Three more years passed thus over the head of the young Elizabeth; when,
during the warm summer months, the wanderers established themselves for
a season at Baden. They had hitherto lived in great seclusion--and
Falkner continued to do so; but he was not sorry to find his adopted
child noticed and courted by various noble ladies, who were charmed by
the pure complexion--the golden hair, and spirited, though gentle,
manners of the young English girl.
Elizabeth's characteristic was an enthusiastic affectionateness--every
little act of kindness that she received excited her gratitude: she felt
as if she never could--though she would constantly endeavour--repay the
vast debt she owed her benefactor. She loved to repass in her mind those
sad days when, under the care of the sordid Mrs. Baker, she ran every
hazard of incurring the worst evils of poverty; ignorance and blunted
sensibility. She had preserved her little well-worn shoes, full of
holes, and slipping from her feet, as a sort of record of her neglected
situation. She remembered how her hours had been spent loitering on the
beach--sometimes with her little book, from which her mother had taught
her--oftener in constructing sand castles, decorated with pebbles and
broken shells. She recollected how she had thus built an imitation of
the church and churchyard, with its shady corner and single stone
marking two graves: she remembered the vulgar, loud voice that called
her from her employment with, "Come, Missy, come to your dinner! The
Lord help me! I wonder when anybody else will give you a dinner." She
called to mind the boasts of Mrs. Baker's children, contrasting their
Sunday frock with hers--the smallest portion of cake given to her last,
and with a taunt that made her little heart swell and her throat feel
choked, so that she could not eat it, but scattered it to the birds--on
which she was beat for being wasteful; all this was contrasted with the
vigilance, the tenderness, the respect of her protector. She brooded
over these thoughts till he became sacred in her eyes; and, young as she
was, her heart yearned and sickened for an occasion to demonstrate the
deep and unutterable thankfulness that possessed her soul.
She was not aware of the services she rendered him in her turn. The very
sight of her was the dearest--almost the only joy of his life. Devoured
by disappointment, gloom, and remorse, he found no relief except in her
artless prattle, or the consciousness of the good he did her. She
perceived this, and was ever on the alert to watch his mood, and to try
by every art to awaken complacent feelings. She did not know, it is
true, the cause of his sufferings--the fatal memories that haunted him
in the silence of night--and threw a dusky veil over the radiance of
day. She did not see the fair, reproachful figure that was often before
him to startle and appal--she did not hear the shrieks that rung in his
ears--nor behold her floating away, lifeless, on the turbid waves, who,
but a little before, had stood in all the glow of life and beauty before
him. All these agonizing images haunted silently his miserable soul, and
Elizabeth could only see the shadow they cast over him, and strive to
dissipate it. When she could perceive the dark hour passing off, chased
away by her endeavours, she felt proud and happy. And when he told her
that she had saved his life, and was his only tie to it--that she alone
prevented his perishing miserably, or lingering in anguish and despair,
her fond heart swelled with rapture; and what soul-felt vows she made to
remain for ever beside him, and pay back to the last the incalculable
debt she owed! If it be true that the most perfect love subsists between
unequals--no more entire attachment ever existed than that between this
man of sorrows and the happy, innocent child. He, worn by passion,
oppressed by a sense of guilt, his brow trenched by the struggles of
many years--she, stepping pure and free into life, innocent as an angel,
animated only by the most disinterested feelings. The link between them,
of mutual benefit and mutual interest, had been cemented by time and
habit--by each waking thought and nightly dream. What is so often a
slothful, unapparent sense of parental and filial duty, was with them a
living, active spirit, for ever manifesting itself in some new form. It
woke with them, went abroad with them--attuned the voice, and shone
brightly in the eyes.
It is a singular law of human life, that the past, which apparently no
longer forms a portion of our existence, never dies; new shoots, as it
were, spring up at different intervals and places, all bearing the
indelible characteristics of the parent stalk; the circular emblem of
eternity is suggested by this meeting and recurrence of the broken ends
of our life. Falkner had been many years absent from England. He had
quitted it to get rid of the consequences of an act which he deeply
deplored, but which he did not wish his enemies to have the triumph of
avenging. So completely during this interval had he been cut off from
any, even allusion to the past, that he often tried to deceive himself
into thinking it a dream; often into the persuasion that, tragical as
was the catastrophe he had brought about, it was in its result for the
best. The remembrance of the young and lovely victim lying dead at his
feet prevented his ever being really the dupe of these fond deceits--but
still, memory and imagination alone ministered to remorse--it was
brought home to him by none of the effects from which he had separated
himself by a vast extent of sea and land.
