TALES OF THE WILD AND THE WONDERFUL.

“Messer, dovete havete pigliate tante coglionerie?” quoth the Reader.

Cardinal Ippolito d’Este to Ariosto.

LONDON: PRINTED FOR HURST, ROBINSON, AND CO. 5 WATERLOO-PLACE, PALL MALL; AND A. CONSTABLE AND CO. EDINBURGH.

M.DCCC.XXV.

p. vTO

JOANNA BAILLIE,

AS A SLIGHT TRIBUTE OF ADMIRATION TO HER RESPLENDENT TALENTS,

THIS VOLUME

IS DEDICATED,

BY

THE AUTHOR.

p. viiTO THE READER.

Pause one moment, gentle Reader—only one little moment will I detain you, while I reply to the question which I have supposed you to ask in the title-page. Blame not me, I beseech you, if you are compelled to make the usual accusation against authors, that there is nothing new in the pages which I diffidently present to you: I am sorry for it, but I cannot help it. Solomon asserted that all things under the sun were aged in his time; and if the wisest of old gentlemen could find nothing new in that early stage of his empire, what can be expected from a poor scribbler like me, near three thousand p. viiiyears after him? Consider too, dear Reader, that this is the first time I have appeared before you in the character of a story-teller; and that I am a timid, nervous subject, and very easily discouraged. Accept me then upon the score of wishing to amuse you, and permit me to say something for my Tales, after having said so much for myself.

Of the stories, “Der Freischütz,” as every body knows, is from the German. “The Fortunes of De la Pole” is original; so is “The Prediction,” and “The Yellow Dwarf,” if I may be allowed that claim for such a “thing of shreds and patches;” it is an olla podrida of odds and ends, a snip of the garment of every fairy tale written since the days of King Arthur. The last story, “The Lord of the Maelstrom,” is also original, though, as in that of “The Yellow Dwarf,” I have raised my structure upon an old nursery foundation; but it appeared to me an excellent vehicle for the beautiful mythology p. ixof the North, and the introduction of Odin and his exploits,—whose history, by the way, I believe, has been extracted from the Talmud, or from the rabbinical traditions of the events previous to the creation, and the deeds of Moses and others. I, moreover, designed to have given thee a little poetry for thy money, gentle Reader, but the booksellers shook their heads when I mentioned my design, and told me it was out of fashion; so I

returned my treasures in that way to my desk, there to remain, among many other excellent things, I assure thee, until it should again be the taste in England; and, in the meantime, offer these Tales of diablerie for your amusement. Entreat me kindly, gentle Reader, I beseech you, for two reasons;—first, because it will entirely depend, upon your reception of this, whether I shall ever write a second volume—and secondly, because there has been a sad sweep lately among those who used to cater for your diversion: many who p. xwere most deserving have been snatched from your admiration and regard. “Shelley is not—Lord Byron is not—and Maturin have they taken away.” For myself, I am not a long-lived man, and therefore advise you to make much of me while I am with you; and as an example, look upon these “coglionerie” with a milder eye than their merits may seem to deserve from your judgment.

I am, dear Reader, truly yours,

THE AUTHOR.

p. xiCONTENTS.

PAGE

The Prediction

1

The Yellow Dwarf

48

Der Freischütz

128

The Fortunes of de la Pole

167

The Lord of the Maelstrom

233

Notes to the Lord of the Maelstrom

352

p. 1THE PREDICTION.

“Let’s talk of Graves.”—Shakspeare.

