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.