LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2492, 1 April 1882, Page 4

LITERATURE.

UKDEi TOE STAE3,

Hafh! hush 1 Listen! What is that sound? It makes me shiver. My fLsh creepi; my heart sinks ■with fear ! It Is the sea and the wi»i whispering together. Ihe sea murmurs the dresd secret that w:s locked in its cold gray bosom. The wind moans and *hrleka over the record of fohy, frailty, and crime. The coy young moon pales and shrinks behind a dark cloud in shame nnd the stars, even the bright stars, grow dim with tears. Traitors, all of ye to brealk faith with a human soul; to give voice to the crnel world ; to blazon forth taut I hilled her ■! Let the angels weep ; let the devils mock. What reck I, after ad, of foul traitor-tongues unloo-ed ? Here, in this palatial home, monarch of all I survey i no lips near to upbraid, no hand nigh to be uplifted in blame or p/aiae. Can I ask more of fate than this ? . A regal chamber, warned by a single glint of starlight that slants down, down on my bra*n, mating It dizzy, until that dream besets me ; "that horrid, horrid, dream’! Sleeping aid waking, it cornea again and again. 1 writho "in all Its serpent folds; I wrestle I with its giant force It is all In vain. It tracks me like a wild beast. It is always biforc'tne, startling, vivid, horrible 1 Four walls, grim and green with <e.mp and age, surround me; a pallet-bed hears my weary limbs, and on a straw bottomed chair I sit, proud as an emperor ou hie dais, brooding on the past, that is a torture j on the future, that is a black ; on the present, 1 laugh them to<sccrn. Mighty as they are —mightier a thousand times thsn my poor wits—l managed to foil them. My tongue revealed the secret long ago that they have broken now. Ah, how that etar fevers my pulse; cands the life blood .rioting through my veins ; mikes me grow chill, chill as if my heart were ice bound-’! Tkcow its gleam so well, 'he pale, pale yellow gleam that fell from the purple aky, down, down, Just where It lay ! It kissed the ashy pallor of the dead face, and the lips that, shorn of tkdr icarlet, had grown black—O God, black as my own soul! That murmuring water will never wash my soul whitejagam ; that moaning wind will bear on its wings the fell story cf my life from pole to pole. Men will shun me ; women will hide their fair white faces, because I killed her —sent her erring soul headlong into eternity. _ But 1 shall eeo her again with demons assisting at the tryst; she and I the maddest, fiercest demons of them all. Let me remember how it was. Clouds have hidden away that mocking star, and my brain gicws cider, calmer; and the years—one thousand years it seems to me since I stood at my mother’s knee, white scaled, innocent of sin—cone to me by snatches again. Great heavens I How often have I onraed the heur of my birth, and down on my shaking knees wearied the Almighty with f i antic prayers to. take back the life'll* gave! Rest, with the fiends of remorse and vengeance tracking me' each hour I breathe 1 It was within the stately walls of Tregarthon that I first opened my eyes on this world. Tregarthon had been the home of my foref sthera for many generations. It was built as far back os 1300 by a Geoffrey Tregarthon, who was knighted for a series of gallant services rendered to King Fdward I, to whom ha was a devoted subject. I- e fell, pierced to the heart, in the thickest of the fight between the forces of Aymor de Valance and Robert Bruce, and was found on tbe field Of battle with the English standard clasped tightly to his breast, -tand I, his descendant, shad die more gloriously still, with the hangman’s knot around my neck, and crowds of human beings watching my last throes, with yells and snouts. I hour them now 1 I hear them always, sleeping i nd waking.: but——- Hare I tell? Walls have ears, and the sea is listening, bat I’il whisper it—l shall cheat yet 1 I’ll meet Azreal alone with no prying eyes to see the dread sturggle, and they will find me dead. Dead to this world, bat what of the next 7 Tregarthon had be n built on the site of aa old monastry, and was chilling and repelling in aspect. A long avenue of old trees led up to the castle and in midsummer time great dark shadows slanted down from them, They were a queer race, those Tregarthons, of which lam « scion. They were brimful of pilde and pomp.; pride of pedigree, price of the escutcheon that had rested pare and untarnished as undriven snow ; pride of the overflowing coffers that had come to them, not by honest labor cr talent, but by the right of lords of the soil for many thousand acres. Pride by which ‘ angels have fallen ’ was the ral'iog,paß«ion of their breasts. The besotting sin of the family, fulsome, uncompromising, narrow pride, descended f om father to son as natural ao heirloom as Tregarthon it’elf ; and they pampered it, aod fed it, and hugged it to their hearts, and held it as their dearest possession. Put this was before the hour I fell from the Tregarthon high estate. My father, Hugo Tregarthon, was a fit suzerain for hi* home. A tall man, straight