The sight of the English at Baden was exceedingly painful to him. They
seemed so many accusers and judges; he sedulously avoided their resorts,
and turned away when he saw any approach. Yet he permitted Elizabeth to
visit among them, and heard her accounts of what she saw and heard even
with pleasure; for every word showed the favourable impression she made,
and the simplicity of her own tastes and feelings. It was a new world to
her, to find herself talked to, praised, and caressed by decrepit,
painted, but courteous old princesses, dowagers, and all the tribe of
German nobility and English fashionable wanderers. She was much amused,
and her lively descriptions often made Falkner smile, and pleased him by
proving that her firm and unsophisticated heart was not to be deluded by
adulation.
Soon, however, she became more interested by a strange tale she brought
home of a solitary boy. He was English--handsome and well-born--but
savage, and secluded to a degree that admitted of no attention being
paid him. She heard him spoken of at first at the house of some
foreigners. They entered on a dissertation on the peculiar melancholy of
the English, that could develop itself in a lad scarcely sixteen. He was
a misanthrope. He was seen rambling the country either on foot, or on a
pony--but he would accept no invitations--shunned the very aspect of his
fellows--never appearing, by any chance, in the frequented walks about
the baths. Was he deaf and dumb? Some replied in the affirmative, and
yet this opinion gained no general belief. Elizabeth once saw him at a
little distance, seated under a wide-spreading tree in a little dell--to
her he seemed more handsome than anything she had ever seen, and more
sad. One day she was in company with a gentleman, who, she was told, was
his father; a man somewhat advanced in years--of a stern, saturnine
aspect--whose smile was a sneer, and who spoke of his only child,
calling him that "unhappy boy," in a tone that bespoke rather contempt
than commiseration. It soon became rumoured that he was somewhat
alienated in mind through the ill treatment of his parent--and Elizabeth
could almost believe this--she was so struck by the unfeeling and
disagreeable appearance of the stranger.
All this she related to Falkner with peculiar earnestness--"If you could
only see him," she said, "if we could only get him here--we would cure
his misery, and his wicked father should no longer torment him. If he is
deranged, he is harmless, and I am sure he would love us. It is too sad
to see one so gentle and so beautiful pining away without any to love
him."
Falkner smiled at the desire to cure every evil that crossed her path,
which is one of the sweetest illusions of youth, and asked, "Has he no
mother?"
"No," replied Elizabeth, "he is an orphan like me, and his father is
worse than dead, as he is so inhuman. Oh! how I wish you would save him
as you saved me."
"That, I am afraid, would be out of my power," said Falkner; "yet, if
you can make any acquaintance with him, and can bring him here, perhaps
we may discover some method of serving him."
For Falkner had, with all his sufferings and his faults, much of the Don
Quixote about him, and never heard a story of oppression without forming
a scheme to relieve the victim. On this permission, Elizabeth watched
for some opportunity to become acquainted with the poor boy. But it was
vain. Sometimes she saw him at a distance; but if walking in the same
path, he turned off as soon as he saw her; or, if sitting down, he got
up, and disappeared, as if by magic. Miss Jervis thought her endeavours
by no means proper, and would give her no assistance. "If any lady
introduced him to you," she said, "it would be very well; but, to run
after a young gentleman, only because he looks unhappy, is very odd, and
even wrong."
Still Elizabeth persisted; she argued, that she did not want to know him
herself, but that her father should be acquainted with him--and either
induce his father to treat him better, or take him home to live with
them.
They lived at some distance from the baths, in a shady dell, whose
sides, a little farther on, were broken and abrupt. One afternoon they
were lingering not far from their house, when they heard a noise among
the underwood and shrubs above them, as if some one was breaking his way
through. "It is he--look!" cried Elizabeth; and there emerged from the
covert, on to a more open but still more precipitous path, the youth
they had remarked: he was urging his horse, with wilful blindness to
danger, down a declivity which the animal was unwilling to attempt.
