The Sacrifice.

Ask any thing but that.

An hour had not quite passed, when, as she sat alone in her little gayly-decorated study, with its walls hung with water-color drawings of her own execution, its tables strewn with poetry and music of her own composition, and her favorite books, and her own lute—her little study in which the happiest hours of her life had been spent, the first hours of her married life, while Jasper was all that her fancy painted him—his step came along the corridor, but with a slow and hesitating sound, most unlike to the quick, firm, decided tread, for which he was remarkable.

She noticed the difference, it is true, at the moment, but forgot it again instantly. It was enough! It was he! and he was coming once again to seek her in her own apartment; he had a boon to ask of her—he had promised to love her—he had called her “his dear Theresa.”

And now she sprung up, with her soul beaming from her eyes, and ran to meet him. The door was opened ere he reached it, and as he entered, she fell upon his neck, and wound her snowy arms about his waist, and kissed him fifty times, and wept silent tears in the fullness of her joy.

And did not his heart respond in the least to her innocent and girlish rapture; did he not bend at all from his bad purpose; was there no melting, no relenting in that callous, selfish nature; was, indeed, all within him hard as the nether millstone?

He clasped her, he caressed her, he spoke to her fondly, lovingly, he kissed, like Judas, to betray. He suffered her to lead him to his favorite seat of old, the deep, softly-cushioned, low arm-chair, and to place her footstool by his side, and nestle herself down upon it as she used to do, with her arms folded negligently across his knee, and her beautiful rounded chin propped upon them, with her great earnest eyes looking up in his face, like unfathomable wells of tenderness.

And he returned her gaze of fondness, unabashed, unembarrassed; and yet it was sometime before he spoke; and when he did speak at length, his voice was altered and almost husky. But it was from doubt how best he might play his part, not that he shrunk from the task he had imposed upon himself, either for shame or for pity.

“Well, my Theresa,” he said, at last, “have you thought whether you will make this sacrifice?”

“No, Jasper, I have not thought about it; but if you wish me to make it, I will make it, and it will be no sacrifice.”

“But I tell you, Theresa, that it is a sacrifice, a mighty and most painful sacrifice; a sacrifice so great and so terrible, that I almost fear, almost feel that it would be selfish in me to ask it of you.”

“Ask it, then; ask it quickly, that you may see how readily it shall be granted.”

“Can you conceive no sacrifice that you would not make to please me?”

“None, that you would ask of me.”

“Theresa, no one can say what another might ask of them. Husbands, lovers, brothers, have asked strange sacrifices—fearful sacrifices, at woman’s hands; and—they have been made.”

“Ask me, then, ask me,” she repeated, smiling, although her face had grown somewhat pale as she listened to his words, and marked his strangely excited manner. “I repeat, there is no sacrifice which you would ask of me, which I will not make. Nay more, there is none which I should think a sacrifice if it is to preserve your love to me, when I feared that I had lost it forever, though how, indeed, I knew not.”

“We shall see,” he said, affecting to muse with himself, and ponder deeply. “We shall see; you are a great historian, and have read of all the celebrated women of times past and present. You have heard of the beautiful Mademoiselle Desvieux, she who?—”

“She who was the promised wife of the great, the immortal Bossuet; and who sacrificed her own happiness, freeing her lover from the claims she held on him, lest a wife should be a clog upon his pure yet soaring ambition, lest an earthly affection should wean him from a higher love, and weaken the cords that were drawing him toward heaven! I have—I have heard of her! Who has not—who does not revere her name—who does not love her?”

“And what think you of her sacrifice, Theresa?”

“That it was her duty. A difficult duty to perform, you will say, but still her duty. Her praise is, that she performed it gloriously. And yet I doubt not that her sacrifice bore her its own exceeding great reward. Loving as she loved, all her sorrows must have been changed into exultation, when she saw him in after days the saint he became, the saint she helped to make him.”

“And could you have made such a sacrifice, Theresa?”

“I hope so, and I think so,” she replied, with a little hesitation. “But it avails not now to think of that, seeing that I cannot make such. She was a maiden, I am a wedded wife.”

“True, dearest, true. I only named her, to judge by your opinion, of what I wish to learn, ere I will ask you. There was another sacrifice, Theresa, a very terrible sacrifice, made of late, and made to no purpose, too, as it fell out—a sacrifice of far more doubtful nature; yet there be some who have not failed to praise it.”

“What was it—do you praise it?”

“At least I pity it, Theresa.”

