Edmund Yates

“ A little rest! Something more than a little rest is required, as they would have allowed, could they have seen what no one, not even Mrs. Bloxam, saw,--the favourite of the public with dishevelled hair and streaming eyes stretched prone upon her pillow, and sobbing as though her heart would break!
Miss Grace Lambert's illness or indisposition, thus evoking the compassion of the company staying at Hardriggs, was, whatever the company might have thought about it, known to herself to spring purely from mental distress. ”

“ I should marry without hesitation from motives of ambition; I should marry without hesitation if the man were any but what he is--if he were anyone but Miles Challoner.."
Mrs. Bloxam sat bolt upright, and gazed at Gertrude in irrepressible, unmixed amazement. "What do you say?" she asked. "Can it be possible that we are all mistaken? Lord Sandilands and I, and Miles Challoner himself, for he thinks you love him. I am as certain as I ever was of any human being's sentiments. ”

“ Lord Ticehurst's astonishment at this suggestion from his Mentor was extreme. "What a queer chap you are, Gil!" he said; "when I've asked you to go to all sorts of houses, first-class, where everything is done in great form and quite correct, you've stood out and fought shy, and all that kind of thing. And now you want to go to old Mother Burge's,--old cat who stuffs her rooms with a lot of people raked up from here and there! 'Pon my soul there's no knowing where to have you, and that's about the size of it!" ”

“ Your heart is not in Rowley Court, nor are you capable of fulfilling your duties as you are at present. Make new ones for yourself, my dear Miles. Yield to the inclination which you have partly confessed, and which I have very distinctly perceived, and turn your back upon the scene which has been overclouded for you since your boyhood by a sorrow which has ever been, and must remain, a mystery to you. Geoffrey Challoner's crime is buried in the grave of Gilbert Lloyd; but you will never lay its ghost while you remain at Rowley Court. I am neither a credulous nor a superstitious man ”

“ Stackborough, dressed most elaborately, was seen approaching the group. It was always said that Bobby Maitland had never been seen to lose his temper. At that instant he was within an ace of it; but he controlled himself with an effort, and said, "That's not bad, Lloyd; not at all bad, for you. When you order Lloyd's man's new livery, Etchingham, you must have a cap and bells added to it. 'Gad, you're like one of those great swells in the olden time, who used to keep a fool to amuse their friends!" ”

“ The other guests were men more or less intimately connected with the turf, who talked to each other in a low grumbling monotone, and whose whole desire was to get the better of each other in every possible way.
The dinner, which had called forth loud encomiums, was over; the cigars were lighted, and the conversation had been proceeding briskly, when in a momentary lull Dolly Clarke, who had the reputation for being not quite too fond of Gilbert Lloyd, said in a loud voice: "Well, my lord, and after Goodwood comes Brighton, and of course you hope to be as lucky there." ”

“ Gertrude was horrified at the effect which the communication she had made to her father had upon him. He had set his heart strongly indeed upon her marriage with Miles Challoner, she thought, when the frustration of the project had the power to plunge him into a state of prostration and misery. As for herself, the alarm she experienced, and the great excitement she had undergone in the revelation made to her by her father, the agony of mind she had suffered in the desperate necessity for avowing the truth, were quickly succeeded by such physical exhaustion as she had never before felt. ”

“ Through a side-gate of the garden the lime-walk was to be gained, and as Miles closed that gate behind him he caught sight of Grace Lambert. She was walking slowly along in the shadow of the trees, her head bent down in a thoughtful attitude. Miles went quickly towards her, and she looked up and recognised him with a slight start and a vivid blush; in fact, with the kind of recognition which takes place when the person who intrudes upon a reverie happens to be its subject. Gertrude had been thinking of Miles--she thought of him very often now ”

“ Gertrude's professional career, he saw at once, must come to an immediate and abrupt close. There was no safety for her in the terrible unexplained attitude of the brothers Challoner, and her total unconsciousness of it and its bearing upon her own fate, but absence from the scene of the secret drama. With the grief of her hopeless, impossible love at her heart, and with the help and safety of her new-discovered relationship to him, security for her future and escape from the present, Gertrude would not hesitate about abandoning her career as a singer. ”

“ In the wildest and deepest of her misery, and when her resolution was highest and sternest, there was one steadfast feeling in Gertrude's heart, by which she clung in all the tempest of emotion, while the clamour was loudest in her storm-tossed heart. It was the indestructible happiness of knowing herself beloved. Nothing could take that from her, whatever befell; life might have many more trials, many more deprivations in store for her, but it could not deprive her of that--not even change on his own part: and she did not think he would change. ”