Falkner saw the danger, and was sure that the boy was unaware of how
steep the path grew at the foot of the hill. He called out to him, but
the lad did not heed his voice--in another minute the horse's feet
slipped, the rider was thrown over his head, and the animal himself
rolled over. With a scream, Elizabeth sprang to the side of the fallen
youth, but he rose without any appearance of great injury, or any
complaint, evidently displeased at being observed: his sullen look
merged into one of anxiety as he approached his fallen horse, whom,
together with Falkner, he assisted to rise--the poor thing had fallen on
a sharp point of a rock, and his side was cut and bleeding. The lad was
now all activity; he rushed to the stream that watered the little dell
to procure water, which he brought in his hat to wash the wound; and as
he did so, Elizabeth remarked to her father that, he used only one hand,
and that the other arm was surely hurt. Meanwhile Falkner had gazed on
the boy with a mixture of admiration and pain. He was wondrously
handsome; large, deep-set hazel eyes, shaded by long dark lashes--full
at once of fire and softness; a brow of extreme beauty, over which
clustered a profusion of chestnut-coloured hair; an oval face; a person
light and graceful as a sculptured image--all this, added to an
expression of gloom that amounted to sullenness, with which, despite the
extreme refinement of his features, a certain fierceness even was
mingled, formed a study a painter would have selected for a kind of
ideal poetic sort of bandit stripling; but, besides this, there was
resemblance, strange and thrilling, that struck Falkner, and made him
eye him with a painful curiosity. The lad spoke with fondness to his
horse, and accepted the offer made that it should be taken to Falkner's
stable, and looked to by his groom.
"And you, too," said Elizabeth, "you are in pain, you are hurt."
"That is nothing," said the youth; "let me see that I have not killed
this poor fellow--and I am not hurt to signify."
Elizabeth felt by no means sure of this. And while the horse was
carefully led home, and his wound visited, she sent a servant off for a
surgeon, believing, in her own mind, that the stranger had broken his
arm. She was not far wrong--he had dislocated his wrist. "It were better
had it been my neck," he muttered, as he yielded his hand to the gripe
of the surgeon, nor did he seem to wince during the painful operation;
far more annoyed was he by the eyes fixed upon him and the questions
asked--his manner, which had become mollified as he waited on his poor
horse, resumed all its former repulsiveness; he looked like a young
savage, surrounded by enemies whom he suspects, yet is unwilling to
assail: and when his hand was bandaged, and his horse again and again
recommended to the groom, he was about to take leave, with thanks that
almost seemed reproaches, for having an obligation thrust on him, when
Miss Jervis exclaimed, "Surely, I am not mistaken--are you not Master
Neville?"
Falkner started as if a snake had glided across his path, while the
youth, colouring to the very roots of his hair, and looking at her with
a sort of rage at being thus in a matter detected, replied, "My name is
Neville."
"I thought so," said the other; "I used to see you at Lady Glenfell's.
How is your father, Sir Boyvill?"
But the youth would answer no more; he darted at the questioner a look
of fury, and rushed away. "Poor fellow!" cried Miss Jervis, "he is
wilder than ever--he is a very sad case. His mother was the Mrs. Neville
talked of so much once--she deserted him, and his father hates him. The
young gentleman is half crazed by ill treatment and neglect."
"Dearest father, are you ill?" cried Elizabeth--for Falkner had turned
ashy pale--but he commanded his voice to say that he was well, and left
the room; a few minutes afterward he had left the house, and, seeking
the most secluded pathways, walked quickly on as if to escape from
himself. It would not do--the form of _her_ son was before him--a ghost
to haunt him to madness. _Her_ son, whom she had loved with passion
inexpressible, crazed by neglect and unkindness. Crazed he was
not--every word he spoke showed a perfect possession of acute
faculties--but it was almost worse to see so much misery in one so
young. In person, he was a model of beauty and grace--his mind seemed
formed with equal perfection; a quick apprehension, a sensibility, all
alive to every touch; but these were nursed in anguish and wrong, and
strained from their true conclusions into resentment, suspicion, and a
fierce disdain of all who injured, which seemed to his morbid feelings
all who named or approached him. Falkner knew that he was the cause of
this evil. How different a life he had led, if his mother had lived! The
tenderness of her disposition, joined to her great talents and
sweetness, rendered her unparalleled in the attention she paid to his
happiness and education. No mother ever equalled her--for no woman ever
possessed at once equal virtues and equal capacities. How tenderly she
had reared him, how devotedly fond she was, Falkner too well knew; and
tones and looks, half forgotten, were recalled vividly to his mind at
the sight of this poor boy, wretched and desolate through his rashness.