“What was it—tell me?”

“After the late rebellion at Sedgemoor. Have you not heard, Theresa?”

“No, I think not—go on, I want to hear it; go on, Jasper.”

“There was a young man, a cavalier, very young, very brave, very nobly born, and, it is said, very handsome. He was taken after the route of that coward, Gray of Werk’s horse—cast into prison, and, when his turn came, tried by the butcher, Kirke—you know what that means, Theresa?”

“Condemned,” she said, sadly. “Of course he was condemned—what next?”

“To be hung by the neck upon the shameful gibbet, and then cut down, while yet alive, and subjected to all the barbarous tortures which are inflicted as the penalty of high treason.”

“Horrible! horrible! and—what more, Jasper?”

“Have you not, indeed, heard the tale?”

“Indeed, no. I pray you tell me, for you have moved me very deeply.”

“It is very moving. The boy had a sister—the loveliest creature, it is said, that trod the soil of England, scarce seventeen years of age, a very paragon of grace and purity and beauty. They two were alone in the world—parents, kinsfolk, friends, they had none. They had none to love but one another, even as we, my Theresa; and they did love—how, you may judge. The girl threw herself at the butcher’s feet, and implored her brother’s pardon.”

“Go on, go on, Jasper!” cried the young wife, excited almost beyond the power of restraining her emotions by the dreadful interest of his tale, “and, for once, he granted it?”

“And, for once, as you say, he granted it. But upon one condition.”

“And that was—?”

“And that was, that the young girl should make a sacrifice—an awful sacrifice—should submit, in a word, to be a martyr for her brother’s sake.”

“To die for him—and she died! Of course, she died to save him; that were no sacrifice, none, Jasper—I say none! Why any woman would have done that!”

“It was not to die for him—it was to sacrifice herself—herself—for she was lovely, as I told you—to the butcher.”

“Ah!” sighed Theresa, with a terrible sensation at her heart, which she could not explain, even to herself; “and what—what did she?”

“She asked permission to consult her brother.”

“And he told her that he had rather die ten thousand deaths than that she should lose one hair’s breadth of her honor!” cried Theresa, enthusiastically clasping her hands together.

“And he told her that life was very sweet, and death on a gallows very shameful!”

“The catiff! the miserable, loathsome slave! the filthy dastard! I trust that Kirke drew him with wild horses! The gallows were too good for such a slave.”

“Then you would not have made such a sacrifice?”

“I—I!” she exclaimed, her soft blue eyes actually flashing fire; “I sacrifice my honor! but lo!” she interrupted herself, smiling at her own vehemence, “am not I a little fool, to fancy that you are in earnest. No, dearest Jasper, I would no more make that sacrifice, than you would suffer me to do so. Did not I make that reservation, did I not say any sacrifice, which you would ask of me?”

“Ay, dearest!” he replied gently, laying his hand on her head, “you do me no more than justice there. I would die as many deaths as I have hairs on my head, before you should so save me.” And for the first time that night Jasper St. Aubyn spoke in earnest.

“I know you would, Jasper. But go on, I pray you, with this fearful tale. I would you had not begun it; but now you have, I must hear it to the end. What did she?”

“She did, Theresa, as her brother bade her. She sacrificed herself to the butcher.”

“Poor wretch! poor wretch! and so her brother lived with the world’s scorn and curses on his head—and she—did she die, Jasper?”

“No, my Theresa. She is alive yet. It was the brother died.”

“How so? how could that be? Did Kirke then relent?”

“Kirke never relented! When the girl awoke in the butcher’s chamber, with fame and honor—all that she loved in life—lost to her for ever—he bade her look out of the window—what think you she saw there, Theresa?”

“What?”

“The thing, that an hour before was her brother, dangling in the accursed noose from the gibbet.”

“And God did not speak in thunder.”

“To the girl’s mind, He spoke—for that went astray at once, jangled and jarred, and out of tune forever! There was a sacrifice, Theresa.”

“A wicked one, and so it ended, wickedly. We’ll none of such sacrifices, Jasper. If we should ever have to die, which God avert in his mercy, any death of violence or horror, we will die tranquilly and together. Will we not, dearest?”

“As you said but now, may the good God guard us from such a fate, Theresa; and yet,” he added, looking at her fixedly, and with a strange expression, “we may be nearer to it than we think for, even now.”

“Nearer to what, Jasper? speak,” she cried, eagerly, as if she had missed the meaning of the words he last uttered.

