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unconscious that she had been there before him, and there sworn a vow of vengeance ruthless as his own, stood the companion and the avenger of her guilt. Always thus in solitude and in the stillness of the night Strathmore came hither; often, very often, for his nature was too brave and too proud to spare itself one tittle of its chastisement, and the love which he had borne the man whom he had slaughtered, seemed to well up in deeper tenderness as everything else in him grew harder, colder, and more merciless. A command he could not resist seemed to impel him to come there as men go to the scene of their past crimes, and to stand beside the record of his guilt, beside the tomb where the life his hand had slain in all its glory and its youth, lay rotting to decay in the womb of the black, dank earth.

There, with his head bowed on the cold marble, and his hands clenched on the wet grass that already covered the ground, he often lay through many hours of long, lonely nights; in what remorse God alone saw. He would have poured out his own life like water, to bring back the life that he had slain.

He stood there now, gazing down upon the white shining stone and the dark leaves which swayed against it; he felt as though some atonement had been wrought to Erroll by the vengeance which the day just passed had crowned. Had his arm ever paused in the blow he had struck to the assassin of one and the betrayer of both, it would have been nerved and steeled afresh by the memory of the dead. Beneath the polished ice, the courtly worldliness of Strathmore's character, lay the fierce, untamable nature of the Indian, or the untutored Southern, their passions, their love, their vengeance; to him there was not alone revenge in that which he had wrought on the traitress who had stained his hands in blood; there was a wild justice done, there was a duty expiated to the dead in the retribution which had pursued the murderess.

As he stood there in the shadowy light, while the moon streamed upon the sepulchre lying at his feet, the solitude, which reigned unbroken about Erroll's grave, for the first time was shared, and on his ear fell the low, mellow, chanting voice of Redempta the gipsy.

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English lord, I have given you your vengeance! Is it sweet in your teeth, or has it turned to ashes as you ate ?"

He started as her form suddenly rose from the depths of the woodland gloom and stood before him by the grave; but the chill smile which had so much of cruelty came on his lips as he glanced at her.

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Redempta, the only thing in life whose sweetness never palls, and cannot die, is vengeance."

Her deep, lustrous eyes, which were now heavy and weary, gleamed for the moment with the evil which glittered in his own, as at the touch of fresh flame dying embers leap to life.

"Ay, ay, she has suffered! I have seen misery gather in her eyes, and shame bowing her head to the dust, I have watched her shiver under the scorn of derisive laughter, and I have heard her moan with pain like a hopeless, fallen thing. She has suffered ! That cannot escape me! that cannot be undone! I have avenged him, and now

Her voice dropped, and she was silent, while over the lurid light of

her eyes a humid softness gathered, and her lips trembled with a voiceless movement-her thoughts were with the dead. For the heart of the woman was in pain, and sickened with the futility of a revenge which could not yield her back what she had loved; it knew not the exultant and pitiless lust of the man, which rioted in vengeance, and fed on its knowledge, and its memory, insatiate and unpalled. For there was this wide difference between the passions of their souls: hers sprang from love which still lived and was deathless, his from love which had become hatred, and in that hatred lost all other sense.

Strathmore glanced at her in the gloaming; he owed this woman much, since he owed her the first secret of his power over the life which he had pursued and hunted down; and the sole price which the Bohemian had asked or taken had been that which she had first named: "to see her suffer."

He stretched out his hand with some Louis d'or:

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Redempta, you are ill-clad and in want; take these now, and in the future I will serve you."

She signed aside the proffered gift with a proud gesture of denial, and on her face came a strange smile, derisive yet melancholy :

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My lord! I told you long ago that Redempta the vagrant, took no price for that which she brought you-no wage for her vengeance. Since his hand lay in mine, no man's gold has soiled it; and with the future I have no share; my work is done. The future is for you: it lies before you; go whither it beckons !"

As the Czeschen words were uttered in the monotonous, chanting recitative in which she spoke, to the memory of each recurred the spring night far away in Bohemia, when the ruddy gleam of the gipsy-fires had shone through the aisles of the pinewoods, and when from the slumbering passions written on the brow she had made sure prophecy of all which, when they should awaken, would scorch and devastate the life. And her hand closed on his arm in a grasp which he could not have shaken from him without violence, while her eyes dwelt on him where he stood in the gloom, and studied his face with the same fixed, dreamy gaze with which she had looked on him then: a look which had much of compassion.

