Charles Hamilton Aïdé

“ Elizabeth laughed. "I am sure that is your principle through life, Mr. George. I am afraid I am not like that. I didn't try to be pleasant here at all at first. I am wiser now. With one or two exceptions, they are good natured and amusing."
"And you have some real friends among them. I have none. Your friends dislike me—I know it. You must not let them prejudice you against me, Miss Shaw."
She smiled a little. "I am not easily prejudiced by others—not easily enough, perhaps. No one can help likes and dislikes." ”

“ The young wife was not very keen sighted; she soon forgot the shadow, in the sunshine, artificial though it was; and slept that night the calm sleep of a child, unconscious that her husband never closed his eyes, but lay and watched with a look of intense anxiety, the sweet untroubled face beside him.
He was off by daybreak; and Magda wandered about the house feeling a little lonely, and dreaming old-world dreams in the great desolate rooms, half the day. She drew a spinning-wheel from a dusty corner in one of the rooms, and set it near a window; bravely resolving to employ herself. ”

“ Grace, clad in her ulster and stalking-cap, did not fear the wind, but, as it rendered talking difficult, she proposed that they should seek the shelter of the fir-wood. There, the turbulence of the wind was only heard in the upper branches; a great quiet reigned over the soft, tawny soil, carpeted with pine-needles, upon which their footsteps fell.
His beginning was not happy.
"Why are you going away? Why do you go and stay with those Barhams, a country minister and his wife, with whom I am sure you can have nothing in common?"
"I like Mrs. Barham and her son very much—that is why I go." ”

“ What you have done is neither fair nor honourable. You have surprised a secret, and betrayed it. You have taken the surest way—if that was your object of creating an impassable gulf between me and a lady for whom I have the greatest—friendship and regard. Whatever you may choose to believe, no word of love has ever passed my lips to her—and assuredly now none ever will. But if I imitated your example, and betrayed you, Monsieur Melchior, be assured her contempt for you would be equal to my own! ”

“ It is a fancy of mine—an absurd fancy, that in the old house where all belongs to another date, another generation, thou shouldst not seem to flout the poor old servants and the pictures on the wall, with thy new fangled clothes. . . . And now farewell, my beloved one! . . . God keep thee! Be of good courage, and Heaven will reward thy going!"
With that, he kissed her with an energy akin to desperation, and leaped from the carriage. The tears forced themselves into her blue eyes, though she tried to smile as she tied on the little old hat, and slipped on the spencer. ”

“ You must never abuse him again—never—never, Mordy. He is the soul of honor, and of all that is noble and high-minded. His very faults are grand faults. You will learn to see that soon, dear—you will, indeed. And so will aunty, when—when it all comes right."
The branching of wide-armed cypress-trees, and the incense of sweet flowers was all they knew in the young moonlight, as they drove from the depot—surely the most poetical railway-station in the world—through the pleasure-grounds of the wonderful hotel at Monterey. ”

“ What could be said to a girl so blind and deaf to the edicts of Society? Pretty, dainty Mrs. Shaw was always so charmingly dressed, and not a hair out of its place upon her sunny little head. How strange she could not inoculate her niece with some of the virus necessary to preserve the female form from the contagion of a virulent commonness!
At the end of the week, these people, with most of whom we have nothing further to do, departed. Their impression of the new heiress and of her delightful aunt are only worth noting inasmuch as they helped to colour public opinion upon subsequent events. ”

“ We go to Schloss Rabensberg? . . . . I shall be glad to get out of this gloomy house, Albrecht."
"Schloss Rabensberg is still gloomier, Magda. It is surrounded by a moat, and stands in the midst of a wild forest. The walls are thick and the windows small. . . . It is not a cheerful residence, my poor child."
"Never mind. I shall get accustomed to it, Albrecht. It is the country—and we can walk about the woods all day long in the sweet summer time; and at night I shall not mind the gloom, with thee." ”

“ Poor Saul Barham, with his brilliant gifts and high aspirations, is dead. Quintin Ferrars I am never likely to see again. Perhaps it is better I should not. But of all the memories of America I bear away with me, the most pathetic is that of the minister's small household in New England, as I knew it, with this only son, their idol, now lying in the dust. Can religion like Mr. Barham's bring consolation? ”