“Nearer to the perils of the law, for high treason,” answered her husband, in a low, dejected voice. “It is of that I have been anxious to speak with you all the time.”

“Then speak at once, for God’s sake, dearest Jasper! speak at once, and fully, that we may know the worst;” and she showed more composure now, in what she naturally deemed the extremity of peril, than he had looked for, judging from the excitement she had manifested at the mere listening to the story of another’s perils. “Say on,” she added, seeing that he hesitated, “let me know the worst.”

“It must be so, though it is hard to tell, Theresa; we—myself, I mean, and a band of the first and noblest youths of England—have been engaged for these three months past in a conspiracy to banish from the throne of England this last and basest son of a weak, bigoted, unlucky race of kings—this cowardly, blood-thirsty, persecuting bigot—this Papist monarch of a Protestant land, this James the Second, as men call him; and to set in his place the brave, wise, virtuous William of Nassau, now Stadtholder of the United Provinces. It is this business which has obliged me to be absent so often of late, in London. It is the failure of this business which has rendered me morose, unkind, irritable—need I say more, you have pardoned me, Theresa.”

“The failure of this business!” she exclaimed, gazing at him with a face from which dismay had banished every hue of color—“the failure!”

“Ay, Theresa, it is even so. Had we succeeded in liberating England from the cold tyrant’s bloody yoke, we had been patriots, saviors, fathers of our country—Brutuses, for what I know, and Timoleons! We have failed—therefore, we are rebels, traitors and, I suppose, ere long shall be victims.”

“The plot, then, is discovered?”

“Even so, Theresa.”

“And how long, Jasper, have you known this dreadful termination?”

“I have foreseen it these six weeks or more. I knew it, for the first time, to-day.”

“And is it absolutely known, divulged, proclaimed? Have arrests been made?” she asked, with a degree of coolness that amazed him, while he felt that it augured ill for the success of his iniquitous scheme; but he had, in some sort, foreseen her questions, and his answers were prepared already. He answered, therefore, as unhesitatingly as if there had been one word of truth in all that he was uttering.

“It is all known to one of the leading ministers of the government; it is not divulged; and no arrests have been made yet. But the breathing space will be brief.”

“All, then, is easy! Let us fly! Let us take horse at once—this very night! By noon to-morrow, we shall be in Plymouth, and thence we can gain France, and be safe there until this tyranny shall be o’erpast.”

“Brave girl!” he replied, with the affectation of a melancholy smile. “Brave Theresa, you would bear exile, ruin, poverty with the outlawed traitor; and we might still be happy. But, alas, girl! it is too late to fly. The ports are all closed throughout England. It is too late to fly, and to fight is impossible.”

“Then it remains only that we die!” she exclaimed, casting herself into his arms, “and that is not so difficult, now that I know you love me, Jasper.” But, even as she uttered the words, his previous conversation recurred to her mind, and she started from his arms, crying out, “but you spoke of a sacrifice!—a sacrifice which I could make! Is it possible that I can save you?”

“Not me alone, Theresa, but all the band of brothers who are sworn to this emprise; nor them alone, but England, which may, by your deed, still be liberated from the tyrant.”

She turned her beautiful eyes upward, and her lips moved rapidly, although she spoke not. She was praying for aid from on high—for strength to do her duty.

He watched her with calm, expectant, unmoved eyes, and muttered to himself, “I have gained. She will yield.”

“Now,” she said, “now,” as her prayer was ended, “I am strong now to bear. Tell me, Jasper, what must I do to save you?”

“I cannot tell you, dearest. I cannot—it is too much—you could not make it; nor if you would, could I. Let it pass. We will die—all die together.”

“And England!” exclaimed the girl, with her face kindling gloriously; “and our mother England, must she perish by inches in the tyrant’s clutch, because we are cowards? No, Jasper, no. Be of more constant mind. Tell me, what is it I must do? and, though it wring my heart and rack my brain, if I can save you and your gallant friends, and our dear native land, I will save them, though it kill me.”

“Could you endure to part from me, Theresa—to part from me forever?”

“To part from you, Jasper!” No written phrase can express the agony, the anguish, the despair, which were made manifest in every sound of those few simple words. A breaking heart spoke out in every accent.

“Ay, to part from me, never to see me more—never to hear my voice; only to know that I exist, and that I love you—love you beyond my own soul! Could you do this, Theresa, in the hope of a meeting hereafter, where no tyranny should ever part us any more?”

