The mysteries of Udolpho: a romance; interspersed with some pieces of poetry. By Ann Radcliffe, ... In four volumes. ... [pt.4]

CHAP. XVII.

— But in these cases, We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor: thus even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice To our own lips.

MACBETH.

SOME circumstances of an extraordinary nature now withdrew Emily from her own sorrows, and excited emotions, which par∣took of both surprise and horror.

A few days following that, on which Signora Laurentini died, her will was opened at the monastery, in the presence of the su∣periors and Mons. Bonnac, when it was found, that one third of her personal pro∣perty was bequeathed to the nearest surviv∣ing relative of the late Marchioness de Vil∣leroi, and that Emily was the person.

With the secret of Emily's family the abbess had long been acquainted, and it was

in observance of the earnest request of St. Aubert, who was known to the friar, that attended him on his death bed, that his daughter had remained in ignorance of her relationship to the Marchioness. But some hints, which had fallen from Signora Lau∣rentini, during her last interview with Emily, and a confession of a very extraordinary na∣ture, given in her dying hours, had made the abbess think it necessary to converse with her young friend, on the topic she had not before ventured to introduce; and it was for this purpose, that she had requested to see her on the morning that followed her interview with the nun. Emily's indis∣position had then prevented the intended conversation; but now, after the will had been examined, she received a summons, which she immediately obeyed, and became informed of circumstances, that powerfully affected her. As the narrative of the ab∣bess was, however, deficient in many parti∣culars, of which the reader may wish to be informed, and the history of the nun is ma∣terially

connected with the fate of the Mar∣chioness de Villeroi, we shall omit the con∣versation, that passed in the parlour of the convent, and mingle with our relation a brief history of

LAURENTINI DI UDOLPHO,

Who was the only child of her parents, and heiress of the ancient house of Udol∣pho, in the territory of Venice. It was the first misfortune of her life, and that which led to all her succeeding misery, that the friends, who ought to have restrained her strong passions, and mildly instructed her in the art of governing them, nurtured them by early indulgence. But they che∣rished their own failings in her; for their conduct was not the result of rational kind∣ness, and, when they either indulged, or opposed the passions of their child, they gratified their own. Thus they indulged her with weakenss, and reprehended her with violence; her spirit was exasperated by their vehemence, instead of being cor∣rected

by their wisdom; and their oppo∣sitions became contests for victory, in which the due tenderness of the parents, and the affectionate duties of the child, were equally forgotten; but, as returning fondness disarmed the parents' resent∣ment soonest, Laurentini was suffered to believe that she had conquered, and her passions became stronger by every effort, that had been, employed to subdue them.

The death of her father and mother in the same year left her to her own discretion, under the dangerous circumstances attend∣ant on youth and beauty. She was fond of company, delighted with admiration, yet disdainful of the opinion of the world, when it happened to contradict her incli∣nations; had a gay and brilliant wit, and was mistress of all the arts of fascination. Her conduct was such as might have been expected, from the weakenss of her prin∣ciples and the strength of her passions.

Among her numerous admirers was the late Marquis de Villeroi, who, on his tour

through Italy, saw Laurentini at Venice, where she usually resided, and became her passionate adorer. Equally captivated by the figure and accomplishments of the Marquis, who was at that period one of the most distinguished noblemen of the French court, she had the art so effectually to conceal from him the dangerous traits of her character and the blemishes of her late conduct, that he solicited her hand in marriage.

Before the nuptials were concluded, she retired to the castle of Udolpho, whither the Marquis followed, and, where her con∣duct, relaxing from the propriety, which she had lately assumed, discovered to him the precipice, on which he stood. A mi∣nuter enquiry than he had before thought it necessary to make, convinced him, that he had been deceived in her character, and she, whom he had designed for his wife, af∣terwards became his mistress.

Having passed some weeks at Udol∣pho, he was called abruptly to France,

whither he returned with extreme reluc∣tance, for his heart was still fascinated by the arts of Laurentini, with whom, how∣ever, he had on various pretences delayed his marriage; but, to reconcile her to this separation, he now gave repeated promises of returning to conclude the nuptials, as soon as the affair, which thus suddenly called him to France, should permit.

