"A brow half martial and half diplomatic,
An eye upsoaring like an eagle's wing."
John Lyon Howe was the younger son of a planter, residing in one of the wildest mountain regions in central Virginia. The elder Howe was blessed with a large family, and cursed with a heavily mortgaged estate--a combination of circumstances not unusual among the warm-hearted, generous and extravagant people of the Old Dominion.
John Lyon Howe had been educated in the Law School of the University of Virginia, where, at the age of twenty-three, he graduated with the highest honors.
Then, instead of commencing his professional life in one of the great Eastern cities, or striking out for the broad fields of enterprise opened in the Far West, young Howe, to the astonishment of all who were acquainted with the talents and ambition of the new lawyer, returned to his native county and opened his law office in Blackville, a small hamlet lying at the foot of the Black Valley, and enjoying the honor and profit of being the county-seat.
But the young lawyer had strong motives for his actions. He had great talent, an intense passion for politics, and quite as much State pride as personal ambition. He wished to distinguish himself; yes, but not in Massachusetts or Minnesota, nor in any other place except in his native State, his dear old Virginia.
Sometime to represent her in the National Congress, and to do her service and credit there, was the highest goal of his youthful aspirations.
For this cause, he settled in the obscure hamlet of Blackville, and opened his law office in one of the basement rooms of the county court-house.
While the courts were in session he attended them regularly, and did a good deal of business in the way of gratuitous counselling and pleading; advocating and defending with great ability and success the cause of the poor and oppressed, and winning much honor and praise, but very little money, not enough, indeed, to pay his office rent, or renew his napless hat and thread-bare coat.
Besides his unprofitable professional labors, he engaged in equally unprofitable political contests.
He took the liberal view of State craft, and sought to open the minds of his fellow-citizen to a just and wise policy, or what he, in his young enthusiasm, conceived to be such. He wrote stirring leaders for the local papers, and made rousing speeches at the political meetings.
He was everywhere spoken of as a rising young man, who was sure to reach a high position some day. Yes! some day; but that desired day seemed very far distant to the desponding young lawyer.
And to make his probation still more painful, he was in love! not as men are who are taken with a new face every year of their lives, but as the heroes of old used to be--for once and forever! profoundly, passionately, desperately in love, almost despairingly in love, since she whom he loved was at once the richest heiress, the greatest beauty, and the proudest lady in the whole community--Sybil Berners! Miss Berners, of Black Hall!--in social position as far above the briefless young lawyer as the sun above the earth; at least so said those who observed this presumptuous passion, and predicted for the young lover, should he ever really aspire to her hand, the fate of Phaeton, to be consumed in the splendor of her sphere, and cast down blackened to his native earth.
Had they who cavilled at his high-placed love but known the truth; how she whom he so worshipped, on her part, adored him? But this he himself did not know, or even suspect. Had he possessed much less of a fine, high-toned sense of honor, he might, by wooing the lady, have found this out for himself; but he, an almost penniless young man, was much too proud to ask the hand of the wealthy heiress. Or had he possessed a little more personal vanity, he might have suspected the truth; for certainly there was not a handsomer man in the whole county than was this briefless young lawyer with the napless hat and thread-bare coat. His person was of that medium height and just proportions necessary to give perfect elegance of form and grace of motion. His features were classic, with the straight forehead, hooked nose, short upper lip, and pointed chin of the strong old Roman type. His complexion was fair, his eyes blue, and his hair and beard a golden auburn. Added to these attractions, there was an intense magnetic power in the gaze of his dark eyes, and in the tone of his deep voice, a power that few could resist, and certainly not Sybil Berners.
But who and what besides heiress and beauty was Sybil Berners? To tell you all she was. I must first tell you something about her family, the "Berners of Black Hall."
Theirs was an old family, and a historical name interwoven with the destinies of the two hemispheres. Their house was older than the history of the new world, and almost as ancient as the fables of the old world.
They were among the first lords of the manor in Colonial Virginia, and they claimed descent from a ducal house whose patent of nobility dated back to the first months of the Norman Conquest of England.
