Robert Neilson Stephens

“ I am tired of myself; weary and sick of Murray Davenport. To be a new man, of my own imagining—that would be something;—to begin afresh, with an unencumbered personality of my own choosing; to awake some morning and find that I was not Murray Davenport nor any man now living that I know of, but a different self, formed according to ideals of my own. There would be a liberation!”
“Well,” said Larcher, “if a man can't change to another self, he can at least change his place and his way of life.” ”

“ A glad boldness had come over Peyton. He felt himself masterful, as one feels who is drunk with wine; yet, unlike such a one, he had command of mind and body.
“Ay, joy,” said he, “joy none the less that you are disdainful! Pride is the attribute of queens, and tenderness is not the only mood in which a woman may conquer. Heaven! You can so discomfit a man with your frowns, what might you do with your smile!”
He felt now that he could dissimulate to fool the very devil.
But Elizabeth, though interested as one may be in an oddity, seemed not otherwise impressed. ”

“ The snow on the ground greatly muffled the sound of our horses' footfalls, and made our way less invisible than so dark a night might have allowed. But it made ourselves also the more likely to be seen; though scarce at a great distance nor in more than brief glimpses, for the wind raised clouds of fine snow from the whitened fields, the black growth of tree and brush along the road served now as curtain for us, now as background into which our outlines might sink, and a stretch of woods sometimes swallowed us entirely from sight. ”

“ I was conscious of only one thing,—that death was bearing down on me. The sound of the horses' footfalls filled my ears. Louder and louder came that sound, drowning even the quick panting of my breath. Again came that aching in the side, that intolerable pain which I had felt in my flight from Paris.
I pressed my hand to my side, and plunged forward. Suddenly the road seemed to rise and strike me in the face. I had fallen prostrate, and now lay half-stunned on the earth. I had just time to turn over on my back, that I might face my pursuers, when the foremost horse came up. ”

“ In fact, many an honest and hard-working man of talent nowadays might envy such a life as the ordinary prisoner in the Bastile could lead, especially in the reign of Louis XVI. Such a prisoner's state, in those old days of tyranny and oppression, was heavenly, compared with that of an innocent man merely awaiting trial in the prison of a police court in New York City in this happy age of liberty and humanity.
Dick was allowed to walk, under guard, not only in the interior court, but also in a small garden on one of the bastions, where the pure air was sweetened by the perfume of flowers. ”

“ You should have bought the silence of mine host yonder, methinks! And changed your company, altered your attitude, rid yourself of the stiffness from the wound my brother gave you, and washed your face of the welt my sword left! You have a good barber, Sir Valentine; he hath shaved a score of years from your face; he hath renewed your youth as if with water from that fountain men tell of, in America!"
"The loss of a long-worn beard indeed giveth some men a strange look of youth," assented Hal, as if humoring her spirit of bitter derision against himself. ”

“ It is well known that power lies in a saltatorial ensemble of white lace skirts, pale blue hose, lustrous naked arms, undulating bodice, magnetic eyes, flying hair, and an unchanging smile, to focus the perceptions of a man, to absorb his consciousness, aided by a tune which seems to close out from him all the rest of the world.
And there, while this plump little girl danced and the frivolous, stupid crowd looked eagerly on, from all parts of the overheated theatre, began the tragedy of Billy Folsom. ”

“ Jerningham shrugged his shoulders.
"It is the truth," said the captain. "Virtue beats in her heart, modesty courses with her blood, purity shines in her eyes, she is the mirror of innocence. Should you find means to try her, I swear to you the attempt would but mar her peace, and serve you nothing. Nay, even if that were not so,—if there were a chance of your enticing her,—black curses would fall upon the man by whose deed that stainless flower were smirched. Innocence robed in beauty—there's too little of it walks the world, that gentlemen should take a hand in spoiling it!" ”

“ Do not stay at Lavardin. Live!—live and be happy, for my sake. So brave—so tender—the world needs you; and you must not die for me—I forbid you!"
"You will find me as immovable as Mathilde," said I.
She looked from one to the other of us, and put forth her hands pleadingly; then broke down into weeping.
"Oh, will you make my duty the harder?" she said. "God knows I would gladly die to save you."
"It is not dying that will save us. The only way is to save yourself." ”

