Chapter X

For it so falls out
That what we have we prize not to the worth,
Whiles we enjoy it; but, being lacked and lost,
Why then we rack the value.
SHAKSPEARE.

Whilst I remember
Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself.

This mode of life had continued for many more days than either of them would retrospectively have imagined to have elapsed since its commencement. And in the course of it many topics which should have been altogether avoided, had every day imperceptibly been approached more nearly, and with greater effort evaded.

One day Lady Gayland, principally from a desire to fix her attention upon some extraneous and indifferent subject, had requested to be allowed in their next ride to mount Castleton’s own horse, instead of the more docile creature procured for Lucy, which she pronounced too sluggish. Castleton was at first rather afraid to assent, as his beautiful animal, though perfectly tractable under his skilful management, had only lately exchanged the turf for the road. But as the groom reported that the essay of the petticoat had been perfectly satisfactory, and as Lady Gayland was a most fearless horse-woman, the exchange, at her repeated request, was made on their next excursion.

They had, in consequence of the novelty of the experiment, started with the intention, at Castleton’s desire, of riding more quietly and carefully; and as they strolled slowly onwards, insensibly their attention had been transferred from the horse to their discourse, which was much the more animated of the two, as no animal is more sleepy than a spirited horse will sometimes be, when left to himself, with the reins upon his neck.

The origin of this, as of many other interesting conversations, was common place. We need not, perhaps, travel even so far back as when, in reply to some disclaimer on Lady Gayland’s part, Castleton said, “You know what Byron sings--

‘No friend like to a woman earth discovers.’”

“Ay, but remember,” interrupted Lady Gayland, “the proviso he adds:

‘So that they have not been, nor will be----’

what?--what is the word whose indispensable presence at the point of the stanza alone, excuses such a botching rhyme as _discovers_?”

“_Lovers_,” answered Castleton. “To be sure he says they should never have been, but then I think it was his own negative experience, limiting his opinion of the social qualities of poor human nature which warped his judgment. In introducing my quotation I should have said _even_ Byron sings--for I think he never had, nor I think was it in his nature to have, a female friend.”

“His sister--”

“He was a kind and a grateful brother to a fond and an indulgent sister, that was all.”

“Poor Byron! who so philosophic a guide for others? who so practical a blunderer for himself in search of the sources of happiness?”

“Others without his talent to commemorate their wayward inconsistencies, may have thought as deeply and mistaken as thoroughly,” answered Castleton, in a tone of bitterness.

“A female friend! ’tis almost an impossibility,” continued Lady Gayland, still generalizing the conversation; “at what stage of our existence could such a feeling take its date? As a girl? No! You men generally treat girls either as flirts or fools, and wilfully shut your eyes to the study of that character of which a special licence is to be the diploma. So mankind to girls are divided into the marrying and non-marrying classes. With the first, friendship would appear forward; with the latter, lost time. As a wife?--Possibly some men might. But I think you, for instance, would not like your wife to maintain a perfect and unreserved friendship with another man? No; in neither case would it do.”

“But yourself,” interrupted Castleton, “you need not be restrained by any of the embarrassments of either of the stations you mention?”

“No; and at fifty perhaps I may think about it; but let us if possible avoid to speak individually. There is only one relation in life in which a woman may be peerless and perfect, and luckily that is as a wife. A mistress’s present career is made up of regret for the past and fear for the future; a female friend content to be no more, is an anomaly rarely found. A wife may unite all that is most estimable in friendship, with so much more than that cold feeling can ever know, that it would be the veriest bathos to degrade a wife to the title of friend.”

“Yet some wives can never be friends, and now, alas! some friends can never become wives.”

“A woman’s part in courtship is, you must recollect, a passive one; we must ever wait till we are asked.”

“Yet who but a fool or a coxcomb would ever venture a proposal unless pretty certain that his suit would not be displeasing; and does not that render it equivalent to a refusal, when a woman tortures by indications of indifference? What would I now give that you had never misled me!”

