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THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._
VOL. XVI.--DECEMBER, 1865.--NO. XCVIII.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.
CHAPTER I
"Then I say, once for all, that priest shall never darken my doors
again."
"Then I say they are my doors, and not yours, and that holy man shall
brighten them whenever he will."
The gentleman and lady, who faced each other pale and furious, and
interchanged this bitter defiance, were man and wife, and had loved each
other well.
Miss Catharine Peyton was a young lady of ancient family in Cumberland,
and the most striking, but least popular, beauty in the county. She was
very tall and straight, and carried herself a little too imperiously;
yet she would sometimes relax and all but dissolve that haughty figure,
and hang sweetly drooping over her favorites; then the contrast was
delicious, and the woman fascinating.
Her hair was golden and glossy, her eyes a lovely gray; and she had a
way of turning them on slowly and full, so that their victim could not
fail to observe two things: first, that they were grand and beautiful
orbs; secondly, that they were thoughtfully overlooking him, instead of
looking at him.
So contemplated by glorious eyes, a man feels small and bitter.
Catharine was apt to receive the blunt compliments of the Cumberland
squires with this sweet, celestial, superior gaze, and for this and
other imperial charms was more admired than liked.
The family estate was entailed on her brother; her father spent every
farthing he could; so she had no money, and no expectations, except from
a distant cousin,--Mr. Charlton, of Hernshaw Castle and Bolton Hall.
Even these soon dwindled. Mr. Charlton took a fancy to his late wife's
relation, Griffith Gaunt, and had him into his house, and treated him as
his heir. This disheartened two admirers who had hitherto sustained
Catharine Peyton's gaze, and they retired. Comely girls, girls
long-nosed, but rich, girls snub-nosed, but winning, married on all
sides of her; but the imperial beauty remained Miss Peyton at
two-and-twenty.
She was rather kind to the poor; would give them money out of her
slender purse, and would even make clothes for the women, and sometimes
read to them: very few of them could read to themselves in that day. All
she required in return was, that they should be Roman Catholics, like
herself, or at least pretend they might be brought to that faith by
little and little.
She was a high-minded girl, and could be a womanly one,--whenever she
chose.
She hunted about twice a week in the season, and was at home in the
saddle, for she had ridden from a child; but so ingrained was her
character, that this sport, which more or less unsexes most women, had
no perceptible effect on her mind, nor even on her manners. The scarlet
riding-habit and little purple cap, and the great, white, bony horse she
rode, were often seen in a good place at the end of a long run; but, for
all that, the lady was a most ungenial fox-huntress. She never spoke a
word but to her acquaintances, and wore a settled air of dreamy
indifference, except when the hounds happened to be in full cry, and she
galloping at their heels. Worse than that, when the dogs were running
into the fox, and his fate certain, she had been known to rein in her
struggling horse, and pace thoughtfully home, instead of coming in at
the death, and claiming the brush.
One day, being complimented at the end of a hard run by the gentleman
who kept the hounds, she turned her celestial orbs on him, and said,--
"Nay, Sir Ralph, I love to gallop; and this sorry business gives me an
excuse."
It was full a hundred years ago. The country teemed with foxes; but it
abounded in stiff coverts, and a knowing fox was sure to run from one to
another; and then came wearisome efforts to dislodge him; and then Miss
Peyton's gray eyes used to explore vacancy, and ignore her companions,
biped and quadruped.
But one day they drew Yewtree Brow, and found a stray fox. At Gaylad's
first note he broke cover, and went away for home across the open
country. A hedger saw him steal out, and gave a view halloo; the riders
came round helter-skelter; the dogs in cover one by one threw up their
noses and voices; the horns blew, the canine music swelled to a strong
chorus, and away they swept across country,--dogs, horses, men; and the
Deuse take the hindmost!
