Henrietta Keddie

“ And like the nervous tissue Dovach was goaded into false activity; the quiet, pale girl learnt to oppose and disobey the conqueror; the cool, deep eyes flamed, the mild tongue bit and stung until the white child seemed fiend-possessed.
It was only to Sir Raoul that the unhappy lady thus broke forth; to the followers over whom her evil fortune had made her mistress she was passive and gentle; and of her own accord she would have woven and read her missal, and paced the battlements, pondering morbidly her misery and sin as mechanically as any nun within her cloisters. ”

“ Letty had been cooking her husband’s dinner, and was skilfully and pleasantly beautifying his dwelling; she was dusting the cage with her turtle—a remembrance from the land of turtles—and she was setting out her flowers, cheap primroses and periwinkles, as she used to deck her old Mile-end factory loom, and with new, graceful ideas, brought from the fragrant myrtles and oleanders on the altars in old classic Roman lands, when the postman’s knock resounded, and she received a letter—a London letter—not for Mrs. George Ashe, but for Lettice Brown. ”

“ This pity of Dovach’s was the most transparent thing in the world, scarcely hiding her own aversion to the victim. Both Sir Raoul and Mahound knew its extent; but in the knight’s resentment that she, who would not deign to extend to him the faintest hope of relenting, or better far—oblivion, should show the least charity to another, he persecuted his black slave more intentionally and more hatefully; and Dovach, perceiving his vexation, was more distinctly and deliberately humane to the inhuman object of contention. Oh, miserable pair! rushing away from the one star in their darkness. ”

“ Never mind, Letty never looked handsomer or happier than when she arranged the scanty furniture, and made the markets in the circumscribed flat in the ugly, crowded manufacturing town. Letty was such a young wife, so stately, and so sweet, so civil to her neighbours, so genuinely frank and kind to old friends, and above all, such a companion, friend, mistress, lady to George Ashe, though she had worked as a factory girl once, and he was never likely to be more than a poor clerk to the end of the chapter, that it was good to see her. ”

“ On a bend of the Isla, where the silver water ran round a fringed promontory and productive haughs stretched right and left, rose the turrets of Baikie. The house was strong in site and strong in architecture—a battlemented, rugged, red sandstone building, with gateway and watch-tower, court and causeway, and moat filled with oozing mud, clayey stagnant water and dank plants, and fed by springs from the clear flowing river. And Baikie was trebled in strength by the character of its master. No feudal chief far or near was feared and followed like Sir Raoul. ”

“ Dovach had been the sole child of a laird, whose lands marched with Baikie—a moderate man, who had said neither yea nor nay to the blustering of Sir Raoul. Dovach had grown up in those primitive days, in a rough, motherless solitude, a white, quiet, still girl with features like chiselled marble and eyes, also, like the deep, cool, fathomless, but intent eyes of a saint in a picture from beyond the seas ”

“ Lucy shook dolorously, and no longer admired the divine beauty of the evening-star, but she called her young companions round her and generously strove, while helpless herself, save for her few peaceful but strong, stern men, to impress them with a sense of her protection; but Patience Chiswell gripped Harris’s arm I and shrieked outright.
“It is the Scourers,” she groaned through her chattering teeth, “and they spare neither man, woman, nor child in their frolics. The good Lord have mercy on us! ”

“ Letty was taken notice of by no less a person than a clever, managing housekeeper in the family of a wealthy cotton lord; nay, Letty was engaged in marriage to a young man with education enough to be a clerk in the factory where she worked, and not only with such chance advantages in book-keeping, but with that intense love of the beautiful in all its shapes which belongs to some of the tenderest and most dependent of our race. Yet Letty was only the orphan daughter of a mechanic, who had been rather remarkable for his incapacity than for anything else. ”

“ Sir Raoul punished himself: his instinctive truth and downright fire revolted at the vileness of Mahound’s frauds and atrocities. There was no love lost between master and man. Mahound did his duty by Raoul, but he did it sullenly; and Sir Raoul maltreated him in a long course of reckless outrages, deepening in affront and barbarity as his Lady Dovach testified some pity for the abhorred and shunned wretch. ”

“ It took all the influence of Letty’s controlling power to restrain him. She was not without fear at his fever, though it was not in her nature to show her fear. She was a woman who could be modestly silent alike in trepidation and mortification, in pain of body and anguish of mind.
“If I were you, George, I would go to the factory as usual,” proposed Letty, earnestly. “People will not believe at first in our fortune; I can scarcely believe in it myself. There may be some obstacle yet of which we are not aware, though the lawyer speaks fair. ”

“ Ninety-nine impetuous, arrogant men of war would have recoiled from Dovach, or brushed by her as if she had indeed been a sculptured or limned image; the hundredth might have run mad for her unearthly, spiritual charms, as Sir Raoul did, after he had once beheld her walking in the gloomy fir-wood, and singing and smiling to herself as she passed by. ”

“ The Bridgewaters had a true regard for Letty, but the communication put them dreadfully about—it was worse than Joachim’s compulsory desertion. Travelling, like poverty, might induce them to fraternise with their inferiors; but to marry them—where the one party was a Lieutenant-Colonel of good family, and in possession of an ample fortune besides his pay, and, not till now reckoned more than crabbed, on the high road to craziness, and the other was a waiting-maid, born a factory girl—well, this was an extension of the suffrage with a vengeance! ”

“ In a great factory, almost grand from its vastness and the might of its machinery, though without architectural elegance or æsthetical design, a long file of girls were working at their noisy looms. Most of them presented the common type of the factory girl, the independence, the self-assertion, the love of snatches of finery in the shape of necklaces and earrings, in the middle of the dusty clothes, with their bursts of gossip and merriment at every pause in their routine. ”

