Secresy; or, Ruin on the Rock

LETTER IV

FROM SIBELLA VALMONT TO CAROLINE ASHBURN

Was I pensive, did I gaze, did I sigh, did I weep, when you Miss Ashburn were with me – what do I know when I have only for companion the faithful, the exquisite, but torturing representation of memory? Can I do more than gaze, and sigh, and weep? O yes, I can: for, Miss Ashburn, I can raise altars on a thousand spots in these woods, which were once hallowed by the footsteps of him I love!

Two years have elapsed since he bade me farewel: therefore did you see me pensive.

That picture of me was painted by himself: therefore do I gaze on it.

The fawn he took from a dying mother; by him she was nourished into familiarity. Nina has ceased to mourn the absence of her benefactor; she is satisfied with my caresses; but the heart of Sibella Valmont, nor now, nor ever, can find any substitute for her Clement Montgomery.

I was nearly six years old when they told me that I had lost my father. He had travelled a twelvemonth before to foreign countries, for the benefit of his health; and I knew not that his death more than his absence would deprive me of my happiness, till my uncle Valmont came and carried me away in his coach from my governess, my maid, and all the domestics who loved me and whom I loved, of my father's household.

Then, indeed, I mourned; and my uncle attempted to soothe me. He said, I must be happy, for I was now dependent upon him; and it was my duty to love him, obey him, and be satisfied. My swelling heart revolted against being commanded to be happy; and I found not one person at the Castle who could supply to me the want of my kind governess and kind maid, except a little dog that on my first entrance had fawned on me as if he wished to make me happier. Him I carried incessantly in my arms; and I told him, whenever we were alone, how I longed to get back to my father's house and to carry him along with me.

In a fortnight after I arrived at Valmont, the affectionate little animal died; and I remained inconsolable. I was sitting weeping on the hall steps when my uncle came to me. He wiped away my tears; bade me be cheerful; and said he had procured me a better play-fellow than Fidelle. My uncle led me with him into the library; and presented me to a boy three years older than myself, blooming, blushing, beautiful. 'Clement is my adopted son, Sibella,' said my uncle. He will henceforth live with you in the castle. Take him out child; and show him where you find the prettiest flowers and the ripest fruit.'

Ah! need I tell you how we advanced from shyness to familiarity, from familiarity to kindness, from kindness to love, all powerful, all potent! The castle then seemed no prison; the moat seemed no barrier. Sometimes my uncle carried Clement abroad to visit him, but then I was sure of his return. Even the hours of instruction I shared with him. He had a good, an amiable tutor, who delighted in teaching to me also every science he taught to Clement; and if Mr. Valmont frowned upon me or checked my industry, Clement was still at my side and I smiled through my tears.

Thus passed away the years from six till sixteen. On the day that I became sixteen, we had run races with our little fawn; and, having wearied ourselves with exertion, we had lain down to rest in each other's arms, at the foot of that oak where you, Miss Ashburn, first beheld me. My uncle broke our happy slumbers. He came to the oak; and sternly commanded Clement to rise and follow him.

I followed too. My uncle sat down in his library; and appeared to meditate; while we looked on each other with love and pity, and on him we looked with suspicion and affright.

When my uncle began to speak, Clement trembled; but all my emotions were chained up in astonishment: for I heard him say that Clement should that day quit the castle, that he should seek new companions, new countries, new climates.

'Never! never!' I cried. I folded my arms round my lover – 'Thou shalt not go, Clement,' I said. 'We have world enough. No: thou shalt not go, my Clement!'

Mr. Valmont furiously bade me desist; but he had awakened a dread in my mind more powerful than my dread of him. For a time, I expostulated with vehemence and courage; but I could not repress my tears – and, while I was compelled to listen to my uncle, his tone, his words impressed me with my former awe of him and rendered my remonstrance timid and useless.

To Clement he said, 'You are now to leave these boyish follies, and learn the duties of a man. You shall mix with society; but remember that you are not to be attracted by its specious appearances. Scrutinize into its follies and enormities, as I have done; and let my precepts and instructions be your guide and law. Remember, Clement, that I took you from poverty and obscurity. Remember too that, on your duty and gratitude depends your security. That child,' he pointed to me, 'mind me, sir, that child is in future to be considered only as your sister.'