It was a gallant chase, and our dreamy virgin's blood got up. Erect, but
lithe and vigorous, and one with her great white gelding, she came
flying behind the foremost riders, and took leap for leap with them. One
glossy, golden curl streamed back in the rushing air; her gray eyes
glowed with earthly fire; and two red spots on the upper part of her
cheeks showed she was much excited, without a grain of fear. Yet in the
first ten minutes one gentleman was unhorsed before her eyes, and one
came to grief along with his animal, and a thorough-bred chestnut was
galloping and snorting beside her with empty saddle. Presently young
Featherstone, who led her by about fifteen yards, crashed through a high
hedge, and was seen no more, but heard wallowing in the deep,
unsuspected ditch beyond. There was no time to draw bridle. "Lie still,
Sir, if you please," said Catharine, with cool civility; then up rein,
in spur, and she cleared the ditch and its muddy contents, alive and
dead, and away without looking behind her.
On, on, on, till all the pinks and buckskins, erst so smart, were
splashed with clay and dirt of every hue, and all the horses' late
glossy coats were bathed with sweat and lathered with foam, and their
gaping nostrils blowing and glowing red; and then it was that Harrowden
Brook, swollen wide and deep by the late rains, came right between the
fox and Dogmore Underwood, for which he was making.
The hunt sweeping down a hillside caught sight of Reynard running for
the brook. They made sure of him now. But he lapped a drop, and then
slipped in, and soon crawled out on the other side, and made feebly for
the covert, weighted with wet fur.
At sight of him, the hunt hallooed and trumpeted, and came tearing on
with fresh vigor.
But when they came near the brook, lo, it was twenty feet wide, and
running fast and brown. Some riders skirted it, looking for a narrow
part. Two horses, being spurred at it, came to the bank, and then went
rearing round on their heels, depositing one hat and another rider in
the current. One gallant steed planted his feet like a tower, and
snorted down at the water. One flopped gravely in, and had to swim, and
be dragged out. Another leaped, and landed with his feet on the other
bank, his haunches in the water, and his rider curled round his neck,
and glaring out between his retroverted ears.
But Miss Peyton encouraged her horse with spur and voice, set her teeth,
turned rather pale this time, and went at the brook with a rush, and
cleared it like a deer. She and the huntsman were almost alone together
on the other side, and were as close to the dogs as the dogs were to
poor Pug, when he slipped through a run in a quickset hedge, and,
reducing the dogs to single file, glided into Dogmore Underwood, a stiff
hazel coppice of five years' growth.
The other riders soon straggled up, and then the thing was to get him
out again. There were a few narrow roads cut in the underwood; and up
and down these the huntsman and whipper-in went trotting, and encouraged
the stanch hounds, and whipped the skulkers back into covert. Others
galloped uselessly about, pounding the earth, for daisy-cutters were few
in those days; and Miss Peyton relapsed into the transcendental. She sat
in one place, with her elbow on her knee, and her fair chin supported by
two fingers, as undisturbed by the fracas of horns and voices as an
equestrian statue of Diana.
She sat so still and so long at a corner of the underwood that at last
the harassed fox stole out close to her with lolling tongue and eye
askant, and took the open field again. She thrilled at first sight of
him, and her cheeks burned; but her quick eye took in all the signs of
his distress, and she sat quiet, and watched him coolly. Not so her
horse. He plunged, and then trembled all over, and planted his fore-feet
together at this angle \, and parted his hind-legs a little, and so
stood quivering, with cocked ears, and peeped over a low paling at the
retiring quadruped, and fretted and sweated in anticipation of the
gallop his long head told him was to follow. He looked a deal more
statuesque than any three statues in England, and all about a creature
not up to his knee.--And by the bye: the gentlemen who carve horses in
our native isle, did they ever see one,--out of an omnibus?--The
whipper-in came by, and found him in this gallant attitude, and
suspected the truth, but, observing the rider's tranquil position,
thought the fox had only popped out and then in again. However, he fell
in with the huntsman, and told him Miss Peyton's gray had seen
something. The hounds appeared puzzled; and so the huntsman rode round
to Miss Peyton, and, touching his cap, asked her if she had seen nothing
of the fox.