On the south-west coast of the principality of Wales stands a romantic little village, inhabited chiefly by the poorer class of people, consisting of small farmers and oyster dredgers, whose estates are the wide ocean, and whose ploughs are the small craft, in which they glide over its interminable fields in search of the treasures which they wring from its bosom; it is built on the very top of a hill, commanding on the one side, a view of an immense bay, and on the other, of the peaceful green fields and valleys, cultivated by p. 2the greater number of its quiet inhabitants. The approach to it from the nearest town was by a road which branched away into lanes and wooded walks, and from the sea by a beautiful little bay, running up far into the land; both sides of which, and indeed all the rest of the coast, were guarded by craggy and gigantic rocks, some of them hollowed into caverns, into which none of the inhabitants, from motives of superstition, reverence, and fear, had ever dared to penetrate. There were, at the period of

which we are about to treat, no better sort of inhabitants in the little village just described, none of those so emphatically distinguished as “quality” by the country people; they had neither parson, lawyer, nor doctor, among them, and of course there was a tolerable equality among the residents. The farmer, who followed his own plough in the spring, singing the sweet wild national chaunt of the season, and bound up with his own hands his sheaves in the autumn, was not richer, greater, nor finer, than he who, bare-legged on the strand, gathered in the hoar weed for the farmer in the spring, or dared the wild winds of autumn and the wrath of the winter in his little boat, to earn with his dredging net a yet harder subsistence for his family. Distinctions were unknown in the village, every man was the equal of his neighbour.

p. 3But, though rank and its polished distinctions were strange in the village of N—, the superiority of talent was felt and acknowledged almost without a pause or a murmur. There was one who was as a king amongst them, by the mere force of a mightier spirit than those with whom he sojourned had been accustomed to feel among them: he was a dark and moody man, a stranger, evidently of a higher order than those around him, who had but a few months before, without any apparent object, settled among them: he was poor, but had no occupation—he lived frugally, but quite alone—and his sole employments were to read during the day, and wander out unaccompanied into the fields or by the beach during the night. Sometimes indeed he would relieve a suffering child or rheumatic old man by medicinal herbs, reprove idleness and drunkenness in the youth, and predict to all the good and evil consequences of their conduct; and his success in some cases, his foresight in others, and his wisdom in all, won for him a high reputation among the cottagers, to which

his taciturn habits contributed not a little, for, with the vulgar as with the educated, no talker was ever seriously taken for a conjuror, though a silent man is often decided to be a wise one.

There was but one person in N— at all disposed p. 4to rebel against the despotic sovereignty which Rhys Meredith was silently establishing over the quiet village, and that was precisely the person most likely to effect a revolution; she was a beautiful maiden, the glory and boast of the village, who had been the favourite of, and to a certain degree educated by, the late lady of the lord of the manor; but she had died, and her pupil, with a full consciousness of her intellectual superiority, had returned to her native village, where she determined to have an empire of her own, which no rival should dispute: she laughed at the maidens who listened to the predictions of Rhys, and she refused her smiles to the youths who consulted him upon their affairs and their prospects; and as the beautiful Ruth was generally beloved, the silent Rhys was soon in danger of being abandoned by all, save doting men and paralytic women, and feeling himself an outcast in the village of N—.

But to be such was not the object of Meredith; he was an idle man, and the gifts of the villagers contributed to spare him from exertion; he knew too, that in another point of view this ascendancy was necessary to his purposes; and as he had failed to establish it by wisdom and benevolence, he determined to try the effect of fear. The character of the people with whom he sojourned was p. 5admirably calculated to assist his projects; his predictions were now uttered more clearly, and his threats denounced in sterner tones and stronger and plainer words; and when he predicted that old Morgan Williams, who had been stricken with the palsy, would die at the turn of tide, three days from that on which he spoke, and that the light little boat of gay Griffy Morris, which sailed from the bay in a bright winter’s morning, should never again make the shore; and the man died, and the storm arose, even as he had said; men’s hearts died within them, and they bowed down before his words, as if he had been their general fate and the individual destiny of each.