“Lord Castleton, I will not say how much I regret that you should have introduced a subject which may interrupt our intercourse. For that your society is agreeable to me, I wonder you should ever have doubted; but it does not _now_ become me to make either professions or disclaimers on that subject. It is only to excuse, not to revive, the past, that I now speak. This is the last time that former days must ever be mentioned between us. How did I then mislead you?”

“I know that I ought not to have recurred to this topic, nor, believe me, had I any previous intention of doing so; but now it is as well that I should explain, in doing which I own there may be more to excuse in myself than to blame in you. But you knew me thoroughly--my over sensitive fastidious nature; why then did you torture me with an apparent preference of Frank Melmoth? I knew that he was every way unworthy of you, but I construed your whole conduct into an internal struggle between your judgment, which still held out on my side, and your heart, which had already yielded to him.”

“Would any man but yourself have so interpreted it? Do you believe even Frank Melmoth, with all his coxcombry, so read it?”

“Perhaps not; but still he was indefatigable in persuading me that such was the construction all parties must put upon your conduct. Trifles light as air are, you know, sometimes--I need not particularize--the earliest violets which I had promised, and procured for you, were boastfully displayed in his button-hole at the ball, the same evening. Eager for an explanation, you refused the request I therefore made to be set down at home by you, yet afterwards you consented to convey him. The next night at the opera was my last, and served to convince me, that your preference upon all indifferent points was decidedly his, and that if there was still a doubt upon your mind, it was my position, not my personal merits, which maintained it.”

“And if the first part of your supposition had been well founded, think not your position would have maintained that doubt a moment. But, first, to answer your last instance; had I conveyed you home, who had a carriage of your own in attendance, it would have been a measure--and how much I might be aware that you were anxious for an explanation--it was not my business so pointedly to facilitate it. When afterwards the poor, needy, half-drowned creature begged for a lift, it would have been positive cruelty to have sent him under the spouts in such a deluge as was then pouring down. Besides, do you not know, with us women there is no such universal patentee of exclusive privileges as indifference. As to your other accusation, the transfer of your flowers, in that, too, I was perfectly innocent. They were left by you upon my table. You know how easy the entrance into apartments at an hotel abroad always is. Frank Melmoth volunteered a visit--I was in my own room. My spirits, so far as society is concerned, seldom fail me; but I own I did then feel quite unequal to receive him. A long time has elapsed, and too many changes occurred since then, for it to be expected that I should recollect exactly what the reflections were which then overpowered me; but as if it were but yesterday, the feelings which then so unnerved me, are even now as then fresh before me--but I have strength to drive them hence. One word in concluding my explanation: I sent an excuse to Melmoth, declining to see him: in revenge, he carried off my violets, leaving me instead a few doggrel couplets, which I own I do not recollect so well as the other parts of the transaction; but,” added she, forcing a smile, “I know there was a string of rhymes, something about flowers--hours--powers.--I have done----

‘The very head and front of my offending
Hath this extent. No more.’”--

“Fool! dolt! idiot that I am!” exclaimed Castleton. “For this, then, and no more, have I, with all my boasted superior discrimination, cast aside my happiness for ever.”

“Nay,” said Lady Gayland, “I must not even now permit you to speak thus: nor ever allow myself to touch on these topics again. And now let us turn our own and our horses’ heads homewards. You have a home, and to that ’tis time we bend both our thoughts and our course.”

So saying, and anxious at once to close the conversation, her impatience as a woman got the better of her usual discretion as an equestrian. Turning her horse round, she at the same time struck him smartly with her whip. Thus unexpectedly roused from that torpor, in which perhaps he had been indulging visions of former triumphs on the turf, and fancying that the same exertions were required of him, the fiery animal started eagerly forward. She checked him firmly with the curb; but, unused to the severity of that bit, this only made him plunge so violently, as to require all her presence of mind and skill in riding to maintain her seat.

“For heaven’s sake let me take hold of his head, and change with me again!” anxiously exclaimed Castleton, jumping off for that purpose. But in violently shaking his head, in impatience at the sharpness of the bit, Lady Gayland’s horse had detached the curb-chain from the hook: this dangling loose, only maddened him the more; he became perfectly unmanageable, and after plunging three or four times, more furiously than ever, though without unseating, or even agitating her, whose courage rose with the emergency, he at length brought down his head, and bearing upon the now powerless bit with a dead, determined pull, he bounded irresistibly onwards at full speed over the echoing turf.