She looked him dreamily in the face.
"The fox?" said she; "he broke cover ten minutes ago."
The man blew his horn lustily, and then asked her reproachfully why she
had not tally-hoed him, or winded her horn: with that he blew his own
again impatiently.
Miss Peyton replied, very slowly and pensively, that the fox had come
out soiled and fatigued, and trailing his brush. "I looked at him," said
she, "and I pitied him. He was one, and we are many; he was so little,
and we are so big; _he had given us a good gallop_; and so I made up my
mind he should live to run another day."
The huntsman stared stupidly at her for a moment, then burst into a
torrent of oaths, then blew his horn till it was hoarse, then cursed and
swore till he was hoarse himself, then to his horn again, and dogs and
men came rushing to the sound.
"Couple up, and go home to supper," said Miss Peyton, quietly. "The fox
is half-way to Gallowstree Gorse; and you won't get him out of that this
afternoon, I promise you."
As she said this, she just touched her horse with the spur, leaped the
low hedge in front of her, and cantered slowly home across country. She
was one that seldom troubled the hard road, go where she would.
She had ridden about a mile, when she heard a horse's feet behind her.
She smiled, and her color rose a little; but she cantered on.
"Halt, in the king's name!" shouted a mellow voice; and a gentleman
galloped up to her side, and reined in his mare.
"What! have they killed?" inquired Catharine, demurely.
"Not they; he is in the middle of Gallowstree Gorse by now."
"And is this the way to Gallowstree Gorse?"
"Nay, Mistress," said the young man; "but when the fox heads one way and
the deer another, what is a poor hunter to do?"
"Follow the slower, it seems."
"Say the lovelier and the dearer, sweet Kate."
"Now, Griffith, you know I hate flattery," said Kate; and the next
moment came a soft smile, and belied this unsocial sentiment.
"Flattery?" said the lover. "I have no tongue to speak half your
praises. I think the people in this country are as blind as bats, or
they'd"----
"All except Mr. Griffith Gaunt; _he_ has found a paragon, where wiser
people see a wayward, capricious girl."
"Then _he_ is the man for you. Don't you see that, Mistress?"
"No, I don't quite see that," said the lady, dryly.
This cavalier reply caused a dismay the speaker never intended. The fact
is, Mr. George Neville, young, handsome, and rich, had lately settled in
the neighborhood, and had been greatly smitten with Kate. The county was
talking about it, and Griffith had been secretly on thorns for some days
past. And now he could hide his uneasiness no longer; he cried out, in a
sharp, trembling voice,--
"Why, Kate, my dear Kate! what! could you love any man but me? Could you
be so cruel? could you? There, let me get off my horse, and lie down on
this stubble, and you ride over me, and trample me to death. I would
rather have you trample on my ribs than on my heart, with loving any one
but me."
"Why, what now?" said Catharine, drawing herself up; "I must scold you
handsomely"; and she drew rein and turned full upon him; but by this
means she saw his face was full of real distress; so, instead of
reprimanding him, she said, gently, "Why, Griffith, what is to do? Are
you not my servant? Do not I send you word, whenever I dine from home?"
"Yes, dearest; and then I call at that house, and stick there till they
guess what I would be at, and ask me, too."
Catharine smiled, and proceeded to remind him that thrice a week she
permitted him to ride over from Bolton, (a distance of fifteen miles,)
to see her.
"Yes," replied Griffith, "and I must say you always come, wet or dry, to
the shrubbery-gate, and put your hand in mine a minute. And, Kate," said
he, piteously, "at the bare thought of your putting that same dear hand
in another man's, my heart turns sick within me, and my skin burns and
trembles on me."
"But you have no cause," said Catharine, soothingly. "Nobody, except
yourself, doubts my affection for you. You are often thrown in my teeth,
Griffith,--and" (clenching her own) "I like you all the better, of
course."