"I have no future, but one waits for you; you must reap as you have sown; you must gather the harvest, and eat of the fruit of your past. It is the inexorable law! The past has been wrought by your own hand; but the future will escape you. You will seek to build anew, and lo! the curse of the dead sin will rest on your work, and the structure will crumble, falling to ashes as it reaches its fairest. The sin of the guilty has been avenged, but the sin to the innocent will never be washed away. You will be great and powerful, and success will go with you, and fame; but the blood-stain will be on your hand for ever, and when you have made atonement, behold it will die in your grasp, and through you will the guiltless be stricken !"

The words in her Czeschen tongue fell slowly and melodiously in the silence in her mournful and monotonous recitation, while her eyes dwelt on his face with their vague, fathomless gaze. Her hand dropped from his arm and left him free:

"In the future you will remember the words of Redempta. We shall meet no more- -farewell!"

She turned from him, and, with the swift, noiseless movement peculiar to her tribe, was lost in the veiling shadows of the night. He stood motionless where she had left him, in the dull, grey light as the moon passed behind the clouds of the east. Again at her words ran a ghastly chill, as at the touch of steel in a vital wound; less from their prophecy than from their truth; the future stretched before him, darkened for all time, by the shadow of remembered guilt. His hand might pioneer his road to power, and reap him honour in the sight of men, but there for ever on it must rest the stain of innocent blood. His life might pass onwards in the fulness of years and the ripeness of triumph, but there for ever at its core must lie the curse of an inexpiable guilt.

Never to lose it, ever to bear it through all the years to come, that burden of life taken, never to be restored, of sin wrought, never to be undone! Veiled in the mist of hidden years, who knew what guiltless life that guilt might strike? who knew what retribution might be coiled and waiting to take its vengeance for the unforgotten crime? who knew where the after-harvest of that deadly sin might be reaped and garnered ?

The future! the future! He had said in his soul, "vengeance to the Living, but to the Dead, atonement." Standing there beside the grave of him whom he had slain, while the words of the prophecy echoed in his ear, the vision of the years to come seemed to rise and swarm about him, and rend, and tear, and shatter from his hands the work of Expiation.

That night the Seine wound slowly and darkly through the open country and under the pale, clear stars, and through the rich glades of woodland towards the city, there to grow black and sullen beneath the arches of dim-lit bridges, and to wash the low walls of the dreary Morgue, and to see the yellow candle faintly burning above the iron cradle of the Enfans Trouvés, and the thousand lights gleaming bright along the palace façade of the Tuileries.

And where the river was still clear, and cool, and fresh, ere it had reached the evil heat and brooding shadows of the city, where green leaves still swayed into its water, and in its depths the starlight gleamed, where its darkness was still repose, and its silence holy, a human form hovered on its brink, bending wearily towards the tranquil gliding waters, where the water-lily floated, and the hush of night seemed visibly to rest.

It was so cool, so serene, so peaceful: to lie there lulled to dreamy death by the cadence of its ebb and flow, and know no more the passionate pain the breathless tumult, the vain despair, and the unending bitterness of life, were this not wisdom, oh ye who suffer?

It looked so to her; for her soul was weary of its travail, and her heart was fain to be at rest. She looked far across the dark and silent country, where no living thing stirred, and upward to the stars, whose white light fell upon her deep and melancholy eyes: her hands were pressed upon her bosom, and her lips moved in faint, broken words:

"I have avenged thee. What have I more to do with life?"

Her head drooped upon her breast, and she leaned nearer and nearer towards the waters, where the quiet stars were shining, and the pale lilies

slowly floating in their shroud of leaves, where were oblivion, and peace, and death; and in the silence she listened to the tranquil murmuring of the tide. And as she thus leaned nearer and nearer yet towards that cool and restful place, in her weary eyes shone the gleam of unshed tears, and in her face a new light came as on the face of one who, having been long prisoned in the loneliness of exile, beholds escape at last, and liberty and rest.