“I know not—I know not!” she exclaimed, in a shrill, piercing tone, most unlike her usual soft, slow utterance. “Is this the sacrifice you spoke of? Would this be called for at my hands?”

“To part from me so utterly that it should not be known or suspected that we had ever met—ever been wedded?”

“Why, Jasper,” she cried, starting, and gazing at him wildly, “that were impossible; all the world knows that we have met—that we have lived together here—that I am your wife. What do you mean? Are you jesting with me? No, no! God help me! that resolute, stern, dark expression! No, no, no, no! Do not frown on me, Jasper; but keep me not in this suspense—only tell me, Jasper.”

“The whole world—that is to say, the whole world of villagers and peasants here, do know that we have met—that we have lived together; but they do not know—nay, more, they do not believe, that you are my wife, Theresa.”

“Not your wife—not your wife! What, in God’s name, then, do they believe me to be? But I am—I am—yes, before God and man, I am your wife, Jasper St. Aubyn! That shame will I never bear. The parish register will prove it.”

“Before God, dearest, most assuredly you are my wife; but before man, I grieve to say, it is not so; nor will the register, to which you appeal—as I did, when I first heard the scandal—prove any thing, but against you. It seems the rascal sexton cut out the record of our marriage from the register, so soon as the old rector died. He is gone, so that he can witness nothing. Alderly and the sexton will not speak, for to do so would implicate themselves in the guilt of having mutilated the church-register. Alderly’s mother is an idiot. We can prove nothing.”

“And when did you learn all this, Jasper?” she asked, calmly; for a light, a fearful yet most clear illumination began to dawn upon her mind.

“Last night. And I rode down this morning to the church, to inspect the register. It is as I was told; there is no trace of the record which we signed, and saw witnessed, on its pages.”

“And to what end should Verity and Alderly have done this great crime needlessly?”

“Villains themselves, they fancied that I too was a villain; and that, if not then, at some after time, I should desire to profit by their villainy, and should then be in their power.”

“Ha!” she said, still maintaining perfect self-possession. “It seems, at least, that their villainy was wise, was prophetical.”

“Theresa!” his voice was stern, and harsh, and threatening—his brow as black as midnight.

“Pardon me!” she said. “Pardon me, Jasper; but you should make allowance for some feeling in a woman. I am, then, looked upon as a lost, fallen wretch, as a disgrace to my name and my sex, a concubine, a harlot—is it not so, Jasper?”

“Alas! alas! Theresa!”

“And you would have me?—speak!”

“I would not have you do it; God knows! it goes nigh to break my heart to think of it—I only tell you what alone can save us—”

“I understand—it needs not to mince the matter; what is it, then, that can save us—save you, I should say rather, and your friends?”

“That you should leave me, Theresa, and go where you would, so it were not within a hundred miles of this place—but better to France or Italy; all that wealth could procure you, you should have; and my love would be yours above all things, even although we never meet, until we meet in heaven.”

“Heaven, sir, is for the innocent and faithful, not for the liar and the traitor! But how shall this avail any thing to save you, if I consent to do it? I must know all; I must see all clearly, before I act.”

“Are you strong enough to bear what I shall say to you, my poor Theresa?”

“Else had I not borne to hear what you have said to me.”

“It is the secretary of state, then, who has discovered our plot. He is himself half inclined to join us; but he is a weak, interested, selfish being, although of vast wealth, great influence, and birth most noble. Now, he has a daughter?—”

“Ah!” the wretched girl started as if an ice-bolt had shot to her very heart, “and you—you would wed her!”

“That is to say, he would have me wed her; and on that condition joins our party. And so our lives, and England’s liberties, should be preserved by your glorious sacrifice.”

“I must think, then—I must think,” she answered, burying her head in her hands, in truth, to conceal the agony of her emotions, and to gain time, not for deliberation, but to compose her mind and clear her voice for speech.

And he stood gazing on her, with the cold, cutting eye, the calm, sarcastic sneer, of a very Mephistopheles, believing that she was about to yield, and inwardly mocking the very weakness, on which he had played, to his own base and cruel purposes.

But in a moment she arose and confronted him, pale, calm, majestical, most lovely in her extremity of sorrow, but firm as a hero or a martyr.

