Cruel As The Grave

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.