Soothed, in some degree, by these assur∣ances, she suffered him to depart; and, soon after, her relative, Montoni, arriving at Udolpho, renewed the addresses, which she had before refused, and which she now again rejected. Meanwhile, her thoughts were constantly with the Marquis de Ville∣roi, for whom she suffered all the delirium of Italian love, cherished by the solitude, to which she consined herself; for she had now lost all taste for the pleasures of society and the gaiety of amusement. Her only indulgences were to sigh and weep over a miniature of the Marquis; to visit the scenes, that had witnessed their happiness,

to pour forth her heart to him in writing, and to count the weeks, the days, which must intervene before the period that he had mentioned as probable for his return. But this period passed without bringing him; and week after week followed in heavy and almost intolerable expectation. During this interval, Laurentini's fancy, occupied in∣cessantly by one idea, became disordered; and, her whole heart being devoted to one object, life became hateful to her, when she believed that object lost.

Several months passed, during which she heard nothing from the Marquis de Ville∣roi, and her days were marked, at inter∣vals, with the phrensy of passion and the fullenness of despair. She secluded her∣self from all visitors, and, sometimes, re∣mained in her apartment, for weeks toge∣ther, refusing to speak to every person, ex∣cept her favourite female attendant, writing scraps of letters, reading, again and again, those she had received from the Marquis,

weeping over his picture, and speaking to it, for many hours, upbraiding, reproach∣ing and caressing it alternately.

At length, a report reached her, that the Marquis had married in France, and, after suffering all the extremes of love, jea∣lousy and indignation, she formed the de∣sperate resolution of going secretly to that country, and, if the report proved true, of attempting a deep revenge. To her favour∣ite woman only she consided the plan of her journey, and she engaged her to par∣take of it. Having collected her jewels, which, descending to her from many branches of her family, were of immense value, and all her cash, to a very large amount, they were packed in a trunk, which was privately conveyed to a neigh∣bouring town, whither Laurentini, with this only servant, followed, and thence pro∣ceeded secretly to Leghorn, where they em∣oarked for France.

When, on her arrival in Languedoc, she found, that the Marquis de Villeroi had

been married, for some months, her de∣spair almost deprived her of reason, and she alternately projected and abandoned the horrible design of murdering the Marquis, his wife and herself. At length she con∣trived to throw herself in his way, with an intention of reproaching him, for his conduct, and of stabbing herself in his pre∣sence; but, when she again saw him, who so long had been the constant object of her thoughts and affections, resentment yielded to love; her resolution failed; she trem∣bled with the conflict of emotions, that as∣sailed her heart, and fainted away.

The Marquis was not proof against her beauty and sensibility; all the energy, with which he had first loved, returned, for his passion had been resisted by pru∣dence, rather than overcome by indifference; and, since the honour of his family would not permit him to marry her, he had endea∣voured to subdue his love, and had so far succeeded, as to select the then Marchioness for his wife, whom he loved at first with a

tempered and rational affection. But the mild virtues of that amiable lady did not recompense him for her indifference, which appeared, notwithstanding her efforts to conceal it; and he had, for some time, sus∣pected that her affections were engaged by another person, when Laurentini arrived in Languedoc. This artful Italian soon per∣ceived, that she had regained her influence over him, and, soothed by the discovery, she determined to live, and to employ all her enchantments to win his consent to the diabolical deed, which she believed was ne∣cessary to the security of her happiness. She conducted her scheme with deep dissi∣mulation and patient perseverance, and, having completely estranged the affections of the Marquis from his wife, whose gentle goodness and unimpassioned manners had ceased to please, when contrasted with the captivations of the Italian, she proceeded to awaken in his mind the jealousy of pride, for it was no longer that of love, and even pointed out to him the person, to whom

she affirmed the Marchioness had sacrificed her honour; but Laurentini had first ex∣torted from him a solemn promise to for∣bear avenging himself upon his rival. This was an important part of her plan, for she knew, that, if his desire of vengeance was restrained towards one party, it would burn more fiercely towards the other, and he might then, perhaps, be prevailed on to assist in the horrible act, which would re∣lease him from the only barrier, that with∣held him from making her his wife.

