Edmund Yates

“ As he stood on the door-step and watched the carriage out of sight, the young man's face was pale and agitated, but full of deep and sacred happiness too. An expression of resolve and hope, of courage and power, was upon his features, such as they had never before worn. Had he recalled the resolution he had taken for the time when Clare Carruthers should know Paul Ward as George Dallas, and had he renewed it, with fresh heart and energy, not unaided now by circumstances, not frowned upon by fate, no longer friendless? ”

“ Under all the quiet of her manner, under all the smoothness of her speech, Harriet Routh knew well there was a savage element in the desperation of her love for Routh, since he had committed the crime which sets a man apart from his fellows, marked with the brand of blood. She had loved him in spite of the principles of her education, in defiance of the stings of her conscience, dead now, but which had died hard; but now she loved him in spite of the promptings of her instincts, in spite of the revulsion of her womanly feelings, in defiance of the revolt of her senses and her nerves. ”

“ Time went over, and the night fell, and the old woman and the young man still talked together, and she tried to comfort him, and make him believe that all would be well. But George was slow to take such comfort--full of remorse and self-condemnation, of gloom and foreboding. The mercurial temperament of the young man made him a bad subject for such suspense and self-reproach, and though he had no shadow of fear of any trouble to come to him from the evidence on the inquest, there was a dull brooding sense of apprehension over him, against which he had no power, no heart, to strive. ”

“ Distracted between the horror, overwhelming to the innocent mind of the young girl, to whom sin and crime had been hitherto dim and distant phantoms, of such guilt attaching itself to the image which she had set up for the romantic worship of her girlish heart, and the urgent terrified desire which she felt that, however guilty, he might escape--nay, the more firmly she felt convinced that he must be guilty, the more ardently she desired it,--Clare Carruthers's gentle breast was rent with such unendurable torture as hardly any after happiness could compensate for or efface. ”

“ The man was a reptile, George--a cruel snake in his nature. I don't believe any one on earth ever loved him, except his mother in his babyhood. I hope she's dead; yes, I trust she's dead! And that you should peril your safety, drag your mother's name into the police-courts, rouse all the anger, stab all the pride, of your stepfather, ruin, or at least greatly injure, your own prospects, by the revelations you will be forced to make, supposing (which, I confess, I think most difficult and improbable) you do prove your own innocence, seems to me utterly monstrous and irrational. ”

“ How she suffered in every hour of her life! Yet there was a kind of dulness over Harriet too. She recurred little to the past in point of feeling; she thought over it, indeed, in aid of the action of her reason and her will, but she did not recall it with the keenness either of acute grief for its vanished happiness, such as it had been, or of remorse and terror for its deep and desperate guilt. The burden of the day was enough now for this woman, whose strength had lasted so long, endured so much, and given way so suddenly. ”

“ The young man and the girl--the idle, dissolute, perverted young man; the beautiful, pure, innocent, proud, pious young girl--talked together that spring afternoon, as the hours wore on to evening, of art, of literature, of music, of travel, of the countless things over which their fancy rambled, and which had wondrous charms for her bright intellect and her secluded life, simple and ignorant in the midst of its luxury and refinement. All that was best and noblest in George's mind came out at the gentle bidding of the voice that sounded for him with a new, undreamed-of music ”

“ Woman-like, Harriet remarked the magnificence of her dress before she noticed the beauty of her face, set off as it was by the aid of the most perfect hat and feather ever put together by the milliner's art. That beauty was at once of the correct and the sparkling order. Her features were of statuesque regularity, but they had all the piquant brilliancy of rich, glowing, passionate life. Cheeks and lips flushed with the full colour of health, masses of hair of the darkest, glossiest brown coiled up in endless braids and rolls under the inimitable hat ”

“ The very stones of the street seem to cry it out, and he has not heard of it; the very air is full of it, and he knows nothing. If anything should prevent his going? But no; nothing will, nothing can. This was the awful danger--this was the certain, the inevitable risk; if I have averted it; if I have saved him, for the time!"
The chill of coming dawn struck cold to her limbs, the sickness of long watching, of fear, and of sleeplessness was at her heart, but Harriet Routh did not lie down on her bed all that dreadful night. ”

“ He was very clever, of course, but still--and with all the wisdom and the zeal of his present mental and moral condition, George shook his head at the idea of a deflection into gambling on the part of Routh.
The often-described scene at the Kursaal displayed all the customary features. Light, gilding, gaiety, the lustre and rustle of women's dress, the murmur of voices and the ring of laughter in all the rooms not devoted to play; but at the tables, silence, attention, and all the variety which attends the exhibition of the passion of gambling in all its stages. ”

“ The time had been long in rolling over her weary old head; for though she had passed the period of life in which feeling is very keen, and sorrow has power to torture, and constancy to last, Mrs. Brookes had no other objects to divide her thoughts with Mrs. Carruthers and her son; and day by day the old woman had brooded upon the new trouble which had come to those whom she loved so well. Perplexity mingled with her grief, for she knew not what to think. She had stoutly denied the possibility of George's guilt, in the memorable dialogue which had been the last she had held with his mother ”

“ No, quite a beggar, for I am coming to beg of my mother--coming to your fine house, Capel Carruthers, like a thief or a spy; slinking in at your gates, under cover of your fine friends' fine carriages; a prodigal stepson, by Jove, without the faintest chance of a welcome, and every probability of being turned out, if discovered. Company here, too, of all nights in the year, to make it more difficult to get hold of old Brookes unsuspected, but not so unfortunate either, if I'm seen. Hangers about are to be found even in the country, I suppose, on festive occasions. There's the house at last! ”

“ Through all his vicissitudes of fortune his wife had been by his side, and as, in the long run, chance had been against him, taking the heaviest portion of his burden on herself. Harriet Routh's was an untiring, undying, unquestioning love or worship of her husband. The revelation of his--to say the least of it--loose mode of life, the shifts and expedients to which he resorted for getting money, the questionable company in which he habitually lived, would have told with fatal effect on a devotion less thorough, a passion more transient. ”

“ Free, with the chance and the power of making a name for himself in the world! free from all the debasing associations, free from Routh, from Harriet--from Harriet? Was that idea quite so congenial to his feelings? to be separated from Harriet, the only woman whom, in his idle dissipated days, he had ever regarded with anything like affection, the only woman who--and then the bright laughing face and the golden hair of Clare Carruthers rose before his mind. ”