pulet-school of hating
feudal fathers--Theodore Clopton having been a Catholic, Alice Beauvoir
a Protestant; an introductory recountal of old Beauvoir's withering
curse on the Clopton family for Theodore's abduction of his daughter,
followed by the tragic event of the father and son, Cloptons', mutual
hatred, and the former found in his own park with the broken point of
his son's sword in him, the latter flying the realm: the curse has slept
for a generation; and now two fair daughters are all that remain to the
high-bred Sir Clement and his desponding lady, on whom the Beauvoir
descendant, a bitterest enemy, takes care to remind them the hovering
curse must burst. This Rowland Beauvoir is the villain of the story,
whose sole aim it is, after the fulfilment of his own libertine wishes,
to see the curse accomplished: and Charlotte's love for a certain young
Saville, whom Beauvoir hates as his handsome rival in court patronage,
as well as her pointed refusal of himself, gives new and present life to
his ancestral grudge. The lovers are espoused, and to make Sir Clement's
joy the greater, Saville has interest sufficient to meet the old
knight's humour of keeping up the ancient family name, by getting it
added to his own; so that the Beauvoir hatred and parricidal curse seem
likely to be frustrated. But--the first hindrance to their union is poor
sister Margaret's secret and infatuated love for that scheming villain
Rowland, her then too probable seduction, melancholic madness, and
suicide: successively upon this follow the last illnesses and deaths of
the heart-broken old people, whom Rowland's dreadful ubiquity terrifies
in their very chamber of disease; and as the too likely consequence of
such accumulated sorrows on a creature of exquisite sensibility,
Charlotte, the only remaining heiress of that ancient lineage,
gradually, and with all the semblance of death, falls into her terrible
trance. Rowland, who, through his intimacy with Margaret, knows all the
secret passages and sliding panels of the old mansion, and who thereby
gets mysterious admission whenever he pleases, comes into that silent
chamber, and finds Saville mourning over his dead-seeming bride: she,
all the while, though unable to move, in an agony of self-consciousness;
and at last, when Rowland in fiendish triumph pronounces the curse
complete, to the extreme horror of both, by an effort of tortured mind
over apparently inanimate matter, rolls her glazed ey