The innocent Marchioness, meanwhile, observed, with extreme grief, the alteration in her husband's manners. He became re∣served and thoughful in her presence; his conduct was austere, and sometimes even rude; and he left her, for many hours together, to weep for his unkindness; and to form plans for the recovery of his affec∣tion. His conduct afflicted her the more, because, in obedience to the command of her father, she had accepted his hand, though her affections were engaged to ano∣ther, whose amiable disposition, she had rea∣son

to believe, would have ensured her hap∣piness. This circumstance Laurentini had discovered, soon after her arrival in France, and had made ample use of it in assisting her designs upon the Marquis, to whom she adduced such seeming proof of his wife's infidelity, that, in the frantic rage of wounded honour, he consented to destroy his wife. A slow poison was administered, and she fell a victim to the jealousy and subtlety of Laurentini and to the guilty weakness of her husband.

But the moment of Laurentini's triumph, the moment, to which she had looked for∣ward for the completion of all her wishes, proved only the commencement of a suffer∣ing, that never left her to her dying hour.

The passion of revenge, which had in part stimulated her to the commission of this atrocious deed, died, even at the moment when it was gratified, and left her to the hor∣rors of unavailing pity and remorse, which would probably have empoisoned all the years she had promised herself with the

Marquis de Villeroi, had her expectations of an alliance with him been realized. But he, too, had found the moment of his re∣venge to be that of remorse, as to himself, and detestation, as to the partner of his crime; the feeling, which he had mistaken for conviction, was no more; and he stood astonished, and aghast, that no proof re∣mained of his wife's infidelity, now that she had suffered the punishment of guilt. Even when he was informed, that she was dying, he had felt suddenly and unaccountably re∣assured of her innocence, nor was the solemn assurance she made him in her last hour, ca∣pable of affording him a stronger conviction of her blameless conduct.

In the first horrors of remorse and despair, he felt inclined to deliver up himself and the woman, who had plunged him into this abyss of guilt, into the hands of justice; but, when the paroxysm of his suffering was over, his intention changed. Laurentini, however, he saw only once afterwards, and that was, to curse her as the instigator of his

crime, and to say, that he spared her life only on condition, that she passed the rest of her days in prayer and penance. Over∣whelmed with, disappointment, on receiving contempt and abhorrence from the man, for whose sake she had not scrupled to stain her conscience with human blood, and, touched with horror of the unavailing crime she had committed, she renounced the world, and retired to the monastery of St. Claire, a dreadful victim to unresisted passion.

The Marquis, immediately after the death of his wife, quitted Chateau-le-Blanc, to which he never returned, and endeavoured to lose the sense of his crime amidst the tu∣mult of war, or the dissipations of a capital; but his efforts were vain; a deep dejection hung over him ever after, for which his most intimate friends could not account, and he, at length, died, with a degree of horror nearly equal to that, which Lauren∣tini had suffered. The physician, who had observed the singular appearance of the un∣fortunate Marchioness, after death, had been

bribed to silence; and, as the surmises of a few of the servants had proceeded no further than a whisper, the affair had never been investigated. Whether this whisper ever reached the father of the Marchioness, and, if it did, whether the difficulty of obtaining proof deterred him from prosecuting the Marquis de Villeroi, is uncertain; but her death was deeply lamented by some part of her family, and particularly by her brother, M. St. Aubert; for that was the degree of re∣lationship, which had existed between Emily's father and the Marchioness; and there is no doubt, that he suspected the manner of her death. Many letters passed between the Marquis and him, soon after the decease of this beloved sister, the subject of which was not known, but there is reason to be∣lieve, that they related to the cause of her death; and these were the papers, together with some letters of the Marchioness, who had consided to her brother the occasion of her unhappiness, which St. Aubert had so solemnly enjoined his daughter to destroy:

and anxiety for her peace had probably made him forbid her to enquire into the melan∣choly story, to which they alluded. Such, indeed, had been his affliction, on the pre∣mature death of this his favourite sister, whose unhappy marriage had from the first excited his tenderest pity, that he never could hear her named, or mention her him∣self after her death, except to Madame St. Aubert. From Emily, whose sensibility he feared to awaken, he had so carefully con∣cealed her history and name, that she was ignorant, till now, that she ever had such a relative as the Marchioness de Villeroi; and from this motive he had enjoined silence to his only surviving sister, Madame Cheron, who had scrupulously observed his request.