Griffith replied with a burst of gratitude; and then, as men will,
proceeded to encroach.
"Ah," said he, "if you would but pluck up courage, and take the
matrimonial fence with me at once."
Miss Peyton sighed at that, and drooped a little upon her saddle. After
a pause, she enumerated the "just impediments." She reminded him that
neither of them had means to marry on.
He made light of that; he should soon have plenty; Mr. Charlton has as
good as told him he was to have Bolton Hall and Grange: "Six hundred
acres, Kate, besides the park and paddocks."
In his warmth he forgot that Catharine was to have been Mr. Charlton's
heir. Catharine was too high-minded to bear Griffith any grudge; but she
colored a little, and said she was averse to come to him a penniless
bride.
"Why, what matters it which of us has the dross, so that there is enough
for both?" said Griffith, with an air of astonishment.
Catharine smiled approbation, and tacitly yielded that point. But then
she objected the difference in their faith.
"Oh, honest folk get to heaven by different roads," said Griffith,
carelessly.
"I have been taught otherwise," replied Catharine, gravely.
"Then give me your hand and I'll give you my soul," said Griffith Gaunt,
impetuously. "I'll go to heaven your way, if you can't go mine. Anything
sooner than be parted in this world or the next."
She looked at him in silence; and it was in a faint, half apologetic
tone she objected, that all her kinsfolk were set against it.
"It is not their business; it is ours," was the prompt reply.
"Well, then," said Catharine, sadly, "I suppose I must tell you the true
reason: I feel I should not make you happy; I do not love you quite as
you want to be loved, as you deserve to be loved. You need not look so;
nothing in flesh and blood is your rival. But my heart bleeds for the
Church; I think of her ancient glory in this kingdom, and, when I see
her present condition, I long to devote myself to her service. I am very
fit to be an abbess or a nun,--most unfit to be a wife. No, no,--I must
not, ought not, dare not, marry a Protestant. Take the advice of one who
esteems you dearly; leave me,--fly from me,--forget me,--do everything
but hate me. Nay, do not hate me; you little know the struggle in my
mind. Farewell; the saints, whom you scorn, watch over and protect you!
Farewell!"
And with this she sighed, and struck her spur into the gray, and he
darted off at a gallop.
Griffith, little able to cope with such a character as this, sat
petrified, and would have been rooted to the spot, if he had happened to
be on foot. But his mare set off after her companion, and a chase of a
novel kind commenced. Catharine's horse was fresher than Griffith's
mare, and the latter, not being urged by her petrified master, lost
ground.
But when she drew near to her father's gate, Catharine relaxed her
speed, and Griffith rejoined her.
She had already half relented, and only wanted a warm and resolute wooer
to bring her round. But Griffith was too sore, and too little versed in
woman. Full of suspicion and bitterness, he paced gloomy and silent by
her side, till they reached the great avenue that led to her father's
house.
And while he rides alongside the capricious creature in sulky silence, I
may as well reveal a certain foible in his own character.
This Griffith Gaunt was by no means deficient in physical courage; but
he was instinctively disposed to run away from mental pain the moment he
lost hope of driving it away from him. For instance, if Catharine had
been ill and her life in danger, he would have ridden day and night to
save her,--would have beggared himself to save her; but if she had died,
he would either have killed himself, or else fled the country, and so
escaped the sight of every object that was associated with her and could
agonize him. I do not think he could have attended the funeral of one he
loved.
The mind, as well as the body, has its self-protecting instincts. This
of Griffith's was, after all, an instinct of that class, and, under
certain circumstances, is true wisdom. But Griffith, I think, carried
the instinct to excess; and that is why I call it his foible.