“ Yet the poor Colonel had meant to crown her with his favour, and Letty would no more reproach his ghost with framing for her a crown of thorns, than she would fling away her turtle because its meek, tenderly prolonged cooings contrasted broadly with those proud, brief letters from London.
You have heard of a man going straight to destruction. George Ashe went far to it, without turning to look behind him. ”

“ He seems to be answering them when he rides abroad once more, and his wistful eyes look over his mask and appeal to those who were wont to gaze upon him in admiration and covetousness,—who stare stealthily in wonder and vague regret now,—appeal half haughtily and fierily, half eagerly and tenderly, “You see me disfigured and mutilated in vain, for her who in life could not forgive me, but who in death declared herself mine. I do not grudge it for Dovach.”
Sir Raoul might be less dreaded, bearing the sad marks of his love, but more clave unto him ”

“ Where his own passions were not concerned, he must have evinced a stem sort of truthfulness as well as an unflinching determination, for no man despised him, though many cursed his name, and if you search into antiquity, and trace cause and effect, you will find that the liar on the throne does not need to be a coward in order to be withered by the breath of men’s scorn. Sir Raoul’s own people, his soldiers in battle, his yeomen in peace, his servants—if you except the black boy Mahound—cherished a certain pride in Sir Raoul. ”

“ It is a strain to a poor, modest, disciplined, modern mind to measure Sir Raoul in the plenitude of his might and the boundlessness of his will, to balance the mountain of his temptations, the meagreness of his lessons, the guilt of his soul. ”

“ In the same way there are characters which by natural impulse, as flowers turn to the sun, turn to whatever of higher intelligence and refinement comes within their reach. It is not respect of persons, it is at the antipodes from sycophancy and snobbishness,—it is simply the like drawing to the like, the magnetism between whatever is brighter and higher in our humanity. So Letty’s friends were often distinguished in one way or another, not by any means always in rank, for she numbered them in the workhouse and the hospital, but they were more or less geniuses in their several orders. ”

“ An excitable maid-servant employed to convey hot water to the patient’s room, and compelled to witness his agony, fell down in a swoon on the kitchen floor, and while her fellow-servants crowded round her to recover her, Letty carried up the next supply of water in the general confusion. A medical man was endeavouring to restrain the convulsions of the young man, and while he did so he caught Letty’s eye—that rational, full, deep, well-set eye—as she stood on the threshold, and, with an imperative sign, he summoned her to his assistance. ”

“ In continual association with harmony and elegance, the former intelligent, reverent factory girl had inevitably imbibed and appropriated a portion of these qualities, until, to her own surprise and annoyance, she began to be mistaken for one of the daughters of the family she served. In daily and hourly conversation with educated people, and even in acquiring those soft Italian words, Letty had got rid of the worst part of her provincial dialect, her illiterate sentences and obsolete expressions. ”

“ I would like to show you Letty in the physique before she leaves the factory this night, as it happens, never to return. She is not a little sprite of a woman, as it is the fashion of the day to find embodiments of latent power. ”

“ Brownies may be monkeys after all, and bristling accomplished dogs and vicious cats early Sir Isaacs and special modifications of the tiger; because in sooth the demon of Baikie was nothing worse than Sir Raoul’s Moorish boy, trophy of his passage of arras against the infidel, named Mahound, kicked and cuffed to atone for the unrighteous mercy which had spared the one life and brought the lad to the north country for a jest, and a horror to Sir Raoul’s obtuse, superstitious neighbours. ”

“ Bold, daring, fierce; lord of these acres, lord of his vassals, unaccountable save to God and his patron saint; engaged once in his life in a crusade against the infidel, buying immunity for all crime, for sacrilege itself, by mowing down the turbaned heads, as title reaper cuts the bearded ears in the golden September; losing every grain of scruple and every note of softness in the fulfilment of the vow—the performance of the sacrifice. ”

“ There are men of wit who reckon “spoons” fair game in society, however the “spoons” may be battered in the process. In this case there were no friends to interfere, to render the conquest less complete. Letty heard of George Ashe’s wild purchases and injurious excesses, and wrung her hands and reproached herself that she had not gone with him or followed him to that London, which, she said to herself, in an agony of defence of the culprit, was drunk with its own snares and sins. ”

“ Yea, Sir Raoul never ceases to hear these words during the whole of his future pilgrimage and warfare: he never loses them in the utmost temptation and trial. He listens to them even when the demon Mahound is dragged before him ”

“ They were proud of his invincibleness; they were proud of his prowess; they were, in their own humble submission, quite capable of crowing over the abject quailing of their enemies—the bands of feudal rivals, the grim, ragged robbers descending from the snowy Grampians, the black Danes still landing on the coast, the presumptuous priest who questioned whether service against the Moor should continually atone for neglected shrine, invaded sanctuary, and plundered treasure. ”

“ Bid your blythe lady farewell, Sir Raoul.”
“Oh! man, mortal, if you be not the arch-fiend I mocked, is there no ransom? Can I pay none that will abet your own love of life; for you know, Mahound, you will die within twelve hours for this deed; it is hopeless to think of escape, you will die inch by inch, as surely as you will burn in hell.”
“What care I for the life that you rendered worse than the cat’s, that, poor beast! has nine lives, or yon corbie’s, which, unhappy bird! outlasts a hundred years. Your hell is not my hell. Bid your bonny wife farewell, Sir Raoul ”

“ He felt the unusual silence and idleness: no mower whetting his scythe, no herdsman whistling in his dog, no straying children: it oppressed him, though it did not cross his imagination that these brooding pauses in ordinary life (so wholesome are stir and labour) have been now and again seized upon for the accomplishment of ghastly visions, the perpetration of horrid crimes. ”