“ To these questions it was impossible he could get any answer; and he would, or thought he would, just then--for he was an unlikely man to stick to such a bargain, if he could have made it--have given years of his life to know what had passed that memorable day at Brighton, before he had returned to the deathbed of his friend, and there encountered Gertrude. The dying whisper which had conveyed to the young woman the power she had used so promptly was unknown by Lloyd; on this point--the great, the essential point of his musings--all was conjecture, dark, terrifying, and undefined. ”

“ But the next she had started from his embrace, and stood pale and breathless before him.
"Is this really true?" she said; "does Lord Sandilands approve?" She asked him only to gain a moment's time for thought; she was terribly disconcerted by this complication, it increased her difficulties immensely. But Miles saw in the question only a symptom of yielding, only a proof of his victory.
"Yes; yes," he said eagerly, "it is true; it is indeed! He is the only real friend I have in the world; the only man whose opinion I care for, and he is on my side. ”

“ Bloxam, recovering herself, and remembering that the communication Lord Sandilands intended to make must not be forestalled. "Your resolution surprised me so much, I grew confused. But how will you account for refusing Mr. Challoner?"
"I shall account for it," said Gertrude, "on the best grounds--grounds which would be adequate in my own judgment had I never made the fatal mistake of my miserable marriage. If I were nothing more than the world knows or believes me to be, I should still hold myself an unsuitable wife for him, and should still refuse him for his own sake." ”

“ Countess of Ticehurst, eh?--rank, wealth, station. For an instant a hard, cold, proud look, which had been a stranger to her face of late, flitted across her features, and then faded away. No! Those might have had their allurements when she first learned Gilbert Lloyd's worthlessness, and recommenced her life, scorning to yield, and merely looking on all human weaknesses as stepping-stones for her advancement. She had learned better things than that now. Miles! ”

“ Whenever you choose, after a day or two, I will see Lord Sandilands; he will help me to impress on Miles Challoner the uselessness, indeed the cruelty, of pressing a suit which can only pain me and avail him nothing. I shall convince him easily; he knows the world too well to be difficult of persuasion of the justice of all that I shall say to him. ”

“ But she was a strong woman by nature, and a quiet, self-repressed woman by habit, and in the few moments' interval of silence she did not faint, but sat down a little behind Lord Sandilands, and with her face turned away from the light. As for the old nobleman himself, the mere shock of the dim suspicion, the vague possibility which suggested itself, shook his composure severely, through all the restraint which his natural manliness and the acquired impassiveness of good breeding imposed. Gertrude was the first to speak. ”

“ She knew nothing of the real, appalling truth; she was ignorant that the man she had married was a criminal of the deepest dye, the secret of his crime in her father's hands, his own brother the object of her affections, and the only possible issue out of all this complication and misery one involving utter and eternal separation between her and Miles Challoner. If he and Gertrude ever met again, she must learn the truth ”

“ The occasion was an important, and Gilbert Lloyd intended that it should be a profitable, one. In the midst of the anger and perturbation of his spirit, he was quite capable of attending to his own and his patron's interests--when they were identical; and there was no mental process, involving no matter what amount of passion or scheming or danger, which Gilbert Lloyd could not lay aside--ranged in its due place in his memory--to await its fitting time; a valuable faculty, and not a little dangerous in the possession of a man at war, more or less openly, with society. ”

“ The doctor will look in every day, and his lordship promises strict compliance with his instructions.
So far all is arranged; but when the doctor is fairly gone, and the door is shut, and Lord Sandilands has heard the sound of the wheels of the professional brougham, low on the sand and loud on the stones, echo away, the old gentleman is fain to admit--first to himself, secondly to Miles, whom he summons immediately--that it is impossible for him to keep his word so far as being mentally quiet is concerned. ”

“ For the love of such a man as Miles Challoner she would have risked everything, in the first appreciation of such a sentiment so fresh and novel to her in all her experience of life--and that experience had been singular and not small; to be the recipient of such a passion as that man proffered and laid at her feet, she would have let her dead past bury its dead ”

“ He took the letter Lord Sandilands had written to him from her hand "You know that the miserable man who was to both of us a rock ahead through life was my brother--the shame and misfortune of our family."
Gertrude bowed her head and covered her face with her hands.
He continued: "All that can be said, except how truly and devotedly I love you, is said in this letter--the last message of your father, of my best friend. There is nothing in England for which we care: we have no ties there; we are bound to each other only by ties of love and sorrow in all the world. ”

