Women have often been hardly used by men, but perhaps no
harder usage, no fiercer cruelty was ever experienced by a woman than that which
fell to the lot of Josephine Murray from the hands of Earl Lovel, to whom she
was married in the parish church of Applethwaite--a parish without a village,
lying among the mountains of Cumberland--on the 1st of June, 181--. That her
marriage was valid according to all the forms of the Church, if Lord Lovel were
then capable of marrying, no one ever doubted; nor did the Earl ever allege that
it was not so. Lovel Grange is a small house, surrounded by a small domain--small
as being the residence of a rich nobleman, lying among the mountains which
separate Cumberland from Westmoreland, about ten miles from Keswick, very
lovely, from the brightness of its own green sward and the luxuriance of its
wild woodland, from the contiguity of overhanging mountains, and from the beauty
of Lovel Tarn, a small lake belonging to the property, studded with little
islands, each of which is covered with its own thicket of hollies, birch, and
dwarfed oaks. The house itself is poor, ill built, with straggling passages and
low rooms, and is a sombre, ill-omened looking place. When Josephine Murray was
brought there as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but
she loved the lakes and mountains, and dreamed of some vague mysterious joy of
life which was to come to her from the wildness of her domicile.
I fear that she had no other ground, firmer than this, on
which to found her hopes of happiness. She could not have thought Lord Lovel to
be a good man when she married him, and it can hardly be said that she loved
him. She was then twenty-four years old, and he had counted double as many
years. She was very beautiful, dark, with large, bold, blue eyes, with hair
almost black, tall, well made, almost robust, a well-born, brave, ambitious
woman, of whom it must be acknowledged that she thought it very much to be the
wife of a lord. Though our story will be concerned much with her sufferings, the
record of her bridal days may be very short. It is with struggles that came to
her in after years that we shall be most concerned, and the reader, therefore,
need be troubled with no long description of Josephine Murray as she was when
she became the Countess Lovel. It is hoped that her wrongs may be thought worthy
of sympathy--and may be felt in some sort to atone for the ignoble motives of her
marriage.
The Earl, when he found his bride, had been living almost
in solitude for a twelvemonth. Among the neighbouring gentry in the lake country
he kept no friendly relations. His property there was small, and his character
was evil. He was an English earl, and as such known in some unfamiliar fashion
to those who know all earls; but he was a man never seen in Parliament, who had
spent the greater part of his manhood abroad, who had sold estates in other
counties, converting unentailed acres into increased wealth, but wealth of a
kind much less acceptable to the general English aristocrat than that which
comes direct from the land. Lovel Grange was his only remaining English
property, and when in London he had rooms at an hotel. He never entertained, and
he never accepted hospitality. It was known of him that he was very rich, and
men said that he was mad. Such was the man whom Josephine Murray had chosen to
marry because he was an earl.
He had found her near Keswick, living with her father in a
pretty cottage looking down upon Derwentwater--a thorough gentleman, for Captain
Murray had come of the right Murrays--and thence he had carried her to Lovel
Grange. She had brought with her no penny of fortune, and no settlement had been
made on her. Her father, who was then an old man, had mildly expostulated; but
the ambition of the daughter had prevailed, and the marriage was accomplished.
The beautiful young woman was carried off as a bride. It will be unnecessary to
relate what efforts had been made to take her away from her father's house
without bridal honours; but it must be told that the Earl was a man who had
never yet spared a woman in his lust. It had been the rule, almost the creed of
his life, that woman was made to gratify the appetite of man, and that the man
is but a poor creature who does not lay hold of the sweetness that is offered to
him. He had so lived as to teach himself that those men who devote themselves to
their wives, as a wife devotes herself to her husband, are the poor lubberly
clods of creation, who had lacked the power to reach the only purpose of living
which could make life worth having. Women had been to him a prey, as the fox is
a prey to the huntsman and the salmon to the angler. But he had acquired great
skill in his sport, and could pursue his game with all the craft which
experience will give. He could look at a woman as though he saw all heaven in
her eyes, and could listen to her as though the music of the spheres was to be
heard in her voice. Then he could whisper words which, to many women, were as
the music of the spheres, and he could persevere, abandoning all other
pleasures, devoting himself to the one wickedness with a perseverance which
almost made success certain. But with Josephine Murray he could be successful on
no other terms than those which enabled her to walk out of the church with him
as Countess Lovel.
