Early next morning he rose to fulfil his threat. It was one of those beautiful mornings after a night of rain and tempest, and the sun shone brightly on the wreck left by the gale. Not a breath was stirring, and it was a strange sight to see the uprooted trees, the ruins of part of the chapel thrown down in the night, and the debris left by the Wye, which had nearly sunk to its wonted bed, lying in disjointed heaps on the sward. The silence was only broken by the robin's note, or the rush of the subsiding river, when the Earl proceeded to demolish the high altar. Rough as his soldiery were, they were not entirely freed from old superstitions, and there was not one hardy enough to obey his behest; so, after censuring them for lukewarmness in a blessed cause, he himself seized a sledgehammer from a bystander, and prepared to perform the sacrilegious act. He was a tall, stout man, of about thirty-five years, in the full strength of manhood, and he whirled the heavy instrument round his head as if it had been a withe; it descended on the altar with tremendous force, and in a moment brought down in dire destruction the marble shrine and image of the Virgin. Again he swung the hammer high--his face was red with passion, and his eye unnaturally bright. Suddenly a mortal paleness suffused his features, his powerful arm dropped down as if broken, and he fell heavily to the earth. Extreme passion had so excited him that a large blood-vessel burst, and as he lay on the earth, the red blood bubbled from his mouth. There were those who saw in his fate the retributive punishment of God for his cousin's death! He never spoke again, and after lingering some hours in great suffering, his spirit passed away, a few hours after his great chieftain's demise. From that hour, the curse of Augusta has reigned malignantly over all his race;--the brave, the beautiful, have alike paid the debt, and one by one, but surely as the leaf falls before October's blast, have the members of that noble house succumbed to their fate. Some on the battle-field, some on the fevered couch, some in the blue lone sea, some by accidental death, some in mortal fray; but of all the many hearts that have braved life's storms, none have lived to be old in this world of sin and sorrow. They learned to love despair, ay, even to be proud of their doom! We trust we have not wearied our reader by this introductory chapter, without which the strange fates and vicissitudes of the family whose history we are about to narrate might perhaps seem overdrawn, but whose early fall will no longer seem strange to one who knows the origin of the WEIRD OF THE WENTWORTHS.[B] CHAPTER II. "Where, perhaps, some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighbouring eyes."--_L'Allegro._