They had been great in history and in story; great in the field and the forum; great in the old country and in the new. They had been a brave, fierce, cruel, and despotic race, equally feared and hated at home and abroad, equally loved and trusted as well; for never were such dangerous foes or such devoted friends as were these Berners; no one ever loved as these Berners loved, or hated as they hated. In the intensity of their love or their hate they were capable of suffering or inflicting death; these Berners, whose friendship was almost as fatal as their enmity; these Berners, who "never spared man in their hate or woman in their love;" these Berners of the burning heart; these Berners of the boiling blood; these Berners of Black Hall; and whose sole representative now was Sybil, the last daughter of their line, who concentrated in her own ardent, intense nature all the most beautiful, all the most terrible attributes of her strong and fiery race.
I said that she was the richest heiress as well as the most beautiful girl of the country.
She was the inheritor of the famous Black Valley manor, holding besides its own home plantation, several of the most productive and valuable farms in the neighborhood.
There is not in all the mountain region of Virginia a wilder, darker, gloomier glade than that forming the home manor of the Berners family, and known as the Black Valley. It is a long, deep, narrow vale, lying between high, steep ridges of iron-gray rock, half covered with a growth of deep-green stunted cedars.
At the head or northern extremity of the vale springs a cascade, called, for the darkness of its color, the Black Torrent. It rushes, roaring, down the side of the precipice, now hiding under a heavy growth of evergreen, now bursting into light as it foams over the face of some rock, until at length it tumbles down to the foot of the mountain and flows along through the bottom of the Valley, until about half way down its length, it widens into a little lake, called, from its hue, the Black Water, or the Black Pond; then narrowing again, it flows on down past the little hamlet of Blackville, situated at the foot or southern extremity of the Black Valley.
The ancient manor house, known as the Black Hall, stands on a rising ground on the west side of the Black Water with its old pleasure gardens running down to the very edge of the lake.
It is a large, rambling, irregularly-formed old house, built of the iron gray rocks dug from the home quarries; and it is scarcely to be distinguished from the iron-gray precipices that tower all around it.
The manor had been in the possession of the same family from the time of King James the First, who made a grant of the land to Reginald Berners, the first Lord of the Manor.
Bertram Berners was the seventh in descent from Reginald. He married first a lady of high rank, the daughter of the colonial governor of Virginia. This union, which was neither fruitful nor happy, lasted more than thirty years, after which the high-born wife died.
Finding himself at the age of sixty a childless widower and the last of his name, he resolved to marry again in the hope of having heirs. He chose for his second wife a young lady of good but impoverished family, the orphan niece of a neighboring planter.
But the new wife only half fulfilled her husband's hopes, when, a year after their marriage, she presented him with one fair daughter, the Sybil of our story.
Even this gift cost the delicate mother her life; for although she did not die immediately, yet from the day of Sybil's birth, she fell into a long and lingering decline which finally terminated in death.
Old Bertram Berners was nearly seventy years of age, when he laid his young wife in her early grave. Although he had been grievously disappointed in his hopes of a male heir, yet he was not mad enough, at his advanced period of life, to try matrimony again. He wisely determined to devote the few remaining days of his life to the rearing of his little daughter, then a child seven years of age.
Old Bertram loved and spoiled the infant as none but an old man can love or spoil his only child, who is besides the offspring of his age. He would not part with her to send her to school; but he himself became her instructor until she was more than ten years old.
After that, as she began to approach womanhood, he engaged a succession of governesses, each one of whom excessively annoyed him by persistently trying to marry him for his money, and who consequently got herself politely dismissed.
Next he tried a succession of tutors, but this second plan worked even worse than the first; for each one of the tutors in his turn tried to marry the heiress for the fortune, and, naturally enough, got himself kicked out of the house.
So the plan of home education prospered badly. Perhaps old Bertram had been singularly unfortunate in his selection of teachers. It must have been so indeed, since he had been accustomed to say that "they all were as bad as they could be; and each one was worse than all the rest."
Thus the literary training of the heiress had been carried on in the most capricious, fitful and irregular manner, the worst suited to her, who more than most girls required the discipline of a firm and steady rule.
The educational result to her was a very superficial knowledge of literature, arts, and sciences, and a very imperfect acquaintance with ancient and modern languages.
She was in the habit of saying sarcastically, that "she had an utter confusion of ideas on the subjects of algebra, astronomy, and all the other branches of a polite education;" that, for instance, she never could remember whether the "Pons Asinorum" were a plant or a problem, or if it was Napoleon Bonaparte that discovered America and Christopher Columbus who lost the battle of Waterloo, or vice versa.
And after all, this was but a trifling exaggeration of the neglected condition of her mind.
