G. P. R. James

“ You have lodged him in prison as you promised--but he must die."
"I think you may leave that to the care of the good old lord," replied Robert. "He is as eager for his blood as a hound for the blood of a deer."
"I will leave it to no one with entire trust," replied Lady Coldenham; "too much depends upon him to have any thing risked upon the conduct of a blundering old man, or a heedless, inattentive lawyer."
"I wonder what poor Ralph has done," said Lord Coldenham, breaking silence for the first time during a quarter of an hour, "to make you two so bitterly his enemies. ”

“ Mister Ralph," said the voice of Doctor M'Feely behind them a moment after, "upon my life and soul, this is my country's way of taking a solitary ramble. You go out to walk alone with a companion, eh? Why, fair Miss Margaret, does my lord know of your night roaming?"
"Quite well," replied Margaret, with very little sign of emotion; "I often walk through the park in the moonlight, doctor, but do not often have such good luck as to-night in meeting Ralph to keep me company. Ralph loves books better than the moon, I fancy." ”

“ The ills that lie upon it must be encountered in front, and there is no use in watching for them till they are within reach. Let us be wise, Ralph, if it be but for this day. Let us enjoy the present as far as we can. You think no more of a dark past or a gloomy future, and I will cast from my mind many a heavy thought and anxious care which the world's eye shall never behold. See! the sun is breaking out from behind the clouds, mottling the livery of the sky with gold. ”

“ Marry! they would have people men and women of the world's making, not of God's; but you can't fashion flesh and blood like a coach or a coat. Nature says shall, and who shall gainsay her? Love's not a loose cloak to fit every one; and it's a garment which can but be bought once and won't turn. Don't tear it, my dear, for patch it you can't; and old Moraber is right, depend upon it--he always is."
"Pray God he is so now," replied Margaret, fervently; and then, throwing her arms round Dora, in a wild burst of strong emotion, she wept again as profusely as ever, but far more happily. ”

“ Margaret started, and gazed in his face.
"Ay, Margaret!" he said. "In the common course of events, Ralph Woodhall will soon be Lord Coldenham, as his father now is. For myself, I am so no longer; and what will become of me I know not. My mother's small property will but be sufficient for herself; but I have my sword unstained, and my heart unburdened, and I too can carve a way for myself in the world."
"Young man," said a voice close to him, while a hand was laid upon his arm, "I have not put you to these bitter trials without motive. ”

“ Come, let us talk of other days, when you and I were boy and girl, and knew not of each other's being, and chased butterflies, and sought to catch the rainbow, and did all that the common bond of nature uses to link withal the human hearts through the wide world in one community of universal sympathy in early years. Tell me, Ralph Woodhall, why is it that all mankind, thus one in happy youth, should part so widely in maturer years--part in feeling and in thought, in conduct and in course, in object and in means? ”

“ Do you hide yourself in the attic? Truth they say lies in a well, and wisdom, it seems, at the top of the house."
"Wisdom and truth are not so far separate," said the old man, speaking rather to himself than to the other.
At the same moment, Margaret, who had been leaning on Ralph's arm, took a step forward, and shot a heavy bolt that was upon the door into the staple; and then, raising her beautiful lips toward her lover's ear till the sweet breath fanned his cheek, she whispered, "It is the voice of Robert Woodhall, your cousin and mine, Ralph, though nearer akin to you than to me." ”

“ Now, Ralph Woodhall, what would you that I should tell you? and you, Mistress Margaret, what is it you desire of me? Would you fair dreams and specious promises, visions of bright and golden happiness, love and enjoyment, long life, and a good old age? You will have none such from me. Do you wish to hear the truth, or do you not? Are you bold enough, fearless enough, to look upon the future with an unwinking eye, and shape your course accordingly?"
"I am," replied Margaret, in a firmer tone than might have been expected from her previous agitation ”

“ Ralph readily followed his suggestion, but inquired, after riding a few yards, "Who is watching us? One of Lord Woodhall's people?"
"No!" replied Stilling, in his quaint, bluff way; "knave Robert's knave Roger."
"I wish to heaven it was his master instead," said Ralph, with a quick glow of the cheek and flash of the eye.
"Ay, so do I," answered Gaunt Stilling, gloomily; "but he always contrives to put some one else in his place when that place is a dangerous one. Every man has his time, however, and his is waiting for him." ”