It was over some of the last pathetic let∣ters of the Marchioness, that St. Aubert was weeping, when he was observed by Emily, on the eye of her departure from La Vallée, and it was her picture, which he had so ten∣derly caressed. Her disastrous death may account for the emotion he had betrayed, on

hearing her named by La Voisin, and for his request to be interred near the monu∣ment of the Villerois, where her remains were deposited, but not those of her husband, who was buried, where he died, in the north of France.

The confessor, who attended St. Aubert in his last moments, recollected him to be the brother of the late Marchioness, when St. Aubert, from tenderness to Emily, had conjured him to conceal the circumstance, and to request that the abbess, to whose care he particularly recommended her, would do the same; a request, which had been exactly observed.

Laurentini, on her arrival in France, had carefully concealed her name and family, and, the better to disguise her real history, had, on entering the convent, caused the story to be circulated, which had imposed, on sister Frances, and it is probable, that the abbess, who did not preside in the convent, at the time of her noviciation, was also en∣tirely ignorant of the truth. The deep re∣morse

that seized on the mind of Laurentini, together with the sufferings of disappointed passion, for she still loved the Marquis, again unsettled her intellects, and, after the first paroxysms of despair were passed, a heavy and silent melancholy, had settled upon her spirits, which suffered few interruptions from fits of phrensy, till the time of her death. During many years, it had been her only amusement to walk in the woods near the monastery, in the solitary hours of night, and to play upon a favourite instrument, to which she sometimes joined. the delightful melody of her voice, in the most solemn and melancholy airs of her native country, mo∣dulated by all the energetic feeling, that dwelt in her heart. The physician, who had attended her, recommended it to the supe∣rior to indulge her in this whim, as the only means of soothing her distempered fancy; and she was suffered to walk in the lonely hours of night, attended by the servant, who had accompanied her from Italy; but, as the indulgence transgressed against the rules

of the convent, it was kept as secret as pos∣sible; and thus the mysterious music of Laurentini had combined with other cir∣cumstances, to produce a report, that not only the chateau, but its neighbourhood, was haunted.

Soon after her entrance into this holy community, and before she had shewn any symptoms of insanity there, she made a will, in which, after bequeathing a considerable legacy to the convent, she divided the re∣mainder of her personal property, which her jewels made very valuable, between the wife of Mons. Bonnac, who was an Italian lady and her relation, and the nearest sur∣viving relative of the late Marchioness de Villeroi. As Emily St. Aubert was not only the nearest, but the sole relative, this legacy descended to her, and thus explained to her the whole mystery of her father's conduct.

The resemblance between Emily and her unfortunate aunt had frequently been ob∣served by Laurentini, and had occasioned

the singular behaviour, which had formerly alarmed her; but it was in the nun's dy∣ing hour, when her conscience gave her perpetually the idea of the Marchio∣ness, that she became more sensible, than ever, of this likeness, and, in her phrensy, deemed it no resemblance of the person she had injured, but the original herself. The bold assertion, that had followed, on the recovery of her senses, that Emily was the daughter of the Marchioness de Villeroi, arose from a suspicion that she was so; for, knowing that her rival, when she mar∣ried the Marquis, was attached to another lover, she had scarcely scrupled to believe, that her honour had been sacrificed, like her own, to an unresisted passion.

Of a crime, however, to which Emily had suspected, from her phrensied confession of murder, that she had been instrumental in the castle of Udolpho, Laurentini was innocent; and she had herself been deceiv∣ed, concerning the spectacle, that formerly occasioned her so much terror, arid had

since compelled her, for a while, to attri∣bute the horrors of the nun to a conscious∣ness of a murder, committed in that castle.

