro, a helpless waif, utterly abandoned and broken up, in perhaps the lowest deeps of agony that ever man entered upon and lived. His soul shook as in an ague; his spirit seemed oozing from him, until, like a dwindled, half-spent breath, it flickered within him on weak, unfeathered wings, impatient of their own impotence. But soon – for in such extremities men sometimes live through the changes of years in an hour – a sudden access of firmness, of sternness stole upon this fainting spirit, which momentarily grew calmer and more stern, till it was cold and hard as steel. Again his eyes became fixed and staring, but now with an expression enough alone, in its frozen and freezing terror, to have brought Sybilla down upon her knees had she encountered it. And when, half an hour after, the sick man again turned his face wearily upon his pillow, in hope of sleep, he had resolved to let Sybilla do it!

O wretched woman! Little guessed she, when she came presently to look upon this sleeper, the pallor of his face already reflected upon her shrunken heart, how completely the power had passed out of her hands – how terrible, how eternal the punishment she herself should assist him in signalizing. Little knew she that if her soul were now for a time abandoned of all warning, of all saving voices, it was abandoned to the power of her husband, in the hollow of whose hand it lay. To open his hand before her eyes, calmly, mercifully to thrust an index-finger into the spots which already festered so deep in this soul, to put aside the cup not so much from his lips as her own, and hold up to her eyes, day by day, the chalice of repentance – all this was within the compass of his will. But he willed it not; he folded up his will and put it aside; he would rather yield his inclinations to hers, and passively close his fingers while he yielded. Why, what devil was in this man also?

From that day Godwin refused to see any physician, prescribing for himself from a private medicine-chest; and from that day he grew rapidly worse and worse. The olden terrors of Sybilla returned upon her as her husband sank so palpably; she slackened her hand, withheld it altogether in a paroxysm of mortal dread which passed very well for conjugal affection, but still from that day he grew rapidly worse and worse. Till in the noon of a certain night, while she was vainly endeavoring to sleep, in an adjoining chamber, the husband called hurriedly to the wife. The wife then rose, hastened to the door in nervous stupor, and stood rigidly looking in from the threshold. The calm, every-day appearance of the patient, as he sat up in his bed, restored her, however, to confidence; and, loosening her clenched hands, she advanced to the foot of the bed.

“Come nearer, Sybilla,” said Godwin. There was something new in the expression of his voice, and she went to his side like one walking on a lake. The sick man placed one arm round her.

“My wife,” he said, and the words fell whispering from his lips, soft as the sound of falling leaves. “My wife, this fever is coming to an end.”

Sybilla shook from head to foot.

“Place your finger on this place,” he said. She touched his wrist, and thought she recognized the difference between a pulse that beats with blood and a pulse that beats with poison. Again Sybilla shook from head to foot.

“And now do look into my eyes, Sybilla” – still he spoke with the same soft voice – “I think they are growing dim.”

She glanced upward for the first time; and his eyes were not dim at all. They were blazing at her; and before she could withdraw her glance he uttered, “Sybilla, I shall be dead in an hour!” and so fixed her eyes upon his face.

If life was of any value to her, it was fortunate for Sybilla at that moment that her heart had grown accustomed to tumult; otherwise it must have burst. As it was, she gradually withdrew her eyes from Godwin’s, and threw herself upon the bed in a passion of tears. And as she lay, burying her head in the clothing, a change passed over her husband’s countenance. The fires were quenched in his eyes, and now they were really dim – with some strange commingling of pity, and melancholy, and agony, and even of yearning love, all in one tear. It was not, however, a time of abiding, and it, too, passed away.

Meanwhile Sybilla still wept and sobbed with her face hidden. Well would it have been for her had she never lifted that face again; better to have wept and sobbed there till every fountain in her breast was still. But she did lift it; and putting forth her hand to assist herself in rising from the bed, she placed it on a breakfast-cup with which John had been habitually served throughout this last illness, and which was not there before. She bounded backward to the wall with a low, long, tremulous cry, and darted an agonized look at John Godwin. He lay with his head pillowed upon his arm, fixedly regarding her. Her head swam; she looked at her husband with the gaze that blind men turn to the sun; she heard a voice far, far away, when he said with slow deliberation —

“Sybilla, I know it! I have known it for a fortnight. I have drunk from that cup fourteen times since I knew it; but never shall drink from it again. You had better go!” He covered his face.

Mechanically, and still entranced in stupor, she obeyed. Slowly attiring herself in all the minutiæ of walking-dress, not forgetting a cloak since the night was cold, she fled down stairs – fled home!

As the outer-door banged-to, the dying man rose, lifted the window-curtain, and watched the hurrying figure of his wife as it emerged here and there full in the light of a lamp, and went on into the darkness beyond. Again and again, and ever less distinct, the shivering mortal passed through narrowing breaks of light into a wider expanse of darkness, as she had passed through many a mercy-sent dawning of remorse into deeper shades of guilt. At length the retreating figure passed for the last time from his straining vision, and he saw her never again.