“ Opposite me sat Professor Genron, who reminded me of the statue of Voltaire in the gallery of the Théâtre Français. The same keen and cunning eyes, the same satirical smile, the head stooped forward, eager, I am sure, to catch all the meannesses of humanity, but with little sympathy for what is noble. Next to him was a Madame de Belcour, whom it amused me to watch. She is like a beautiful cat, so soft, and oh! so sentimental! On her other side was a young poet, a Monsieur Anatole Doucet, whom Madame Martineau says is a genius, as well as remarkable for his beauty. ”

“ The woven figures came not to life; no sound, not even that of a mouse behind the wainscot, broke the perfect stillness of the night. The imagination, without aliment, cannot keep up for ever at high-pressure pitch; and when youth and health are in the other scale, nature will sooner or later have its way, and claim its right of rest. She fell asleep.
How long she remained so, she never knew; but she started from her sleep with the horrible consciousness that something was near her—something between her and the window—something bending over her, with its face close, close to hers. ”

“ Therefore it was that she had thrown herself frankly and without stint into the stream of society in New York, resolved to take what interest and amusement she could find, without letting any one—least of all her brother—see the dark shadow that obtruded itself, from time to time, across the brilliant scene. And she had her reward. There is not so much cordiality in the world that a warm-hearted girl can remain indifferent to such a welcome as had been accorded to Grace, even where there was not much in common between her and her new acquaintances. ”

“ Elizabeth's room felt stifling as she entered it, although the window leading on to the balcony stood wide open. The faint odour of a cigar rose from the verandah below. She never kept her little maid up; she was independent of all services, and began slowly to undress herself. The hands, now and again, fell listless, and once she rested her burning head between them, for some minutes, on the dressing-table. Then she heard a little movement in the verandah below—a door being closed and bolted; after which all was silence. She generally read before going to bed, but not to-night. ”

“ How could it be given to the humble burgher's daughter to remove any mysterious shadow that hung over the proud old family?
She had once read that to the pure and holy in heart the spiritual world has no terrors; that the weapons of the powers of darkness fall harmless before the innocence of a little child. Could it be that because Albrecht had called her "good," because he believed her to be thus pure and spotless at heart, that he had sent her here to drive out by her presence the dark spirit that hovered over his house? ”

“ Men are very troublesome," said Miss Planter, stooping to pick a rose, "and Englishmen are the worst of all. John Bloxsome says—" Here she stopped short.
"What does Mr. Bloxsome say?"
"He says the English are the most arrogant nation on the face of the earth, and I am afraid he is right! You are awfully stuck up, you really are."
"Perhaps I am, as an Englishman. I am proud of being one. Not as myself, Mordaunt Ballinger. I have nothing to be stuck up about."
"No, indeed!" pursued the girl, relentlessly. "You are very nice, of course, and all that. But there is nothing so wonderful about you." ”

“ But Elizabeth had no notion of being debarred from what she regarded as an innocent diversion, by any hints Miss Baring might drop. She talked, with unembarrassed spontaneity, across the table; her lips twitched at the poet's affectations, his paradoxes, his foamings at the mouth. She regarded him much as certain men are regarded by an indulgent public in England: men whose superficial cleverness and puerile vanity entertain for an hour, and are forgotten ”

“ Through the moat—for such the lake was termed—a stream flowed constantly, born among the hills, and growing in its passage through the forest, till it had been widened and deepened by the hand of man into this broad basin, and was then suffered to escape, a dwindled rivulet, and hide itself in the forest once again. Looking down from the windows of the schloss, one saw to the very bottom of the dark green water, where long weeds and grasses, like dusky plumes, swayed to and fro with the current, and the great brown shadow of a fish darted, ever and anon, athwart the mystery of tangled rushes ”

“ You do not strike me as a good American, Mr. Ferrars."
"I am too good an American, and too irritable a man, to stand by and see all the jobbery and corruption that goes on, and not raise my voice. And what good would that do, even if I were elected, which I doubt? There are men shouting their lungs out all the time; there are papers, every day, denouncing the acts of a man like ——, and yet he will continue to be a member of our administration until he is hurled from power, and the opposition set up their gods in the temple. ”

“ Elizabeth rode well and fearlessly, and she was mounted on her beloved Bruno, which her father had given her the year before he died. She looked to greater advantage on horseback than anywhere, and so her companion thought. They galloped across the downs, and hardly spoke a word until they entered a wood of young larch and birch trees, through the burgeoned lilac tips and tender greens of which the pale blue sky of May looked bluer overhead. Her cheek was flushed with the exercise; her dark eyes gleamed. "She looks positively handsome," the soldier said to himself, and his lips were opened. ”