It may be remembered, that, in a cham∣ber of Udolpho, hung a black veil, whose singular situation had excited Emily's curio∣sity, and which afterwards disclosed an ob∣ject, that had overwhelmed her with horror; for, on lifting it, there appeared, instead of the picture she had expected, within a re∣cess of the wall, a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length, and dressed in the habiliments of the grave. What added to the horror of the spectacle, was, that the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms, which were visible. on the fea∣tures and hands. On such an object, it will be readily believed, that no person could endure to look twice. Emily, it may be re∣collected, had, after the first glance, let the veil drop, and her terror had prevented her from ever after provoking a renewal of such suffering, as she had then experienced.

Had she dared to look again, her delusion and her fears would have vanished together, and she would have perceived, that the figure before her was not human, but formed of wax. The history of it is somewhat extraordinary, though not without example in the records of that fierce severity, which monkish su∣perstition has sometimes inflicted on man∣kind. A member of the house of Udolpho, having committed some offence against the prerogative of the church, had been con∣demned to the penance of contemplating, during certain hours of the day, a waxen image, made to resemble a human body in the state, to which it is reduced after death. This penance, serving as a memento of the condition at which he must himself arrive, had been designed to reprove the pride of the Marquis of Udolpho, which had for∣merly so much exasperated that of the Romish church; and he had not only su∣perstitiously observed this penance himself, which, he had believed, was to obtain a

pardon for all his sins, but had made it a condition in his will, that his descendants should preserve the image, on pain of for∣feiting to the church a certain part of his domain, that they also might profit by the humiliating moral it conveyed. The figure, therefore, had been suffered to retain its station in the wall of the chamber, but his descendants excused themselves from ob∣serving the penance, to which he had been enjoined.

This image was so horribly natural, that it is not surprising Emily should have mistaken it for the object it resembled, nor, since she had heard such an extraordinary account, concerning the disappearing of the late lady of the castle, and had such expe∣rience of the character of Montoni, that, she should have believed this to be the mur∣dered body of the lady Laurentini, and that he had been the contriver of her death.

The situation, in which she had disco∣vered it, occasioned her, at first, much sur∣prise and perplexity; but the vigilance, with

which the doors of the chamber, where it was deposited, were afterwards secured, had compelled her to believe, that Montoni, not daring to confide the secret of her death to any person, had suffered her remains to decay in this obscure chamber. The cere∣mony of the veil, however, and the circum∣stance of the doors having been left open, even for a moment, had occasioned her much wonder and some doubts; but these were not sufficient to overcome her suspicion of Montoni; and it was the dread of his terrible vengeance, that had sealed her lips in silence, concerning what she had seen in the west chamber.

Emily, in discovering the Marchioness de Villeroi to have been the sister of Mons. St Aubert, was variously affected; but, amidst. the sorrow, which she suffered for her untimely death, she was released from an anxious and painful conjecture, occa∣sioned by the rash assertion of Signora Lau∣rentini, concerning her birth and the ho∣nour of her parents. Her faith in St. Au∣bert's

principles would scarcely allow her to suspect that he had acted dishonourably; and she felt such reluctance to believe herself the daughter of any other, than her, whom she had always considered and loved as a mother, that she would hardly admit such a circumstance to be possible; yet the likeness, which it had frequently been af∣firmed she bore to the late Marchioness, the former behaviour of Dorothée the old housekeeper, the assertion of Laurentini, and the mysterious attachment, which St. Au∣bert had discovered, awakened doubts, as to his connection with the Marchioness, which her reason could neither vanquish, or con∣firm. From these, however, she was now relieved, and all the circumstances of her father's conduct were fully explained; but her heart was oppressed by the melancholy catastrophe of her amiable relative, and by the awful lesson, which the history of the nun exhibited, the indulgence of whose passions had been the means of lead∣ing her gradually to the commission of a

crime, from the prophecy of which in her early years she would have recoiled in hor∣ror, and exclaimed—that it could not be!—a crime, which whole years of repentance and of the severest penance had not been able to obliterate from her conscience.