“O Sybilla, Sybilla,” he said aloud, as he turned from the window, “I pray Heaven the bitter, bitter punishment you now endure may atone for this offense forever! It is enough; for after all I live! And some day, Sybilla, when sorrow and repentance shall have chastened you, it shall be a joy to you to know that I live – broken, unstrung, all youthful vigor shattered, but still not quite a murdered man. Yet if I had not known so early – ”

Shortly after, attired as for a journey, John Godwin stood in the street below – a solitary, hopeless, stricken man. The day had just begun to dawn, as fresh and beautiful as if for the first time it rolled away the darkness from the earth. Clouds laden with soft violet light came up from the East, and shed it all abroad; cool airs came down from the courts of an eternal city, with a message therefrom to all who would stop and listen. More than once did Godwin so pause in the silent streets, listening with fixed attention, drinking the air as draughts of water; and ever as his feet resounded on the pavement again he felt a peaceful sleep settling over his weary spirit. Involuntarily, or rather as a matter of course that no thinking about could affect, he bent his steps toward the leafy old house: he had a vague intention of just looking at it once more. And all his troubles melted away as, one by one, he passed the old landmarks of pilgrimage. Past feelings came back upon him, the same as of old, though robed not now in joy, but in melancholy: the pleasures of an old man’s memory. But how fast his heart beat as he neared the corner whence the old house, and Jessy’s chamber in it, were visible! And there it was! the snowy curtain still flapping in the morning air – the cactus, the roses, the geraniums – the same, the same!

Glancing down the road at about the same time, Jessy descried a man sitting dejectedly on the way-side bank, with his face turned steadily toward her window. Her attention was sufficiently arrested to recall her again and again; and still he sat there – still as before. A thousand unformed emotions suddenly crowded within her; she felt her face grow pale, and her heart sicken. The stranger approached timidly and with an air of guilt; a few paces nearer, and Jessy saw not only who it was, but, by one of those wonderful laws which psychologists vainly endeavor to expound, pretty distinctly how it was. By what mysterious bridge does soul pass over to soul? How came this loving woman to know, from one glance at that bowed form and haggard face, that he had but now escaped, scathed and wounded, through some fearful tribulation which it was necessary for her to know and to share?

Without daring to look again, she knew that Godwin was approaching the house. She went out upon the stairs to listen for his coming; and, after some minutes, seated herself upon them with her hands clasped over her knees, knowing he would come. Her father was away on a short journey – her mother had, months since, gone her last and longest journey: Jessy was alone in the house with the old servant. Presently the expected knock was heard – a faint, appealing knock, it seemed to her; and the next moment they stood once more face to face, with the threshold between them.

Godwin made no attempt to enter: he stood like one sinking under a heavy burden imploring to be relieved.

“Yes! yes! For God’s sake come in!” said Jessy’s trembling voice. And the next moment, as if there he would be safest from the pursuer, she shut the door of her own chamber upon her old lost love. “Now, John, what is all this? What terrible things have you to tell me.”

They sat down together. With dilated eyes and parted lips she listened, as in a very frenzy of words Godwin told his story. Now in drops of molten fire, and now in melancholy tear-drops, he poured out his whole soul before her, till not one agony remained unknown. In the excitement of the story he rose from his chair; and when he had ended all, and stood silent before her, pale and ruined, a wreck most eloquent, her old love, her pity, her anguish burst all bonds: she clasped her arms about his neck, pressed her cheek convulsively to his, and wept as though the flood-gates of her heart were all broken up together. “O, my poor boy! my poor boy! They will kill me too!”

Godwin looked down upon the sobbing girl, trusting his tongue with not a word; and when her tears were all spent, and they stood silently apart, he felt that it was possible to bear up manfully against all distresses, and to go on patiently to the end. But Sybilla was not forgotten; and whatever thoughts passed between Jessy and Godwin in the sympathy of silence, it was of her mainly that they spoke. There was some understanding between them regarding her; her name was the last word uttered before farewell; which, however choked down and delayed, whatever they yearned to say first, each to the other, but were ashamed, had at last to be uttered. “Good-bye, then, dear Jessy,” said Godwin, as they stood as of old in the porch before the door, and it sounded to them both like the snatch of an old-loved, long-forgotten song. She put her hand in his, and the direful Whither and how long? rose up before them, and was answered in each, Anywhere, to the ends of the earth perhaps – forever! “God bless you, dear John,” said she in a broken voice; and yielding herself to his embrace and his kisses, she added, “and, right or wrong, I will love you, dream of you, pray for you, and never cease till I die!” The haggard face of Godwin lit up with one last look, revealing more than words. “O faithful, loving girl,” he said, “what have I lost, and yet not wholly lost!” He passed through the gate, went out upon the road, and for miles turned not his head.

Her Lieutenant-General Sir Victor and all the idols of her vanity shattered about her, Sybilla heard with renewed dismay of Godwin’s disappearance. It was another stroke of the two-edged sword; for she believed that, with the intention of screening her from justice, he had crawled away to die in some obscurity; and had it not been for the consequent excitement, the daily expectation of hearing of his death, the wretched wife must have sunk under the agonies of her remorse. But, when a few weeks were passed came Jessy with news of his life instead – with grief and consolation, and not a word of reproach. Long and painful was the interview between these two women; and, soon after they parted, the high-strung nerves of Sybilla gave way, and she was mercifully laid upon a bed of sickness. But there was a secret between them now, betwixt the innocent and the guilty, that rendered separation impossible; and before Sybilla rose, a repentant woman, they were knit in close bonds of dependence and support.