as a poplar tree, stately as his own oaks; with high squiline features, eyes like a hawk, and hair like spun silver. Dressed in black velvet, with priceless point for collar and ruffle, he looked as if he had just stepped out of oi e of the great worm eateu frames in the picture gallery that took up a whole wing of the building. Reserved to moorseness, pompous in bearing, bard as adamant in nature, ho never unbent, and barely smiled, It is scarcely a marvel that I feared him, but did not Jove him. Not an approving glance, or a kiss, can memory recall. My mother died when I was ten years old. I recollect that I regarded her with a sort of religious adoration and admiration, just es one would regard an angel or a star, or a splendid painting or piece of exquisite statuary, that one dared not approach too near, or touch without permission. Every day I used to be tak en up to a sumptuous apartment, well hung with blue and silver, to receive a maternal kies from lips so red, so lovely, and so strangely cold ; Ups that mechanically touched my baby brow, but never said one word of softness to the only off spring God had given her. She was no flaxon beauty with co- al and opal tints, and azure orbs. Her ohaek was dusky, but rich with glowing crimson roses of the sweet south. Her eyes were immense, and dark as midnight skies, and heavy ebon tresses crowned her imperial brow. Her form was grand and stately as an Eastern queen. She rarely smiled. Scorn and weariness sat on her features, and her heart was dead to all living things. She had burled It in the tomb of her first passionate love. My mother was partly Spanish, and all the intense fervour of her nature had been lavished on a young Spaniard, whom she believed to be devoted to her till awakened to his falsity by his clandestine marriage with her younger sister. But in spite of his desertion, she adored him still, and three years after her union with Hugo Tregarthon she knelt by her first lover’s dying coach, and swore to cherish his child, whose mother hal died in giving her birth. To save Mercedes from being homeless and frlead’eas, Mrs Tregartbon took her to her arms, and thus It was that the girl became an inmate of my home. But as a boy I hated her, for she had smiles and caresses from my mother, when I, flesh of her flesh, was put aside to make way for the childJ of |the man she had worshipped. One day silence and gloom reigned in the house, for its mistress was at death’s door. I crept away to a corner of the garden, never once looking at the scarlet flowers or the spangled butterflies that disported them selves in the scented air.

I wanted to realise my mother In death, when she w ml 1 lie in that dreadful dark mausoleum where the Tregarthons had slept side by side for generations. I wanted to picture her glowing cheeks white and cold like marble ; her lovely etarlike eyes, with their light quenched ; and her scarlet lips, set and rigid, with the curling scorn gone out from them.

All of a sudden a great horror rose up before me, and, flying from the spot, I hid myself in an old lumber room, lest death, with his long icy fingers, should press the life out of my heart, The next day Mrs Tregarthon died; a week afterwards I watched the funeral pageant with i uspense and grief, though the great black horses, tossing their heads and moving the ebon feathers to and fro, pleased my fancy. In a little time Mrs Hugo Tregarthon, with her beautiful face and scornful bearing, soon passed out of remembrance; only I remembered her. And when there was cool shadow beneath the ancient trees, whoso large arms stretched yearningly to the heavens, and a strong fragrance of flowers around j when a hum of insects rose up from the ground, and a duet between a rivulet and fluttering leaflets murmured in my ears, I sat on a fallen branch, tears blisterlrg my