“ The fiend Kirke was busy in his brutal office all day long, and his ferocious soldiery drank deep of blood, and reveled amid the carnage in unbridled licentiousness. None escaped him or them upon whom the jealous eye of power fell, who could not pay enormously for life from some store unattainable by his death; for where there was a choice, Kirke always preferred blood.
Had Ralph Woodhall been given up at once by Churchill to any inferior officer, or even to Lord Feversham himself, it is more than probable his fate would have been instantly sealed. ”

“ Ought we, Ralph--ought we to do or say any thing that he would blame and condemn?"
"No--oh no," answered Ralph Woodhall, firmly; "I ask it not, Margaret. I only ask, let me still hope. Keep your heart and hand for me as long as may be, and though it may seem wild, rash, insane to dream that in a few short years I may accomplish enough to lessen the disparity between your state and mine, yet, so long as the beacon burns before me, I will go on, let the road be ever so rough and perilous. These are strange and stirring times, Margaret; changes come suddenly and often; all men are struggling ”

“ Stay! let me give you a letter to my steward, who is the man of all others to aid you, and to take means for insuring your safety."
"Nay, dear Lady Danvers," replied Ralph, "I am under no such great apprehension as you seem to think; I have done nothing that any man of heart would not have done, or that any man of honor might not have done. I would fain, it is true, avoid all personal collision with Lord Woodhall in his present state of rage; but for my personal safety I have no fear; he is a man of too much honor to resent what has occurred by any unworthy means." ”

“ I saw the wound myself; and it was not such a scratch as a man might give himself, for the sake of a little bloody evidence to support a lie. What you tell me is impossible, I say."
"It is quite true, sir," said the man, in a soft, insinuating tone; "I will tell you all about it; but let me just say, in the mean time, sir, that if you had but condescended to trust me in the matter of the young lady, Mistress Kate, I would have had her back for you, and snug in the little cottage, within a single day."
"I never trust any body too much," replied Robert Woodhall, in a surly tone. ”

“ Drayton--nothing more, thank you," replied Ralph; "I have had quite enough, and all has been very good."
"Perhaps, sir, you would like to look through the house," said Mr. Drayton, determined not to leave the young stranger to his own bitter thoughts if he could help it; "it is a curious old place, and, to my mind, looks better by candlelight than at any other time. I think old places always do; for there is something about them which makes one feel that their real light is gone, and that they can only be viewed pleasantly by something manufactured and modern. ”

“ Margaret was roused. "Respect!" she said; "what should I respect in Robert Woodhall?"
"You should respect him whom you have promised to marry," said Lady Coldenham; "you should respect the house from which he springs."
"My promise to marry him," replied Margaret, with cold calmness, "was cruelly wrung from me in a moment of the greatest agony. It is sufficient that I keep it, without exacting more. He can not make me more than his slave. ”

“ The edge of the sky grew rosy; the sun set; the night came. The misty clouds, from which had dropped, occasionally, large tears upon the earth, passed away like gloomy thoughts from a bright mind; and star by star came out in the refreshed sky, and looked down upon the earth in melancholy calmness.
Alone, and side by side, Hortensia Danvers and Ralph Woodhall wended slowly on. I must not pretend to look into her bosom; the eye of man never did. There may be some women who can divine what mysterious things were passing therein, but even of women, not all. ”

“ Well, well, if Ralph is innocent--and I begin to fancy it may be so--he'll marry Lady Danvers, and Margaret will marry Robert, and we might all be happy again--but for the want of poor Henry!"
Poor old man, how completely he had forgotten, or how little must he have ever known of the feelings and passions of youth! The indifference of old age to those things of the heart which make the brightness of active existence, is one of age's greatest evils, considered as a stage of mere mortal life, but is, perhaps, a good preparation for parting with mortal things to enter upon life eternal. ”

“ Now don't say a word, good man; there are some offenses that the law does not touch--there are some evils that no law will prevent; I have punished the one, and have stopped the other. That is my only offense, and I am ready to die for it."
"If I put those last words down, they'll twist a cord round your throat to a certainty, Gaunt," said Doctor M'Feely. "Lawyers won't have it that there is any thing law can't do; and they always hang a man who preaches the contrary."
"Put them down, put them down," said Gaunt Stilling; "they will make no difference in my fate. ”

“ He quietly tore to pieces Lady Diana Fullerton's note with very little reverence, and, casting the subject from his mind, let his thoughts rest again, with some of that impatience for action which is peculiar to youth, upon the death of his poor cousin Henry, and the anguish which he knew Margaret must be feeling both for her brother and for himself, if she believed him guilty. He longed to fly to her, to console her, to comfort her, to assure her of his innocence, and of his ever-enduring affection; but how rarely is it that Fate allows us to do any thing that we long to do. ”