Five years have now elapsed; and now and then, perhaps this very day, these two strange friends bend their still young and beautiful heads together in secret over some little piece of news – from Paris – Vienna – St. Petersburgh. For, as the best outlet of never-resting emotions, Godwin had turned himself to music, had spent whole nights in pouring from the strings of his violin songs of his experience. Till at last he began to grow famous; and is now known to the cognoscenti by a new name – which, after all, is only Jessy’s name Italianized – as a musician full of ungovernable fire and pathos, as a wild, erratic, fast-consuming genius, careless at once of emolument and praise. And so, suddenly appearing here and there, he still pours music into ears that understand not the bitter secret of its power.

TO MY CIGAR

—BY CHARLES ALBERT JANVIER—              Oh! bright cigar!  I love thy wreaths of smoke so dimly curling,  I love thy murky cloud above me whirling,              While like a star  Amid the smoke thy brilliant tip is shining,  And bids me cast all care and repining              From me afar.              Companion dear!  When weary of this world, its empty pleasure,  Its ceaseless toil, its cares without a measure,              Its doubt and fear,  Then Fancy paints upon thy bright cloud waving  The far-off friends and scenes my heart is craving,              And brings them near.              And when in sorrow  My heart is bowed, and all is cold around it,  And dreary thoughts and weary cares surround it,              Yet still I borrow  From thee a solace, while dear Hope, reviving,  Brings to my view, the mists before it driving,              A bright to-morrow.

THE TRIAL BY BATTLE

A TALE OF CHIVALRY(Concluded from page 429.)CHAPTER IIITHE JUDGMENT OF HEAVEN

Upon the appointed day, the Count of Barcelona, who had passed the preceding eve in masses and prayers, presented himself at the gate of the camp, mounted on a horse from Seville – a steed whose slender legs and light step made him rather resemble a courser for a fête-day than a battle charger.

The champion of the empress was clad in a coat of mail of polished steel, inlaid with gold, the work of the Moors of Cordova, in the midst of which shone a sun of diamonds, which threw rays like pointed flames; round his neck he wore the chain given him by the empress, for whose life and fame he was about to do battle. He struck the barrier three times, and thrice he was asked by a herald who he was, to which he always gave this reply – “I am the Champion of God.” At the third response, the gate was opened, and the Count of Barcelona entered the lists, which were arranged in an oval form, like the ancient classic circus, and bordered with seats, raised one above each other in tiers, filled at this time with the nobility of the Rhine, who had hurried to see the imposing and interesting spectacle.

At one end of the arena the Emperor Henry was seen, in his imperial robes, seated on his throne; on the other, in a wooden lodge, sitting on a common stool, was discovered the empress, dressed in black, holding her infant son in her arms. Directly opposite the hut in which she was immured, stood the pile destined to consume her and her babe, if her champion were defeated; and near it was placed the common hangman, in a red frock, his arms and legs bare, holding in one hand a chafing-dish, and in the other a torch. In the middle of the curve that formed the lists was an altar, whereon lay the holy evangelists, upon which a crucifix was placed. Opposite the altar stood an uncovered bier.

The Count of Barcelona entered the lists, which he rode round, while a flourish of trumpets proclaimed to the accusers of the empress that the Champion of God was at his post; for by this sacred appellation the defender of him or her who appealed to the ordeal of battle was always styled in the ages of chivalry. The count stopped before the emperor, whom he saluted by lowering the point of his lance to his feet; backing his steed, whose head he kept toward the sovereign, till having reached the middle he made him spring on all his feet, executing this demi-volte in so able a manner, that everybody acknowledged him for a most gallant cavalier. Then he advanced slowly toward the lodge of the empress, curbing the ardor of the mettled charger, till he reached the spot where she was seated, when he dismounted, the noble animal standing as still in the lists as if he had been made of marble. Ascending the steps that conducted him to her side, as if to prove to all present his conviction of her innocence, he knelt on one knee, and asked her if she were still minded to accept of him for her champion.

The empress, overpowered by her feelings, could only extend her hand to him, in token of her acceptance of his services. The count took off his helmet, and kissed the offered hand of the empress with deep respect; then rising, with sparkling eyes, fastened his helmet to the saddle-bow, replacing himself in the saddle with a single bound, and with no more assistance from the stirrups than if he had been clad in a silken vest. Opposite the altar, on the other side of the lists, he recognized the jongleur who had been the cause of his coming there, seated at the feet of a beautiful young lady, whom he rightly supposed to be the heiress of Provence. He advanced toward her, in the midst of the enthusiastic applause of the spectators, upon whom his youth, heroic beauty, and chivalrous bearing, had made a lively impression, and whose vows and prayers for his success were the more ardent because he appeared too young and slight to risk his life in single combat against two such formidable knights.