The Fatal Bride
Being a Second Contribution from the Reminiscences of a Bachelor.
I am now an old man, and, what is perhaps less excusable, an old bachelor too; and yet, sir, I am not a bachelor of malice prepense—I am no profane railer against wedlock. I would not, for my grandmother’s enamel bonbonniere, which catches my eye this moment, nor for my honoured uncle’s silver-mounted and inlaid steel barrels—both of them family relics dear in their own several ways—that your fair readers should set me down as guilty of premeditated and deliberate celibacy. No such thing. I have more than once narrowly escaped—I should say missed—the fate-matrimonial, and that by pure accident—by no cowardice or perfidy of mine. No; my tendencies were all conjugal—my blessedness, however, has been single; and so far am I from thanking my stars, or taking merit to myself for this state of things, that, sooth to say, even the seventy-and-five winters and summers that have bleached and baked me in succession, still find me, now and then, sighing over the tender recollections and bitter disappointments, which are now for me, the sad and only relics of the romance of early days.
But though I have had my passages of love, as well as those of the sterner passions, in my day; and though I sometimes take a whim to rummage among old trinkets, lockets, and likenesses, each of them to me a little history in itself, yet I would not have you suppose me a superannuated sentimentalist either. No, sir. I have my tender, and, jesting aside, my melancholy retrospections; but I have also my pleasant, and, even at this time of day, my exciting recollections, too. I would be almost ashamed to tell you how often it comes to pass, that, my solitary pint of old port finished, I find myself sunk in my comfortable, ancient, leathern chair, gazing between my knees into the clear red embers, between which and me are rising and floating, like mystic shapes from an enchanted cauldron, the forms and faces long lost to life, which have mingled in the mazes of early adventure; and some of whom have left upon my time-chilled heart, traces that eternity itself, mayhap, will fail to obliterate.
Thus it is, that in long winter’s evenings, as I sit alone and musing, memory calls up, with chastened colouring and softened outline, the chequered past before me. Passive, as though the pageant were the creation of some Prospero, and I his wondering visitor, I sit by and see, while memory and association crowd my vision with their filmy troops, fragments of old adventure, and glimpses of thrilling scenes, with all their actors duly accoutred, and looking just as they did—how many years ago! The lighthearted and the moody—the loved and the worthless—the prosperous and the ruined—the changed, and the dead and gone—all, in defiance of time and death, take their old places, and wear their old looks and liveries, as they drift by me in sad and wayward procession. Leaving these recollections to themselves, to rise, and shift, and unroll before my listless gaze, as chance, or some unknown law of suggestion wills it, it often happens that strange occurrences, and striking and mournful histories, which had passed from my ordinary remembrances, are thrown up again, like long-buried treasures from the restless sea, and startle me almost with the vividness of novelty.
It may be, that feeling, in most of these stories, that interest which attaches to an acquaintance with the individuals who have taken a part in them, I am unduly predisposed to exaggerate the degree of favour with which an ordinary reader may be presumed to regard them. Incidents well worth recording, as having happened to my lord or lady this, that, or t’other, may yet prove dull enough in the abstract, and unsupported by the borrowed importance of the aforesaid distinguished titles. But whatever interest I might have thrown over these pages, by particularizing individuals, and publishing real names, I feel bound—in some cases by humanity, in others by honour, but in all effectually—to forego. A chronique scandaleuse is not quite the thing for your respectable pages, nor, independently of other and higher considerations, are the tease and worry to which such authorship would expose your humble servant, quite the thing for an easy old bachelor, who has not handled a pistol in anger for full five-and-thirty years, who wishes well to all mankind, and hates trouble, almost as much as law or bloodshed.
The tales I send you, therefore, shall not record the names of those whose acts, follies, or sufferings, they recite. In all other respects they shall be faithful narratives of fact—in this alone fictitious. They may prove wondrous dull, as old men’s stories sometimes do. Of their merits, I am, for every reason, the worst possible judge. Decide, then, yourself—put them into your Magazine or into your fire, just as your critical acumen shall determine. As for me, I prize my snug obscurity too justly to aspire to literary honours, or to participate in literary resentments. Blot, burn, or print, just as you please; I have nothing of the genus irritabile, except, perhaps, some symptoms of the cacoëthes scribendi about me. I perceive, indeed, with complacency, that you have admitted my former contribution to a place in your November number; this has determined me to despatch another, which, with like encouragement, may be followed by a third, and so on; I, all the while, with your good leave, maintaining my incognito, and despatching my scribblings through that mysterious agency, the penny-post. Should you cease to hear from me, without sufficient apparent cause for the suspension of my correspondence; should, I say, this series—for such, with your permission, I mean to make it—be abruptly and finally cut short, why then you may conclude that the