“ Trust them not, Margaret. Receive every thing they tell you with doubt. Be firm, constant, and true to the last; for be sure it is the only road to--the only chance of happiness. Let them not persuade you to any thing that can ever put a bar against your union with him. Let them never induce you to give up faith in despair. Far be it from me to urge any child to disobey a parent; but there is a limit to obedience beyond which no parent has a right to exact it, and the less when any command is founded on passion, prejudice, or error. ”

“ You have condemned my young friend, Ralph Woodhall, this day: I come to intercede for him."
"All in vain, my lady--all in vain!" said Jeffries, glancing his eye at the maid-servant. "Found guilty by a jury, he can expect no mercy."
Hortensia had spoken very calmly, and she knew the man too well to let him see any agitation. "Why not?" she asked, in the same quiet tone. "If his guilt were proved, which you, my lord, know quite well it is not, and which I deny, still he would be very much less culpable than any of the others whom you have condemned. ”

“ Beware what you do, sir--beware what you insinuate! Is the man taken? is he in prison?"
"Oh no, he is not," replied Robert Woodhall, in a cool, indifferent tone; "I know where he is; I can put him in the hands of justice in eight-and-forty hours. In double that time he may escape, for he goes whither he will, and disports himself as a gentleman at large. But what is that to me, if Margaret loves him better than me--if your promise is to be unavailing, and your commands to be set at naught?" ”

“ We, on the contrary, can never go too fast; forgetting that there is but a certain portion of life allotted to every man, and that life is not mere time, measured by suns or moons, but a certain amount of action, event, idea, sensation. We crowd more into seven days than a patriarch put into seven years; and then we wonder that life is so brief, that so little time has been allowed us.
There was an evening--a long evening--before Ralph Woodhall and Hortensia Danvers. ”

“ Trust to tried affection and long-known truth; and be assured that he who may now seem guilty is innocent as yourself. He who seems most innocent is guilty. You sent not to me in the hour of need as I bade you; but I watch over you, and come to your comfort, even when you seek me not. Be firm and true. Moraber."
"Goodness gracious! if that is not the wise man in the old tower!" exclaimed Dora, when she had arrived at the name, and made it out with some difficulty; "Lord bless me! Mistress Margaret, how can he know any thing about you?" ”

“ They always look to me like the prosperous and wealthy of this earth, who never seem to dream of all the strife, and care, and agony of body and of mind that is going on around them."
"Not so with all the prosperous!" replied the lady, in a tone almost reproachful; "those who are not quite so fortunate often do them an injustice. They can not see beneath the surface, or know not how often the heart, which has few or no sorrows of its own, bleeds for the sorrows of others. Yet so far you are right, I believe. Prosperity may have a tendency to harden the heart. ”

“ M'Feely," replied the master of the house; "you have been much wanted to bless the venison up at the hall."
"Oh, the currant-jelly does that mighty well without me," replied the chaplain. "Mr. Ralph, I am right glad to see you. Alma Mater abandoned, I hear. Done with the old lady, eh? Well, it must be so with all fathers and mothers. Children will quit them, must quit them; and there is no use of going cackling about like a hen after a brood of young ducklings when first she sees them take to the water. Every animal knows its own element, and will find it sooner or later. ”

“ At length, however, a nimble step was heard upon the stairs, and the head groom, whom she had sent for, appeared with an eager and excited countenance. He doffed his hat as he entered the room, saying at once, "They have taken him away before the magistrates, my lady; but Mistress Alice said you wanted me."
"Who? who?" demanded Lady Danvers; "of whom do you speak?"
"Mr. Ralph, my lady," replied the man. "We would have rescued him with the strong hand, and beaten the constables all to mortar; but he would not let us, and ordered us all to keep the peace. ”

“ Remember to tell Ralph what I have said; and bid him think of me as one dead; for to every thing that makes existence life, I must be dead from the moment the ring is upon my finger."
After a few words more, Doctor M'Feely left her; and in less than a quarter of an hour, the house, so lately silent and solitary, was full of gay sounds and heedless laughter, jarring painfully with the thoughts of the melancholy tenant of that solitary room. Indeed, it seemed as if the whole party, with the exception of Lord Woodhall, had determined to leave the poor girl to her own imaginations. ”