Ruth’s rosy lip grew pale for a moment as she heard of these things; in the next her spirit returned, and “I will make him tell my fortune,” she said, as she went with a party of laughers to search out and deride the conjuror. He was alone when they broke in upon him, and their mockeries goaded his spirit; but his anger was deep, not loud; and while burning with wrath, he yet could calmly consider the means of vengeance: he knew the master spirit with which he had to contend; it was no ordinary mind, and would have smiled at ordinary terrors. To have threatened her with sickness, misfortune, or death, p. 6would have been to call forth the energies of that lofty spirit, and prepare it to endure, and it would have gloried in manifesting its powers of endurance; he must humble it therefore by debasement; he must ruin its confidence in itself; and to this end he resolved to threaten her with crime. His resolution was taken and effected; his credit was at stake; he must daunt his enemy, or surrender to her power: he foretold sorrows and joys to the

listening throng, not according to his passion, but his judgment, and he drew a blush upon the cheek of one, by revealing a secret which Ruth herself, and another, alone knew, and which prepared the former to doubt of her own judgment, as it related to this extraordinary man.

Ruth was the last who approached to hear the secret of her destiny. The wizard paused as he looked upon her,—opened his book,—shut it,—paused,—and again looked sadly and fearfully upon her; she tried to smile, but felt startled, she knew not why; the bright inquiring glance of her dark eye could not change the purpose of her enemy. Her smile could not melt, nor even temper, the hardness of his deep-seated malice: he again looked sternly upon her brow, and then coldly wrung out the slow soul-withering words, “Maiden, thou art doomed to be a murderer!”

p. 7From that hour Rhys Meredith became the destiny of Ruth Tudor. At first she spurned at his prediction, and alternately cursed and laughed at him for the malice of his falsehood: but when she found that none laughed with her, that men looked upon her with suspicious eyes, women shrunk from her society, and children shrieked at her presence, she felt that these were signs of truth, and her high spirit no longer struggled against the conviction; a change came over her mind when she had known how horrid it was to be alone. Abhorring the prophet, she yet clung to his footsteps, and while she sat by his side, felt as if he alone could avert that evil destiny which he alone had foreseen. With him only was she seen to smile; elsewhere, sad, silent, stern; it seemed as if she were ever occupied in nerving her mind for that which she had to do, and her beauty, already of the majestic cast, grew absolutely awful, as her perfect features assumed an expression which might have belonged to the angel of vengeance or death.

But there were moments when her naturally strong spirit, not yet wholly subdued, struggled against her conviction, and endeavoured to find modes of averting her fate: it was in one of these, perhaps, that she gave her hand to a wooer, from a distant part of the country, a sailor, who either p. 8had not heard, or did not regard the prediction of Rhys, upon condition that he should remove her far from her native village to the home of his family and friends, for she sometimes felt as if the decree which had gone forth against her, could not be fulfilled except upon the spot where she had heard it, and that her heart would be lighter if men’s eyes would again look upon her in kindliness, and she no longer sate beneath the glare of those that knew so well the secret of her soul. Thus thinking, she quitted N— with her husband; and the tormentor, who had poisoned her repose, soon after her departure, left the village as secretly and as suddenly as he had entered it.

But, though Ruth could depart from his corporeal presence, and look upon his cruel visage no more, yet the eye of her soul was fixed upon his shadow, and his airy form, the creation of her sorrow, still sat by her side; the blight that he had breathed upon her peace had withered her heart, and it was in vain that she sought to forget or banish the recollection from her brain. Men and women smiled upon her as before in the days of her joy, the friends of her husband welcomed her to their bosoms, but they could give no peace to her heart: she shrunk from their friendship, she shivered equally at their neglect, she dreaded any cause that might lead to that which, it had p. 9been said, she must do; nightly she sat alone and thought, she dwelt upon the characters of those around her, and shuddered that in some she saw violence and selfishness enough to cause injury, which she might be supposed to resent to blood. Then she wept bitter tears and thought of her native village, whose inhabitants were so mild, and whose previous knowledge of her hapless destiny

might induce them to avoid all that might hasten its completion, and sighed to think she had ever left it in the mistaken hope of finding peace elsewhere. Again, her sick fancy would ponder upon the modes of murder, and wonder how her victim would fall. Against the use of actual violence she had disabled herself; she had never struck a blow, her small hand would have suffered injury in the attempt; she understood not the usage of fire-arms, she was ignorant of what were poisons, and a knife she never allowed herself, even for the most necessary purposes: how then could she slay? At times she took comfort from thoughts like these, and at others, in the blackness of her despair, she would cry, “If it must be, O let it come, and these miserable anticipations cease; then I shall, at least, destroy but one; now, in my incertitude, I am the murderer of many!”