What state of mental suspense could equal, in agony, that of Castleton during these dreadful moments? What, compared to his feelings, are those of the patient whilst the surgeon is sharpening his knife? or of the self-conscious criminal, when the death-bearing verdict is about to be pronounced? For let us do poor human nature the justice to own, that the fear-fraught sensations of such a moment far surpass in intensity those which any merely selfish sufferings could produce. This might still have been the case had he been only the friend he professed himself: but he was never so well aware how much dearer she was to him than he would have owned to himself, as when even the recently-acquired conviction, that by his folly he had lost her heart, was superseded by the all-engrossing fear, that by his indiscretion he had endangered her life. And in his anguish he felt that there was no earthly sacrifice at which he would not purchase her precious safety.

At the time Lady Gayland’s horse broke away, he had already dismounted, which caused a moment’s delay in following her. His first impulse was digging his spurs into his own more sluggish beast to attempt to come up with her. But he was too well aware of the comparative speed of the two animals, which had before been tried on other fields, not to know that this was impracticable, as long as the fleetest and the foremost spurned from beneath him the ground he hardly seemed to touch. Therefore, with eyes constantly fixed on the object of all his anxieties, and a countenance as haggard as if the dreaded calamity had already happened, he had only to follow as best he might, pressing to the utmost his own panting steed.

There were various extensive grass-rides between avenues in the wide-spreading domains of Somersby Park; but as these intersected the open space of turf, and as Lady Gayland’s horse, in its self-directed course, had either to cross or break into these between the trees, each was a fresh source of alarm to Castleton. But as yet, his undaunted rider still maintaining her self-possession, had succeeded so far in guiding him as to steer him clear of any of these dangers. At last he rushed into the long avenue which conducted straight to the front of the house. Thus, therefore, many perils were now past, but the worst Castleton anticipated was still to be feared, from the concussion with which, sooner or later, his speed must meet a sudden check; and this dread increased as he marked how, without the slightest symptom of tiring, he still pursued his passionate career. What would not Castleton have given at that moment for wings, to dart over the short but still increasing space between them? so disgusted was he with the inadequate efforts of his own flagging and jaded animal, that he even madly meditated throwing himself off, and endeavouring by his own exertions to reach her.

Within a hundred yards of the front of the house, the flying steed had now arrived in safety, and Lady Gayland was already collecting all her remaining strength to pull him up with one last attempt, without recollecting that at that point a by-path conducted through a shrubbery, at right-angles to the stables. For this the horse made, with a sudden spring sideways. Lady Gayland, little prepared for so unexpected a turn, lost her balance, and as the jerk she had at the same time given caused him to flounder in the same direction, she had not opportunity to recover herself, and was thrown with violence against the shrubs on one side of the road.

Castleton, from the angle that the road had taken, and the thickness of the shrubbery, had not actually seen the accident, but arriving a few seconds afterwards, with horror he beheld her lying apparently lifeless on the spot where she had fallen.

Throwing himself from his own horse, and rushing to her, he raised her gently in his arms, and laying her head on his shoulder whilst he supported her waist with his trembling hand, he gazed anxiously in her face, to mark the least symptom of returning animation, but as yet she lay there with the stiffness of a corpse; her eyes were completely closed, and their long dark lashes seemed to press upon her cheek. “She’s dead,--she’s dead, and I have killed her!” he wildly cried. As he said this, her eyes for an instant opened, though only with a dull unconscious stare; and the hand he held, grasped his convulsively. “Look up once again!--For my sake live, my best beloved, my own adored Geraldine!” He paused in vain, hoping that these passionate exclamations might again wake her into life. A deep drawn breath from behind was the only sound which in reply struck upon his ear. He turned round in the direction from whence that sound proceeded, and within two paces of him--colourless and motionless as a statue--beheld the figure of his wife!