'As for you, Sibella,' he said to me, 'your duties in life are easily performed. I have chosen a part for you: and nothing is required of you but obedience. You have heard me declare to Clement, and I now repeat it to you, that to Clement Montgomery you are to be no more than a sister.' This day he quits us. When he shall return, I have not determined.'

Yes, Caroline, my Clement went. Two years has he roamed in a world which I am forbidden to know. But, alike in viewing the palace or the cottage, the burning mountain or the fertile plain, must the idea of Sibella accompany him. Our minds, our principles, our affections are the same; and, while I trace his never to be forgotten image within my breast, I know how fondly he cherishes the remembrance of mine.

Caroline, adieu! I go to the oak. On that consecrated spot, mountains, seas, continents dissolve, and my spirit unites with his!

LETTER V

FROM CAROLINE ASHBURN TO SIBELLA VALMONT

Yes, dearest Sibella, charming Sibella, in that one short but rapid sentence, you have taught me to understand your progress, from shyness to familiarity, from familiarity to kindness, from kindness to love, all powerful, all potent. Oh! be that love happy in its continuance, as at its commencement! Be it the pure garb of your Clement's soul, upon which vice shall leave no spot nor wrinkle! Be it, as you say, That your hearts, your affections, your principles are the same; and I would trust this lover amidst allurements such as virtue held seldom rejected, had seldom turned from without contamination.

Your uncle, my Sibella, I perceive, intended you for your lover, and your lover for you. His project, then, was to place a second Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Well, Sibella, innocence remains with you. Your Eden will yet bloom; for, trust me, innocence and happiness cannot long be separated.

Why will that uncle of your's so strenuously uphold his mysterious reserve and silence? I long to ask him a million of questions; and he knows that I do, and he wishes that I should. It is not because he is altogether convinced of the wisdom and utility of his plans, that he does plan; it is, that he will oppose himself to general customs and general experience. It is singularity and not perfection that he is in search of; and, since experience formerly taught him, that even the renowned name of Valmont might mix undistinguished with a herd of less illustrious names, he now bravely resolves to enforce the wonder of his compeers, if he cannot claim their reverence.

Perhaps, with the flattering promises of success, he sometimes soothes the rancour of his solitude. And occasionally, indeed, his existence is remembered, and his whimsies are made the subject of ridicule, contempt, and laughter; but some novel circumstance, such as the gay Mrs. Ashburn's visit to his gloomy retirement, must call them into this remembrance, or the name of Mr. Valmont would rest as undisturbed as does, in every memory but his own, the deeds of his forefathers.

It is to my mother's excursion to Valmont castle, that I owe the felicity of calling you my friend, it is to her escape from thence, as she herself terms it, that I owe my knowledge of Mr. Valmont's history. Surrounded, on her arrival at the house of Sir Thomas Barlowe, by a crowd of visitors, as gay, profuse, and dissipated as herself, she hastens to communicate her joy at the agreeable change, and to inveigh against the morose Mr. Valmont and his insipid wife. A conversation ensued of some length for such a subject, during which I discovered that two of the party, the Earl of Ulson and Colonel Ridson were once the intimate companions of Mr. Valmont. The former of these gentlemen appeared eager to place his defects in the strongest point of view; while the latter, with less zeal, to be sure, but with a sweetness of temper infinitely endearing, was willing to smooth the rugged parts of Mr. Valmont's character, and to place a vice behind the glare of a virtue. By setting aside, to the best of my judgment, the Earl's exaggerations, and making also some allowance for the palliative temper of Colonel Ridson, I had succeeded in learning as much of Mr. Valmont's history as enables me to form some, and I believe no inaccurate estimate of his worth, abilities, and character.

Your grandfather, Sibella, a being quite as eccentric tho' less whimsical than your uncle, lived in the castle you now inhabit. Nor would he, of his own free will, have quitted that castle for heaven itself. Every stone of the building that had kept its station in times of turbulence and discord against the attack of an enemy was to him an idol. If he was thoughtful, it was in recalling the great deeds of his ancestors; if he was talkative, it was on the same theme; if he had wishes, they were that he had lived in those glorious days when fighting well was the most eminent of virtues, and a strong fortified castle and obedient vassals the most valuable of possessions.