From her parted lips a whisper stole, broken and yearning, on the hush of night:

"My love! my love! I come!".

And in the silence there was the dull moan of severed waters, and the troubled lilies trembled on the river's breast: then, with a sighing sound, the winds swept over them, and all was still.

The waters flowed on upon their changeless course.

Through the summer night the river wound its way under the radiance of the stars, and bore her with it more gently than life, more tenderly than human hands. The waters flowed on with liquid melancholy murmur, and the dead body of the Bohemian floated down the stream in its serene and solemn rest, finding repose at last after the heat and travail, the passion and the pain, of many years. To her untaught, unfettered soul, love had been God, and vengeance, Duty; and death was ransom justly won, after a mission justly wrought; death in her wild, instinctive, barbaric creed was sure reunion with him for whom she had suffered and been sacrificed, and to whom her life had been unceasingly consecrated even to the last, if erring in its revenge, yet heroic in its martyrdom.

The waters bore her onwards slowly, softly, as merciful hands bear the bier of the dead; now in the cool shadow of the leaves, now in the clear sheen of holy stars, while on her upturned brow and her closed eyes the moonlight shone with fair and peaceful gleam, and in her dark, floating hair the stainless lilies wound, and through the hush of night the winds gently breathed over the surface of the waters, which murmured low about her in pitying whisper :

"Rest in peace, O human soul! And blame her not for sin which had its root in love, you great and countless criminals upon earth, whose lust is avarice, and whose god is self."

THE BALLADS AND TRADITIONS OF NORTHERN EUROPE.

PART THE FIRST.

THE singular wild tales of Northern Europe have, for the most part, come down to our times in rude, and yet often most elaborately artificial metre, as embodied in the alliterative verses of the old Icelandic Skalds, and in the popular ballads of a later period, which have recently excited so much attention in Scandinavia. Many a wild and curious tale, which would otherwise have passed away into oblivion, has been kept alive by the beauty of the verses in which it was enshrined. These glorious old Scandinavian ballads are precious relics, indeed, of a former condition of society; in their rude stanzas are embodied pictures so vivid of times long gone by, that they, and they alone, seem to us to roll back the mists of ages that have settled over the scenes that they describe, and transplant us to the wild Northern coast, where the merman and the water-kelpie, the sea-trow and the land-trow, the elf and the kobold of the mine, still hold undisputed dominion,

In the comparison we purpose to institute of the legends of various countries of the North of Europe, it will be shown that, wherever the Northman, the progenitor of our justly-prized Anglo-Saxon race, has ruled, and especially in those localities where his sway was longest maintained, there exists a marvellous similarity of legend, a wonderful identity of character in the popular belief. The same ballad, varied in its incidents, but identical in its plot, is often to be met with in half a dozen different languages of the North, in countries which now have but little communication with each other. The Breton and the Swede, the Icelander and the Lowland Scot, have ballads so alike in their construction, so identical even in their very words, that we cannot hesitate to believe in their common origin. The noble old Scottish ballad of the Lochmaben Harper has its exact counterpart in Danish, while the same legend, clothed in various garbs, exists, as we shall afterwards show, in many other Northern lands. Nay, had we but space, we could trace these Northern traditions still farther back to their common origin, following them across the wild plains of Russia into the arid steppes of Tartary, till we find them glowing in rich Eastern dress amid the flowery gardens of Cashmere, or on the fertile shores of the Indian Ocean. Thither, however, we shall not follow them; we shall not touch on Sanskrit or any other Eastern poetry, but confine ourselves to regions nearer home, and more suitable to our Northern imaginations.

We have been accustomed to look upon our own favoured isle, and especially the Northern part of it, as the true home of romantic poetry. The ballad minstrelsy of Scotland is undoubtedly copious and rich. The collections of Scott and of Motherwell, of Buchan and of Chambers, are mines of wealth, but they are not the sole depositaries of the legendary lore of the North. They are, indeed, but a tithe of the wondrous folklore of the rest of Northern Europe. Iceland and Ferro, Norway and Sweden, Denmark and Holstein, Germany and Brittany, have each yielded vast treasures of this kind, and in all these countries, within the last forty years, learned and diligent men have laboured to rescue from

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