“ It was a hot morning in July when a cab drew up at the pillars, and Gilbert Lloyd jumped out, paid the driver, and made his way into the Inn. The exhalations from the barrows of the fried-fish vendors were potent, and the change to the faint, sickly perfume of the West-Indian pine-apple, tastefully arranged in slices on an open barrow which blocked the immediate thoroughfare, was scarcely refreshing. ”

“ He, Gilbert Lloyd, had rather a habit of trusting to chance in matters of this kind; and, on the present occasion, he found that chance befriended him. For while his patron, eager and anxious-eyed, went roaming round the room in hot search for the object of his thoughts, Gilbert, no less anxious, no less determined, remained quietly near the entrance-door, and narrowly watched each passing face. He knew most of them. A London man of-half-a-dozen seasons can scarcely find a fresh face in any evening party on which he may chance to stumble. ”

“ The indiscreet, illiterate, but by no means bad-hearted, young nobleman aforenamed had given himself up, heart and soul, to a passion for the opera-singer known to him as Miss Grace Lambert, and had gone through a psychological examination of his feelings, so far as his brain-power permitted, with the view of seeing how the matter lay, and what would be his best means for securing his ends. The notion of succeeding dishonourably had never entered his head, or at least had not remained there for a moment. ”

“ The Dean, too, received the news with great regret: he had experienced much pleasure in Miss Lambert's society. The very fact of her position had had its secret charm; there was something specially pleasant in being brought into daily communion with one whose status in life was considered equivocal, but whose conduct was unexceptionable, and, if occasion required, would bear any amount of scrutiny. All great men have their enemies; the Dean was not without his. ”

“ Old Lady Spills, who was always seated at the bow-window of her lodgings with a powerful opera-glass, marked the young nobleman's arrival at the hotel, and immediately called to her granddaughter, then resident with her, to get her hat and accompany her on the parade as quickly as possible. "Not that it's of any use," the old lady remarked to herself; "for Julia is as stupid as an owl, and not likely to be attractive even to the most innocent of youths, much less to a young man like this, who is, no doubt, perfectly able to take care of himself." ”

“ Meanwhile, Lord Ticehurst sat upright in his mail-phaeton, driving the pair of roans which were the cynosure of the Park during the season, and the envy of all horsey men always, through some of the loveliest scenery in Sussex. Not that scenery, except Grieve's or Beverley's, made much impression on his lordship. Constant variety of hill and dale merely brought out the special qualities and paces of the roans; wooded uplands suggested good cover-shooting; broad expanse of heath looked very like rabbits. ”

“ Ashy pale that face was, and it bore a fixed look of horror; for, bringing his own secret knowledge of Gilbert Lloyd to bear upon the story told by the housekeeper, Lord Sandilands readily divined what was that swift, unaccountable illness of which Lloyd's friend had died, what the irresistible power his wife had wielded in insisting upon the separation which had taken place. "The wretched girl! What must she not have suffered!" the father thought. "Alone, in the power of such a man, in possession of such a secret, whether by positive knowledge or only strong suspicion, no matter. ”

“ My genius, as you call it, my fame, are real things in their way and in their sphere, but they are not of any account in yours. Ask your friend Lord Sandilands; he is a kind friend to me also, and a man who knows the world thoroughly; and he will tell you I am right."
"No, he won't!" said Miles triumphantly, "No, he won't! He will tell you, on the contrary, that you are quite wrong; he will tell you that he knows I love you, and have dared to hope, to believe that you love me. He will tell you that I have told him what is my dearest hope, and that he shares it ”

“ The Duke of Doncaster, a melancholy old man, in a crumpled wig and dyed whiskers, wearing the bell-hat, large-checked neckerchief, and cutaway green coat of the past generation, was driving his team up and down the parade, solemnly and methodically as was his usual afternoon practice, and he recognised Lord Ticehurst's presence by jerking his whip-elbow into the air in true coachman-like fashion. ”

“ It was fortunate that Miles was just then so much engrossed with his love, so full of the hope of the success of his suit, so relieved and encouraged by discovering that Lord Sandilands did not attempt to dissuade him from a project in which he had felt very doubtful whether he should have the support of a man of the world--and though nothing would have induced him to abandon that project, Lord Sandilands' acquiescence made a wonderful difference to him in the present, and would, he felt, be of weighty importance in the future,--that he was not keenly observant of the old nobleman. ”

“ That's all, eh?"
"No," said Clarke earnestly, "nothing of the sort; the man has made a revelation, but not of the kind you imagine--a thousand times more serious. There's never been much love lost between you and me, Lloyd, and you may wonder why I'm here to counsel and help you; so understand at once, it's for Ticehurst's sake; you're so mixed up with him that any public exposéwould be the deuce and all for him." ”