"Catharine," said he, resolutely, "let me ride by your side to the house
for once; for I read your advice my own way, and I mean to follow it:
after to-day you will be troubled with me no more. I have loved you
these three years, I have courted you these two years, and I am none the
nearer; I see I am not the man you mean to marry: so I shall do as my
father did, ride down to the coast, and sell my horse, and ship for
foreign parts."
"Oh, as you will," said Catharine, haughtily: she quite forgot she had
just recommended him to do something of this very kind.
Presently she stole a look. His fine ruddy cheek was pale; his manly
brown eyes were moist; yet a gloomy and resolute expression on his
tight-drawn lips. She looked at him sidelong, and thought how often he
had ridden thirty miles on that very mare to get a word with her at the
shrubbery-gate. And now the mare to be sold! The man to go
broken-hearted to sea,--perhaps to his death! Her good heart began to
yearn.
"Griffith," said she, softly, "it is not as if I were going to wed
anybody else. Is it nothing to be preferred by her you say you love? If
I were you, I would do nothing rash. Why not give me a little time? In
truth, I hardly know my own mind about it two days together."
"Kate," said the young man, firmly, "I am courting you this two years.
If I wait two years more, it will be but to see the right man come and
carry you in a month; for so girls are won, when they are won at all.
Your sister that is married and dead, she held Josh Pitt in hand for
years; and what is the upshot? Why, he wears the willow for her to this
day; and her husband married again, before her grave was green. Nay, I
have done all an honest man can to woo you; so take me now, or let me
go."
At this, Kate began to waver secretly, and ask herself whether it would
not be better to yield, since he was so abominably resolute.
But the unlucky fellow did not leave well alone. He went on to say,--
"Once out of sight of this place, I may cure myself of my fancy. Here I
never could."
"Oh," said Catharine, directly, "if you are so bent on being cured, it
would not become me to say nay."
Griffith Gaunt bit his lip and hung his head, and made no reply.
The patience with which he received her hard speech was more apparent
than real; but it told. Catharine, receiving no fresh positive
provocation, relented again of her own accord, and, after a considerable
silence, whispered, softly,--
"Think how we should all miss you."
Here was an overture to reconciliation. But, unfortunately, it brought
out what had long been rankling in Griffith's mind, and was in fact the
real cause of the misunderstanding.
"Oh," said he, "those I care for will soon find another to take my
place! Soon? quotha. They have not waited till I was gone for that."
"Ah, indeed!" said Catharine, with some surprise; then, like the
quick-witted girl she was, "so this is what all the coil is about."
She then, with a charming smile, begged him to inform her who was his
destined successor in her esteem. Griffith colored purple at her cool
hypocrisy, (for such he considered it,) and replied, almost fiercely,--
"Who but that young black-a-vised George Neville, that you have been
coquetting with this month past,--and danced all night with him at Lady
Munster's ball, you did."
Catharine blushed, and said, deprecatingly,--
"_You_ were not there, Griffith, or to be sure I had not danced with
_him_."
"And he toasts you by name, wherever he goes."
"Can I help that? Wait till I toast him, before you make yourself
ridiculous, and me very angry--about nothing."
Griffith, sticking to his one idea, replied, doggedly,--
"Mistress Alice Peyton shilly-shallied with her true lover for years,
till Richard Hilton came, that was not fit to tie his shoes; and
then"----
Catharine cut him short,--
"Affront me, if nothing less will serve; but spare my sister in her
grave."
She began the sentence angrily, but concluded it in a broken voice.
Griffith was half disarmed; but only half. He answered, sullenly,--
"She did not die till she had jilted an honest gentleman and broken his
heart, and married a sot, to her cost. And you are of her breed, when
all is done; and now that young coxcomb has come, like Dick Hilton,
between you and me."
"But I do not encourage him."
"You do not _dis_courage him," retorted Griffith, "or he would not be so
hot after you. Were you ever the woman to say, 'I have a servant already
that loves me dear'? That one frank word had sent him packing."
Miss Peyton colored, and the water came into her eyes.