“ When I heard footsteps on the uneven pebble pavement of the street, and saw approaching me out of the gloom some cloaked pedestrian, I mechanically gripped the handle of my sword, and kept a wary eye on the stranger,—knowing that in passing each other we must almost touch elbows. His own suspicious and cautious demeanor and motions reflected mine.
At night, in the narrow streets of a great town, there exists in every footfall heard, every human figure seen emerging from the darkness, the possibility of an encounter, an adventure, something unexpected. ”

“ And here let me say that I think Margaret, from first to last, loved Philip with more tenderness than she was capable of bestowing upon any one else; with an affection so deep that sometimes it might be obscured by counter feelings playing over the surface of her heart, so deep that often she might not be conscious of its presence, but so deep that it might never be uprooted:—and 'twas that which made things the more pitiful. ”

“ Peyton went on. “You remember how you upheld them with a rapier in Bayard’s woods?”
“I remember,” said Colden, faintly, first reddening, then taking on a pale and sickly look, as if a prey to hidden chagrin and rage.
It seemed as if his tormentor intended to torture him interminably. Peyton, who knew that one of his men would come for him as soon as the horse should be saddled and bridled, remained facing the unhappy major, wearing that frank half-smile which, from the triumphant to the crestfallen, seems so insolent and is so maddening. ”

“ TEARS Everell’s last meal at Foxwell Court was not marked by lively conversation. He had his own thoughts, or, rather, his own confused and whirling state of mind, so that he scarce knew whether the others spoke or were silent. Outwardly he still maintained a brave face, so that Georgiana might not yet be alarmed. The young lady herself had never taken much part in the table talk. Lady Strange and Rashleigh felt the occasion too sensibly to be capable of easy discourse, and Foxwell knew a gentleman’s part too well to intrude a gaiety either real or feigned. ”

“ If what an ungallant American traveller wrote at that time—that at the German courts beauty and butter alike were measured by the pound—were true, it was to be granted that the German ladies had fair skin, radiant complexion, and something of a classic cast of countenance. But Dick's gaze fastened upon one face, which had beauty without heaviness; a face that stood out from the others,—making them and all the world besides fade into nothingness, while Dick, in doubt whether he was not dreaming, forgot that any other woman had ever lived. It was the face of Catherine de St. Valier! ”

“ Love and beauty await me; they, and this glad earth even now waking to joy at the first breath of spring! I am for this world, with its music and its wine, its laughter and its poetry, its green fields and its many-colored cities, its pleasures of good-fellowship, its smiles of the woman beloved! ”

“ To come to the point, Murray Davenport saw that to make his change of identity really successful, to avoid a thousand interruptions to his self-delusion, to make himself another man in the world's eyes and his own, and all the more so in his own through finding himself so in the world's, he must transform himself physically—in face and figure—beyond the recognition of his closest friend—beyond the recognition even of himself. ”

“ Those great brown eyes, the plush sack, the lovely face that had borne the impress of sorrow so speedily, had felt death—those might never have existed, so soon had they been forgotten by the one being in the world for whom that face had worn the aspect of a perfect love. ”

“ Old Noah, the only servant I saw, reflected in his black face the sorrow that had fallen on the home, and stepped with the tread of a ghost. I soon took my leave, having so far failed to carry any brightness into the stricken house, that I came away filled with a sadness akin to its own. I walked forward aimlessly through the wintry dusk, thinking life all sorrow, the world all gloom. ”

“ Worse still than the crime of obliterating all human-made relics of the past, is the vandalism of nature herself where nature is exceptionally beautiful. To rob millions of beauty-lovers, yet to live, of the Palisades of the Hudson, would bring upon us the amazement and execration of future centuries. This earth is an entailed estate, that each generation is in honor bound to hand down, undefaced, undiminished, to its successor. ”

“ One afternoon, as we stood on a little spur that rose from the declivity below the château, and whence through a small opening between trees could be seen the river, the smiling plain, and afar the high-perched château of Clochonne, I asked her:
"Why is it that when I speak of what most occupies my heart you become silent or sorrowful, or go suddenly from me?"
With assumed lightness she replied:
"Can a woman explain her capricious doings any more than a man can understand them? It is well known that we do unaccountable things." ”

“ Hal's course lay. It was a highway that, not far out of London, became like all other roads of the time narrow and rutty, often a mere ditch below the level of the fields, woods, or commons, at either side; rarely flanked, as in later times, by hedges, walls, or fences of any kind; passing by fewer houses, and through smaller villages, than it is now easy to imagine its doing.
On this, as on every English road, most passenger travel was by horseback or afoot, although the great, had their coaches, crude and slow-moving. ”