With sickening horror Doctor Danvers turned away from the awful
spectacle. He covered his face in his hands, and it seemed to him as if a
soft, solemn voice whispered in his ear the mystic words, "Whoso
sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." The hand which, but a few years before, had, unsuspected, consigned a
fellow-mortal to the grave, had itself avenged the murder--Marston had
perished by his own hand. Naturally ambitious and intriguing, the perilous tendencies of such a
spirit in Mademoiselle de Barras had never been schooled by the mighty
and benignant principles of religion; of her accidental acquaintance at
Rouen with Sir Wynston Berkley, and her subsequent introduction, in an
evil hour, into the family at Gray Forest, it is unnecessary to speak. The unhappy terms on which she found Marston living with his wife,
suggested, in their mutual alienation, the idea of founding a double
influence in the household; and to conceive the idea, and to act upon it,
were, in her active mind, the same. Young, beautiful, fascinating, she
well knew the power of her attractions, and determined, though probably
without one thought of transgressing the limits of literal propriety, to
bring them to bear upon the discontented, retired roué, for whom she
cared absolutely nothing, except as the instrument, and in part the
victim of her schemes. Thus yielding to the double instinct that swayed
her, she gratified, at the same time, her love of intrigue and her love
of power. At length, however, came the hour which demanded a sacrifice to
the evil influence she had hitherto worshipped on such easy terms. She
found that her power must now be secured by crime, and she fell. Then
came the arrival of Sir Wynston--his murder--her elopement with Marston,
and her guilty and joyless triumph. At last, however, came the blow, long
suspended and terrific, which shattered all her hopes and schemes, and
drove her once again upon the world. The catastrophe we have just
described. After it she made her way to Paris. Arrived in the capital of
France, she speedily dissipated whatever remained of the money and
valuables which she had taken with her from Gray Forest; and Madame
Marston, as she now styled herself, was glad to place herself once more
as a governess in an aristocratic family. So far her good fortune had
prevailed in averting the punishment but too well earned by her past
life. But a day of reckoning was to come. A few years later France was
involved in the uproar and conflagration of revolution. Noble families
were scattered, beggared, decimated; and their dependants, often dragged
along with them into the flaming abyss, in many instances suffered the
last dire extremities of human ill. It was at this awful period that a
retribution so frightful and extraordinary overtook Madame Marston, that
we may hereafter venture to make it the subject of a separate narrative. Until then the reader will rest satisfied with what he already knows of
her history; and meanwhile bid a long, and as it may possibly turn out,
an eternal farewell to that beautiful embodiment of an evil and
disastrous influence. The concluding chapter in a novel is always brief, though seldom so short
as the world would have it. In a tale like this, the "winding up" must be
proportionately contracted. We have scarcely a claim to so many lines as
the formal novelist may occupy pages, in the distribution of poetic
justice, and the final grouping of his characters into that effective
tableau upon which, at last, the curtain gracefully descends. We, too,
may be all the briefer, inasmuch as the reader has doubtless anticipated
the little we have to say. It amounts, then, to this:--Within two years
after the fearful event which we have just recorded, an alliance had
drawn together, in nearer and dearer union, the inmates of Gray Forest
and Newton Park. Rhoda had given her hand to young Mervyn, of ulterior
consequences we say nothing--the nursery is above our province. And now,
at length, after this Christmas journey through somewhat stern and gloomy
scenery, in this long-deferred flood of golden sunshine we bid thee,
gentle reader, a fond farewell. THE END