"I may have been imprudent," she murmured. "The young gentleman made me
smile with his extravagance. I never thought to be misunderstood by him,
far less by you." Then, suddenly, as bold as brass,--"It's all your
fault; if he had the power to make you uneasy, why did you not check me
before?"
"Ay, forsooth, and have it cast in my teeth I was a jealous monster, and
played the tyrant before my time. A poor fellow scarce knows what to be
at that loves a coquette."
"Coquette I am none," replied the lady, bridling magnificently.
Griffith took no notice of this interruption. He proceeded to say that
he had hitherto endured this intrusion of a rival in silence, though
with a sore heart, hoping his patience might touch her, or the fire go
out of itself. But at last, unable to bear it any longer in silence, he
had shown his wound to one he knew could feel for him, his poor friend
Pitt. Pitt had then let him know that his own mistake had been
over-confidence in Alice Peyton's constancy.
"He said to me, 'Watch your Kate close, and, at the first blush of a
rival, say you to her, Part with him, or part with me.'"
Catharine pinned him directly.
"And this is how you take Joshua Pitt's advice,--by offering to run away
from this sorry rival."
The shrewd reply, and a curl of the lip, half arch, half contemptuous,
that accompanied the thrust, staggered the less ready Griffith. He got
puzzled, and showed it.
"Well, but," stammered he at last, "your spirit is high; I was mostly
afeard to put it so plump to you. So I thought I would go about a bit.
However, it comes to the same thing; for this I do know,--that, if you
refuse me your hand this day, it is to give it to a new acquaintance, as
your Alice did before you. And if it is to be so, 'tis best for me to be
gone: best for _him_, and best for you. You don't know me, Kate; for, as
clever as you are, at the thought of your playing me false, after all
these years, and marrying that George Neville, my heart turns to ice,
and then to fire, and my head seems ready to burst, and my hands to do
mad and bloody acts. Ay, I feel I should kill him, or you, or both, at
the church-porch. Ah!"
He suddenly griped her arm, and at the same time involuntarily checked
his mare.
Both horses stopped.
She raised her head with an inquiring look, and saw her lover's face
discolored with passion, and so strangely convulsed that she feared at
first he was in a fit, or stricken with death or palsy.
She uttered a cry of alarm, and stretched forth her hand towards him.
But the next moment she drew it back from him; for, following his eye,
she discerned the cause of this ghastly look. Her father's house stood
at the end of the avenue they had just entered; but there was another
approach to it, namely, by a bridle-road at right angles to the avenue
or main entrance; and up that bridle-road a gentleman was walking his
horse, and bid fair to meet them at the hall-door.
It was young Neville. There was no mistaking his piebald charger for any
other animal in that county.
* * * * *
Kate Peyton glanced from lover to lover, and shuddered at Griffith. She
was familiar with petty jealousy; she had even detected it pinching or
coloring many a pretty face that tried very hard to hide it all the
time. But that was nothing to what she saw now: hitherto she had but
beheld the feeling of jealousy; but now she witnessed the livid passion
of jealousy writhing in every lineament of a human face. That terrible
passion had transfigured its victim in a moment: the ruddy, genial,
kindly Griffith, with his soft brown eye, was gone; and in his place
lowered a face older, and discolored, and convulsed, and almost
demoniacal.
Women (wiser, perhaps, in this than men) take their strongest
impressions by the eye, not ear. Catharine, I say, looked at him she had
hitherto thought she knew,--looked and feared him. And even while she
looked and shuddered, Griffith spurred his mare sharply, and then drew
her head across the gray gelding's path. It was an instinctive impulse
to bar the lady he loved from taking another step towards the place
where his rival awaited her.
"I cannot bear it," he gasped. "Choose you now, once for all, between
that puppy there and me": and he pointed with his riding-whip at his
rival, and waited with his teeth clenched for her decision.
The movement was rapid, the gesture large and commanding, and the words
manly: for what says the fighting poet?--
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who fears to put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all."