CHAPTER IV. SIBYLL.
While Montagu in anxious forethought awaited the revolt that Robin ofRedesdale had predicted; while Edward feasted and laughed, merry-madewith his courtiers, and aided the conjugal duties of his good citizensin London; while the queen and her father, Lord Rivers, more and morein the absence of Warwick encroached on all the good things power canbestow and avarice seize; while the Duchess of Bedford and Friar Bungeytoiled hard at the waxen effigies of the great earl, who still held hisroyal son-in-law in his court at Calais,--the stream of our narrativewinds from its noisier channels, and lingers, with a quiet wave, aroundthe temple of a virgin's heart. Wherefore is Sibyll sad? Some shortmonth since and we beheld her gay with hope and basking in the sunnyatmosphere of pleasure and of love. The mind of this girl was a singularcombination of tenderness and pride,--the first wholly natural, the lastthe result of circumstance and position. She was keenly conscious of hergentle birth and her earlier prospects in the court of Margaret; andthe poverty and distress and solitude in which she had grown up from thechild into the woman had only served to strengthen what, in her nature,was already strong, and to heighten whatever was already proud. Ever inher youngest dreams of the future ambition had visibly blent itself withthe vague ideas of love. The imagined wooer was less to be young andfair than renowned and stately. She viewed him through the mists of thefuture, as the protector of her persecuted father, as the rebuilder of afallen House, as the ennobler of a humbled name; and from the moment inwhich her girl's heart beat at the voice of Hastings, the ideal of hersoul seemed found. And when, transplanted to the court, she learned tojudge of her native grace and loveliness by the common admiration theyexcited, her hopes grew justified to her inexperienced reason. Often andever the words of Hastings, at the house of Lady Longueville, rang inher ear, and thrilled through the solitude of night,--"Whoever is fairand chaste, gentle and loving, is in the eyes of William de Hastings themate and equal of a king." In visits that she had found opportunity tomake to the Lady Longueville, these hopes were duly fed; for the oldLancastrian detested the Lady Bonville, as Lord Warwick's sister,and she would have reconciled her pride to view with complacency hisalliance with the alchemist's daughter, if it led to his estrangementfrom the memory of his first love; and, therefore, when her quick eyepenetrated the secret of Sibyll's heart, and when she witnessed--forHastings often encountered (and seemed to seek the encounter) the youngmaid at Lady Longueville's house--the unconcealed admiration whichjustified Sibyll in her high-placed affection, she scrupled not toencourage the blushing girl by predictions in which she forced her ownbetter judgment to believe. Nor, when she learned Sibyll's descent froma family that had once ranked as high as that of Hastings, would sheallow that there was any disparity in the alliance she foretold. Butmore, far more than Lady Longueville's assurances, did the delicateand unceasing gallantries of Hastings himself flatter the fond faithof Sibyll. True, that he spoke not actually of love, but every lookimplied, every whisper seemed to betray it. And to her he spoke as to anequal, not in birth alone, but in mind; so superior was she in culture,in natural gifts, and, above all, in that train of high thought andelevated sentiment, in which genius ever finds a sympathy, to thecourt-flutterers of her sex, that Hastings, whether or not he cherisheda warmer feeling, might well take pleasure in her converse, and feelthe lovely infant worthy the wise man's trust. He spoke to her withoutreserve of the Lady Bonville, and he spoke with bitterness. "Iloved her," he said, "as woman is rarely loved. She deserted me foranother--rather should she have gone to the convent than the altar; andnow, forsooth, she deems she hath the right to taunt and to rate me, todictate to me the way I should walk, and to flaunt the honours I havewon."
"May that be no sign of a yet tender interest?" said Sibyll, timidly.