p. 10Her husband went forth and returned upon the voyages which made up the avocation and felicity of his life, without noticing the deep-rooted sorrow of his wife; he was a common man, and of a common mind; his eye had not seen the awful beauty of her whom he had chosen; his spirit had not felt her power; and, if he had marked, he would not have understood her grief; so she ministered to him as a duty. She was a silent and obedient wife, but she saw him come home without joy, and witnessed his departure without regret; he neither added to nor diminished her sorrow: but destiny had one solitary blessing in store for the victim of its decrees,—a child was born to the hapless Ruth, a lovely little girl soon slept upon her bosom, and, coming as it did, the one lone and lovely rose-bud in her desolate garden, she welcomed it with a warmer joy and cherished it with a kindlier hope.

A few years went by unsoiled by the wretchedness which had marked the preceding; the joy of the mother softened the anguish of the condemned, and sometimes when she looked upon her daughter she ceased to despair: but destiny had not forgotten her claim, and soon her hand pressed heavily upon her victim; the giant ocean rolled over the body of her husband, poverty p. 11visited the cottage of the widow, and famine’s gaunt figure was visible in the distance. Oppression came with these, for arrears of rent were demanded, and he who asked was brutal in his anger and harsh in his language to the sufferers. Ruth shuddered as she heard him speak, and trembled for him and for herself; the unforgotten prophecy arose in her mind, and she preferred even witnesses to his brutality and her degradation, rather than encounter his anger and her own dark thoughts alone.

Thus goaded, she saw but one thing that could save her, she fled from her persecutors to the home of her youth, and, leading her little Rachel by the hand, threw herself into the arms of her kin: they received her with distant kindness, and assured her that she should not want: in this they kept their promise, but it was all they did for Ruth and her daughter; a miserable subsistence was given to them, and that was embittered by distrust, and the knowledge that it was yielded unwillingly.

Among the villagers, although she was no longer shunned as formerly, her story was not forgotten; if it had been, her terrific beauty, the awful flashing of her eyes, her large black curls hanging like thunder-clouds over her stern and p. 12stately brow and marble throat, her majestic stature, and solemn movements, would have recalled it to their recollections. She was a marked being, and all believed (though each would have pitied her, had they not been afraid) that her evil destiny was not to be averted; she looked like one fated to some wonderful deed. They saw she was not of them, and though they did not directly avoid her, yet they never threw themselves in her way, and thus the hapless Ruth had ample leisure to contemplate and grieve over her fate. One night she sat alone in her wretched hovel, and, with many bitter ruminations, was watching the happy sleep of her child, who slumbered tranquilly on their only bed: midnight had long passed, yet Ruth was not disposed to rest; she trimmed her dull light, and said mentally, “Were

I not poor, such a temptation might not assail me, riches would procure me deference; but poverty, or the wrongs it brings, may drive me to this evil; were I above want it would be less likely to be. O, my child, for thy sake would I avoid this doom more than for mine own, for if it should bring death to me, what will it not hurl on thee?—infamy, agony, scorn.”

She wept aloud as she spoke, and scarcely seemed to notice the singularity (at that late p. 13hour) of some one without, attempting to open the door; she heard, but the circumstance made little impression; she knew that as yet her doom was unfulfilled, and that, therefore, no danger could reach her; she was no coward at any time, but now despair had made her brave; the door opened and a stranger entered, without either alarming or disturbing her, and it was not till he had stood face to face with Ruth, and discovered his features to be those of Rhys Meredith, that she sprung up from her seat and gazed wildly and earnestly upon him.