She had not lived with him six months before he told her
that the marriage was no marriage, and that she was--his mistress. There was an
audacity about the man which threw aside all fear of the law, and which was
impervious to threats and interference. He assured her that he loved her, and
that she was welcome to live with him; but that she was not his wife, and that
the child which she bore could not be the heir to his title, and could claim no
heirship to his property. He did love her--having found her to be a woman of
whose company he had not tired in six months. He was going back to Italy, and he
offered to take her with him--but he could not, he said, permit the farce of her
remaining at Lovel Grange and calling herself the Countess Lovel. If she chose
to go with him to Palermo, where he had a castle, and to remain with him in his
yacht, she might for the present travel under the name of his wife. But she must
know that she was not his wife. She was only his mistress.
Of course she told her father. Of course she invoked every
Murray in and out of Scotland. Of course there were many threats. A duel was
fought up near London, in which Lord Lovel consented to be shot at
twice--declaring that after that he did not think that the circumstances of the
case required that he should be shot at any more. In the midst of this a
daughter was born to her and her father died--during which time she was still
allowed to live at Lovel Grange. But what was it expedient that she should do?
He declared that he had a former wife when he married her, and that therefore
she was not and could not be his wife. Should she institute a prosecution
against him for bigamy, thereby acknowledging that she was herself no wife and
that her child was illegitimate? From such evidence as she could get, she
believed that the Italian woman whom the Earl in former years had married had
died before her own marriage. The Earl declared that the Countess, the real
Countess, had not paid her debt to nature till some months after the little
ceremony which had taken place in Applethwaite Church. In a moment of weakness
Josephine fell at his feet and asked him to renew the ceremony. He stooped over
her, kissed her, and smiled. "My pretty child," he said, "why should I do that?"
He never kissed her again.
What should she do? Before she had decided, he was in his
yacht sailing to Palermo--sailing no doubt not alone. What should she do? He had
left her an income--sufficient for the cast-off mistress of an Earl--some few
hundreds a year, on condition that she would quietly leave Lovel Grange, cease
to call herself a Countess, and take herself and her bairn--whither she would.
Every abode of sin in London was open to her for what he cared. But what should
she do? It seemed to her to be incredible that so great a wrong should befall
her, and that the man should escape from her and be free from punishment--unless
she chose to own the baseness of her own position by prosecuting him for bigamy.
The Murrays were not very generous in their succour, as the old man had been
much blamed for giving his daughter to one of whom all the world knew nothing
but evil. One Murray had fired two shots on her behalf, in answer to each one of
which the Earl had fired into the air; but beyond this the Murrays could do
nothing. Josephine herself was haughty and proud, conscious that her rank was
greater than that of any of the Murrays with whom she came in contact. But what
should she do?
The Earl had been gone five years, sailing about the world
she knew not where, when at last she determined to institute a prosecution for
bigamy. During these years she was still living at the Grange, with her child,
and the Courts of Law had allotted her some sum by way of alimony till her cause
should be decided; but upon this alimony she found it very difficult to lay her
hands--quite impossible to lay her hands upon the entirety of it. And then it
came to pass that she was eaten up by lawyers and tradesmen, and fell into bad
repute as asserting that claims made against her should legally be made against
the very man whom she was about to prosecute because she was not his wife. And
this went on till further life at Lovel Grange became impossible to her.
In those days there was living in Keswick a certain Mr
Thomas Thwaite, a tailor, who by degrees had taken a strong part in denouncing
the wrongs to which Lady Lovel had been subjected. He was a powerful, sturdy
man, with good means for his position, a well-known Radical in a county in which
Radicals have never been popular, and in which fifty years ago they were much
rarer than they are now. At this time Keswick and its vicinities were beginning
to be known as the abodes of poets, and Thomas Thwaite was acquainted with
Southey and Wordsworth. He was an intelligent, upstanding, impulsive man, who
thought well of his own position in the world, and who could speak his mind. He
was tall, massive, and square; tender-hearted and very generous; and he hated
the Earl of Lovel with all his heart. Once the two men had met since the story
of the Countess's wrongs had become known, and the tailor had struck the Earl to
the ground. This had occurred as the Earl was leaving Lovel Grange, and when he
was starting on his long journey. The scene took place after he had parted from
his Countess--whom he never was to see again. He rose to his feet and rushed at
the tailor; but the two were separated, and the Earl thought it best to go on
upon his journey. Nothing further was done as to the blow, and many years rolled
by before the Earl came back to Cumberland.
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