The eyes of Hastings sparkled for a moment, but the gleam vanished."Nay, you know her not. Her heart is marble, as hard and as cold;her very virtue but the absence of emotion,--I would say, of gentleremotion; for, pardieu, such emotions as come from ire and pride andscorn are the daily growth of that stern soil. Oh, happy was my escape!Happy the desertion which my young folly deemed a curse! No!" he added,with a sarcastic quiver of his lip--"no; what stings and galls the Ladyof Harrington and Bonville, what makes her countenance change in mypresence, and her voice sharpen at my accost, is plainly this: inwedding her dull lord and rejecting me, Katherine Nevile deemed shewedded power and rank and station; and now, while we are both young,how proves her choice? The Lord of Harrington and Bonville is so noted adolt, that even the Neviles cannot help him to rise,--the meanest officeis above his mind's level; and, dragged down by the heavy clay to whichher wings are yoked, Katherine, Lady of Harrington and Bonville--oh,give her her due titles!--is but a pageant figure in the court. If thewar-trump blew, his very vassals would laugh at a Bonville's banner, andbeneath the flag of poor William Hastings would gladly march thebest chivalry of the land. And this it is, I say, that galls her. Forevermore she is driven to compare the state she holds as the dame ofthe accepted Bonville with that she lost as the wife of the disdainedHastings."
And if, in the heat and passion that such words betrayed, Sibyll sighedto think that something of the old remembrance yet swelled and burned,they but impressed her more with the value of a heart in which thecharacters once writ endured so long, and roused her to a tenderambition to heal and to console.
Then looking into her own deep soul, Sibyll beheld there a fund of suchgenerous, pure, and noble affection, such reverence as to the fame, suchlove as to the man, that she proudly felt herself worthier of Hastingsthan the haughty Katherine. She entered then, as it were, the lists withthis rival,--a memory rather, so she thought, than a corporeal being;and her eye grew brighter, her step statelier, in the excitement of thecontest, the anticipation of the triumph. For what diamond without itsflaw? What rose without its canker? And bedded deep in that exquisiteand charming nature lay the dangerous and fatal weakness which hascursed so many victims, broken so many hearts,--the vanity of the sex.We may now readily conceive how little predisposed was Sibyll to theblunt advances and displeasing warnings of the Lady Bonville, and themore so from the time in which they chanced. For here comes the answerto the question, "Why was Sibyll sad?"
The reader may determine for himself what were the ruling motives ofLord Hastings in the court he paid to Sibyll. Whether to pique the LadyBonville, and force upon her the jealous pain he restlessly soughtto inflict; whether, from the habit of his careless life, seeking thepleasure of the moment, with little forethought of the future, andreconciling itself to much cruelty, by that profound contempt for humanbeings, man, and still more for woman, which sad experience often bringsto acute intellect; or whether, from the purer and holier complacencywith which one whose youth has fed upon nobler aspirations than manhoodcares to pursue, suns itself back to something of its earlier lustrein the presence and the converse of a young bright soul,--whatever,in brief, the earlier motives of gallantries to Sibyll, once begun,constantly renewed, by degrees wilder and warmer and guiltier emotionsroused up in the universal and all-conquering lover the vice of hissofter nature. When calm and unimpassioned, his conscience had saidto him, "Thou shalt spare that flower." But when once the passion wasroused within him, the purity of the flower was forgotten in the breathof its voluptuous sweetness.
And but three days before the scene we have described with Katherine,Sibyll's fabric of hope fell to the dust. For Hastings spoke for thefirst time of love, for the first time knelt at her feet, for thefirst time, clasping to his heart that virgin hand, poured forth theprotestation and the vow. And oh! woe--woe! for the first time shelearned how cheaply the great man held the poor maiden's love, howlittle he deemed that purity and genius and affection equalled thepossessor of fame and wealth and power; for plainly visible, boldlyshown and spoken, the love that she had foreseen as a glory from theheaven sought but to humble her to the dust.
The anguish of that moment was unspeakable,--and she spoke it not. Butas she broke from the
profaning clasp, as escaping to the threshold shecast on the unworthy wooer one look of such reproachful sorrow as toldat once all her love and all her horror, the first act in the eternaltragedy of man's wrong and woman's grief was closed. And therefore wasSibyll sad!