“And so,” she said, in a clear, cold, ringing voice, “this is the sacrifice you ask of me?—to sever myself from you forever—to go forth into the great, cruel, cold world alone, with a bleeding, broken heart, a blighted reputation, and a blasted name? All this I might endure, perhaps I would—but you have asked more of me, Jasper. You have asked me to confess myself a thing infamous and vile—a polluted wretch—not a wife, but a wanton! You have asked me, your own wedded wife, to write myself down, with my own hand, a harlot, and to stand by and look on at your marriage with another—as if I were the filthy thing you would name me. Than be that thing, Jasper, I would rather die a hundred fold; than call myself that thing, being innocent of deed or thought of shame, I had rather be it! Now, sir, are you answered? What, heap the name of harlot on my mother’s ashes! What, blacken my dead father’s stainless ’scutcheon! What—lie, before my God, to brand myself, the first of an honest line, with the strumpet’s stain of blackness! Never! never! though thou and I, and all the youth of England, were to die in tortures inconceivable; never! though England were to perish unredeemed! Now, sir, I ask you, are you answered?”

“I am,” he replied, perfectly unmoved, “I am answered, Theresa, as I hoped, as I expected to be.”

“What do you mean?—did you not ask me to do this thing?”

“I did not, Theresa. I told you what sacrifice might save us all. I did not ask you to make it. Nay, did I not tell you that I would not even suffer you to make it?”

“But you told me—you told me—God help me, for I think I shall go mad! Oh! tempt me no further, Jasper; try me no further. Is—is this true, that you have told me?”

“Every word—every word of it, my own best love,” answered the arch deceiver, “save only that I would not for my life, nay, for my soul, have suffered you to make the sacrifice I spoke of. Perish myself, my friends! perish England! nay, perish the whole earth, rather!”

“Then why so tempt me? Why so sorely, so cruelly try this poor heart, Jasper?”

“To learn if you were strong enough to share in my secrets—and you shall share them. We must fly, Theresa; not from Plymouth; not from any seaport, but from the wildest gorge in the wild coast of Devon. I have hired a fishing-boat to await us. We must ride forth alone, as if for a pleasure party, across the hills, to-morrow, and so make our way to the place appointed. If we escape, all shall be well—come the worst, as you said, my own Theresa, at least we shall die together.”

“Are you in earnest, Jasper?”

“On my soul! by the God who hears me!”

“And you will take me with you; you will not cast me from you; you will uphold me ever to be your own, your wedded wife?”

“I will—I will. Not for the universe! not for my own soul! would I lose you, my own, own Theresa!”

And he clasped her to his bosom, in the fondest, closest embrace, and kissed her beautiful lips eagerly, passionately. And she, half fainting in his arms, could only murmur, in the revulsion of her feelings, “Oh, happy! happy! too, too happy!”

Then he released her from his arms, and bade her go to bed, for it was waxing late, and she would need a good night’s rest to strengthen her for the toils of to-morrow’s journey.

And she smiled on him, and prayed him not to tarry long ere he joined her; and retired, still agitated and nervous from the long continuance of the dreadful mental conflict to which he had subjected her.

But he, when she had left the room, turned almost instantly as pale as ashes—brow, cheeks, nay, his very lips were white and cold. The actor was exhausted by his own exertions. The man shrunk from the task which was before him.

“The worse for her!” he muttered, through his hard-set teeth, “the worse for her! the obstinate, vain, willful fool! I would, by heaven! I would have saved her!”

Then he clasped his burning brow with the fingers of his left hand, as if to compress its fierce, rapid beating, and strode to and fro, through the narrow room, working the muscles of his clinched right hand, as if he grasped the hilt of sword or dagger.

“There is no other way,” he said at length; “there is no other way, and I must do it—must do it with my own hand. But—can I—can I—?—” he paused a moment, and resumed his troubled walk. Then halted, and muttered in a deep voice, “By hell! there is naught that a man cannot do; and I—am I not a man, and a right resolute, and stout one? It shall be so—it is her fate! her fate! Did not her father speak of it that night, as I lay weak and wounded on the bed? did I not dream it thrice thereafter, in that same bed? though then I understood it not. It shall be there—even there—where I saw it happen; so shall it pass for accident. It is fate!—who can strive against their fate?”

Again he was silent, and during that momentary pause, a deep, low, muttering roar was heard in the far distance—a breathless hush—and again, that long, hollow, crashing roll, that tells of elemental warfare.

Jasper’s eye flashed, and his whole face glared with a fearful and half frenzied illumination.

“It is,” he cried, “it is thunder! From point to point it is true! It is her fate—her fate!”

And with the words, he rushed from the room; and within ten minutes, was folded in the rapturous embrace of the snowy arms of her, whose doom of death he had decreed already in the secrets of his guilty soul.

——