cheeks, and my heart aching with a greater sense of loneliness than it had ever known before ; while my eyes mechanically followed tha happy flight of birds acre 33 the cloudless sky, and the dancing of tho butterflies over the scanted bloom. My mother had never loved mo ; yet when she died I satined to have lost every thing. Scarcely two years after Mrs Tregarthon’s death, Hugo Tregarthon brought home another bride. This time his choice had fallen on tho tochorless daughter of a Scotchman. The second Mrs iregarthou was a complete antithesis to rhe first one, net only in person, hut in character. She was smalt and fragile, with tho blue eyes and fair hair of tbo North ; and her disposition was meek and shy. And-she had a little) niece called Muriel, the loveliest, most fairy like of creatures, who was dearer to her than her own child could have been. Muriel was five years younger than herself, and Mercedes D’Alicant was three years older than I was. A greater contrast than these two girls could hardly have existed. Mercedes, so tall and and proud, with cold grey eyes and a pile olive skin ; handsome and imperial withal, but strong, self reliant, hard. Muriel, with the pearly tints of a Saxon, eyes of true turqcoise, hair like spun gold, that floated in loose waving masses over her fair white shoulders down to her slim waist. As the years grew on, and Muriel emerged from childhood, I loved her-; loved her with a passionate love that was 'terrible in its intensity. And another man loved her too, Juan Gonsales, a Spaniard, and a kinsman of Mercedes, who had, by evilneac and cleverness, ingratiated himself into Hngc Tregarthon’s regard, and was a frequent guest at th castle. It was evident that Juan idolised Muriels but although, with the habitual meekness of her nature, the child rest'd passive under his devotion, it was easy to see that no reciprocity resigned in her bosom Nay, at times I saw her shrink away under the passionate gaze of his great Spanish-eyes, that were filled with all the fire and 'fervor of the sons of the sonth. Yet I —fool, madman, dolt—was deceived : but not for long. I loved her, as I have said ; I loved Muriel batter than my own soul; and on" day, when the sun was shining and tbs flowers were blowing, sbe and I came face ti face. It must have been the subtle spell, born of such a scene, that made me forget doubt and fear la the g’amour of her < xqnisite face. ‘Muriel,’ I whispered, ‘I love you, and lay my happiness at your feet. Will you take it into your keapiug ? Will you be my wife V

Cold words—prosaic, commonplace, but passion, fervid, burning, has no eloquence. Her eyes were uplifted to mine for a moment, and then their lids drooped, but I had caught their sweet glanoe ; and in another minute I clasped her in my arms, and her fair he'd was pillowed ’on my breast. The days went by like a halcyon dream. Hugo Tregarthon had sanctioned our betrothal, and Juan Gonsales was absent; so that Muriel and I were left in our paradise, save for Mercedes. She never lost sight of us for long. Like a wild beast, she was ever on our track. She never spoke much ; but her gray eyes gleamed like sttel when they rested on Muriel and me. Casual watchers would have read hatred in Mercedes’ glance; but with the instinct that always lives in human nature, I knew that Mercedes loved me, ay, dearer than her own soul! I shunned her I the very knowledge of her love seemed like treason to my worship of my betrothed, and perhaps it was my very avoidance of her that fanned the dame in Mercedes’ breast into greater fury. Kight away towards the beach there was an artificial cutting through a large rook, with an archway of century old trees above. It was just like the cloisters of an ancient monastery. The stones were cool and agree able to the feet, and on either side bunches of feathery ferns nodded their heads, and greon tufts of moss peeped out of the crevices. And it was there that I met Mercedes one summer’s eve. It was the first time 1 had been alone with her since I had told Muriel of my love, and our engagement had been announced at Tregarthon. * Guy, I wanted to apeak to yon, and am glad of an opportunity of doing so/ she said, in a formal tone, cold as ice. * dpeak on, fair lady,’ I cried gaily; since Muriel had accepted mo I had grown gay and joyous as a boy ; it seemed as If thn whole world was full of sunshine and happiness, •You have not wished me joy,’ I added. * Joy !’ Mercedes repeated the word with a sneer curling her bp ; her eyes flashed, her cheeks flushed, and just for a minute she staggered. I put out my hard hastily towards her 5 but, pushing it roughly aside, she shouted, ‘Don’t touch me ! Don’t dare to touch me!’ I stared at her am? zed, Then she turned and faced me !’ ‘Joy! I have not wished you joy ! No, nor will 1! I care for Muriel; and I cannot bear to see her drifting into deceit and misery without stretching out a saving hand. You believe that Muriel loves yon, Gnv ?’ ‘Thank God, I do ! I answered solemnly ; but even as I spoke a cold ehivor ran thron ;h me, when Mercedes broke into a shrill unmusical laugh. * Fool! ’ she muttered ; ‘ Muriel loves another man ; loves him so dearly that were you ten times her husband she would never forget Juan nor the kisses he has implanted on her lips.’ ‘ You lie ! ’ burst from me. Shaking with rage, I seized her arm and flung her a few paces. Fhe recovered her equilibrium, and only showed her resentment by the pallor of her cheek and a steady hard look in her «ye. (To oe continued )