“ A slight, hardly perceptible smile curled upon Robert Woodhall's lip; but, turning away to conceal the emotions of which he was conscious, he called Lord Woodhall's servants to their master, and then saw him deferentially to the door.
There are as great varieties in love as in any other passion; seldom found altogether pure, it is mixed with a thousand various alloys, some more, some less congenial to itself. Now it must not be supposed that Robert Woodhall was altogether without love of a certain kind for his fair cousin Margaret. ”

“ Moraber."
"This is strange," said Ralph, returning the letter.
"Not so strange as some tidings in this letter, sir," said Gaunt Stilling, striking lightly the other he held in his hand. "However, before I go, let me ask you one question, sir, which is of more importance than you may think. I am very bold; but you will pardon me. Are you to be married, as men say, to Lady Danvers?"
"Not the most remote chance of it," replied Ralph. "Have you too, Stilling, been deceived by appearances, the deceitfulness of which none could judge better? ”

“ In an instant Ralph's hand was upon the door of the carriage, and before Hortensia could beseech him to forbear, he had sprang out.
"Here, Jones, give me my horse!" he cried. "Turn round the carriage, and away back with all speed! What! is the lane too narrow? On before there seems a wider space. Stay! I will ride on and see. Coachman, you must get your mistress out of this peril as speedily as possible. Come after me slowly; some one put the cushions against the front windows; you, men on horseback, gather round the carriage--take no part with any one, but defend your lady." ”

“ What is it most like, Ralph--like woman's love, or Heaven's bounty, or the rays of Hope, that stream between the close dwellings of man's earthly aspirations, gilding the straws upon his onward way, and making the stones on his path shine like jewels?"
"Like woman's love, methinks," said Ralph, "because, as you say, it pours from sources we do not see, brightens the dimmer air that it pervades, and often lends a luster to worthless objects, which shine in its light alone." ”

“ I know nothing more solemn and impressive than a wide, far-extended, uncultivated moor upon a dim day, when no bright gleams of sunshine diversify the expanse with catches of golden light, when the sky above is all gray, and the eye rests upon nothing but long lines of brown and purple heath, like a broad, desolate ocean spreading every where around. Such was the scene which presented itself to the eyes of Ralph and Margaret ere they had gone a quarter of a mile. The undulations of the ground had by that time hidden the plowed fields and meadows around. ”

“ How would you have the people prosperous here, with no one of wealth and station near them but an old woman all pride and diamonds, whose only object is to maintain her state and her two sons; and their only bounties are the riding over our fields and gardens, and the debauching of our wives and daughters? Marry! well may the fences go to decay, the thatch go to decay, and the roof-tree fall in. There is a good receipt for rendering a place desolate, and these people have found it."
"I fear so, my good man," replied Ralph; "but you speak freely dangerous things." ”

“ Robert Woodhall saw her emotion with infinite pleasure, but he answered in a quiet tone, though with a slightly-curled lip, "I did not know that there was any doubt of it."
"Great doubt," replied Margaret; "I, for one, do not believe that Ralph would ever draw his sword against poor Henry; and there are others, wiser, and better able to judge than myself, who do not believe it either." ”

“ Sir,--What I dare to do, I dare to avow. Your son Ralph murdered his cousin Henry Woodhall. I have urged, and shall urge Lord Woodhall, the bereaved father, to suffer no weak remains of affection for an unworthy object to prevent him from punishing the offender to the utmost. I, for one, should prefer to have a man hanged out of my family, rather than to have a murderer left living in it. ”

“ Shortly after, an undefinable feeling of dread took possession of her. "There is no knowing," she thought, "what men in their intemperate courage may do to satisfy themselves upon their point of honor. Alice!" she cried aloud, "go and see for Mr. Ralph Woodhall; tell him I want him--that I had forgotten something which I wished to say."
"Lord! my lady, I dare say he is gone to bed," replied the girl.
"Ascertain, at all events," said Lady Danvers; "ask one of the duke's servants."
The waiting-woman left the room, and remained away for some five minutes. ”

“ I tell him you are a wise man, and he says to me nay, for that no wise man would live in this moor."
"Fools might be made judges of wise men, and yet not much hanging done in the land," replied the person he called Moraber; "not for want of folly enough in the judges, but for want of wise men to be judged."
"Come, Master Moraber, or whatever is your name," said the voice of Robert Woodhall, "show us a trick of your art. What in the fiend's name is this you have got on the table?" ”