As is the established practice in families of such renown and dignity, as that to which you, my friend, appertain, the first born son of your grandfather was the only hope, the only joy, the only object of the careful solitude of his anxious parents; while your father, coming into the world two years after his brother, was adored, flattered and spoiled by no creature but his nurse. Your uncle, I understand, received a stately kind of education within the castle walls; and your father, happier because of less consequence, passed his early years with other young men of fashion at school and at college.

Mr. Valmont was not a whit behind his father in his veneration for high birth, but he could not boast so unqualified a love of fruits of armour; nor did he think that civil war was the only time when a man could gather honours worthy of a distinguished name. No sooner was your uncle emancipated from the fetters of his minority, than he resolved to repair to court, where he expected to find only his equals, and those equals alive to and exact in the observance of all that haughty decorum, which Mr. Valmont deemed indispensably necessary to the well being of social institutions. Poor man! he feels himself lost in the motley multitude, sees his high-born pretensions to notice and deference pushed aside by individuals obscure in their origin, but renowned for artful intrigues, for bold perseverance, and dazzling success! Shocked at the contaminating mixture, he had fled back with precipitancy to his castle, but love detained him, for he had made an offering of his heart to a woman of rank and fashion. Nothing could be more unfortunate than this passion. Nothing further from congeniality than the minds and manners of Lady Margaret B – and Mr. Valmont: he, just risen, as it were, from the tomb of his progenitors, loaded with the punctilio of the last age, recoiling from the salute of every man who could not boast an unblemished pedigree, and lastly, and most worthily, possessing refined ideas of female delicacy, of honourable love, and of unchanging fidelity; and she, on the contrary, a graceful coquette, without an atom of real tenderness in her heart, and valuing her rank merely as it gave her opportunities of extending her conquest. Lady Margaret B – was highly diverted with Mr. Valmont's formalities; and, in spite of the torture her dissipated coquettish manners inflicted on him, she had sufficient power to make him the most ardent of her lovers. In fine, she rejected him, laughed at him, despised him.

I could not hear this anecdote, nor can I repeat it, without a sensation of pain, so strongly do I enter into the irritable feelings of your uncle, when, hitherto accustomed only to receive homage and obedience, he is at once foiled in his ambition by low born courtiers, and betrayed in his love by a high born jilt.

Mr. Valmont consulted no other guide than his passions; and instantly drew an angry and false picture of mankind. With such people as I have spoken of he could not associate; for their vices he abhorred; but his mind had not fortitude enough, had not comprehension enough, to cast aside his own prejudices; and, instead of attempting to reform mankind, he retires to rail at them; and carries with him the pride, selfishness, and love of power, in which all the vices of society originate.

Wrapped in the impenetrable selfishness of high birth, Mr. Valmont denies the possibility of eminent virtue existing without rank. Who shall presume to arraign his principles, to sit in judgment upon his actions, to teach him his duty? I stand, cries Mr. Valmont, within the sacred verge of nobility! Look on that coat of arms! I derive from the Normans! Wisdom in rags – keep off!

True: his ancestors conquered, that he should be wise! – Oh, cede to him the palm! Bind his brows with the laurel!

After a few months retirement, Mr. Valmont ventured once more into the heterogeneous multitude, in search of a wife: for, I suspect he found himself as ill qualified for solitude as society. Beside, he had formed the virtuous project of instructing a new race, to put the old world out of countenance.

I cannot but pause, to reflect upon your uncle's toils in search of his help mate. He must have a wife, whose pedigree his future sons might place beside his own; and he must have one, of a temperament and character opposite to that of lady Margaret B – ; and his good stars, his ill stars, or whatever else you please, led him to the feet of Mrs. Valmont.

It is true, your aunt was neither as coquettish nor had she the sprightly wit nor the mischievous gaiety of lady Margaret, but she loved crowds, detested solitude, and was a votary of dissipation; to convince her how much he had studied her inclinations, and how much he meant to gratify them, no sooner was Mr. Valmont in possession of his bride then he snatched her from the scenes where her existence was alone valuable to her, and buried her amidst obscurity and horror at Valmont castle.

What is the consequence? she had no mental accomplishments in reserve for their mutual benefit and delight; nor had he mind enough to steal fire from heaven and animate with life the marble. From the struggle of tempers, and the warfare of words, she droops into an hypocondriac; he degenerates into a cynic, proud of himself alone.