What availed it to hate, to curse the father!--he had never been
delivered over to this father, had never been hated by him, had his
mother survived. All these thoughts crowded into Falkner's mind, and
awoke an anguish, which time had rendered, to a certain degree, torpid.
He regarded himself with bitter contempt and abhorrence--he feared, with
a kind of insane terror, to see the youth again, whose eyes, so like
_hers_, he had robbed of all expression of happiness, and clouded by
eternal sorrow. He wandered on--shrouded himself in the deepest
thickets, and clambered abrupt hills, so that, by breathless fatigue of
body, he might cheat his soul of its agony.
Night came on, and he did not return home. Elizabeth grew uneasy--till
at last, on making more minute inquiry, she found that he had come back,
and was retired to his room.
It was the custom of Falkner to ride every morning with his daughter
soon after sunrise; and on the morrow, Elizabeth had just equipped
herself, her thoughts full of the handsome boy--whose humanity to his
horse, combined with fortitude in enduring great personal pain, rendered
far more interesting than ever. She felt sure that, having once
commenced, their acquaintance would go on, and that his savage shyness
would be conquered by her father's kindness. To alleviate the sorrows of
his lot--to win his confidence by affection, and to render him happy,
was a project that was occupying her delightfully--when the tramp of a
horse attracted her attention--and, looking from the window, she saw
Falkner ride off at a quick pace. A few minutes afterward a note was
brought to her from him. It said--
"DEAR ELIZABETH,
"Some intelligence which I received yesterday obliges me unexpectedly to
leave Baden. You will find me at Mayence. Request Miss Jervis to have
everything packed up as speedily as possible; and to send for the
landlord, and give up the possession of our house. The rent is paid.
Come in the carriage. I shall expect you this evening.
"Yours, dearest,
"J. FALKNER."
Nothing could be more disappointing than this note. Her first fairy
dream beyond the limits of her home, to be thus brushed away at once. No
word of young Neville--no hope held out of return! For a moment an
emotion ruffled her mind, very like ill-humour. She read the note
again--it seemed yet more unsatisfactory--but, in turning the page, she
found a postscript. "Pardon me," it said, "for not seeing you last
night; I was not well--nor am I now."
These few words instantly gave a new direction to her thoughts--her
father not well, and she absent, was very painful--then she recurred to
the beginning of the note. "Intelligence received yesterday"--some evil
news, surely--since the result was to make him ill--at such a word the
recollection of his sufferings rushed upon her, and she thought no more
of the unhappy boy, but, hurrying to Miss Jervis, entreated her to use
the utmost expedition that they might depart speedily. Once she visited
Neville's horse; it was doing well, and she ordered it to be led
carefully and slowly to Sir Boyvill's stables.
So great was her impatience, that by noon they were in the carriage--and
in a few hours they joined Falkner at Mayence. Elizabeth gazed anxiously
on him. He was an altered man--there was something wild and haggard in
his looks, that bespoke a sleepless night, and a struggle of painful
emotion by which the very elements of his being were convulsed:--"You
are ill, dear father," cried Elizabeth; "you have heard some news that
afflicts you very much."
"I have," he replied; "but do not regard me: I shall recover the shock
soon, and then all will be as it was before. Do not ask questions--but
we must return to England immediately."
To England! such a word Falkner had never before spoken--Miss Jervis
looked almost surprised, and really pleased. A return to her native
country, so long deserted, and almost forgotten, was an event to excite
Elizabeth even to agitation--the very name was full of so many
associations. Were they hereafter to reside there? Should they visit
Treby? What was about to happen? She was bid ask no questions, and she
obeyed--but her thoughts were the more busy. She remembered, also, that
Neville was English, and she looked forward to meeting him, and renewing
her projects for his welfare.