M. E. Braddon

“ Oh, how she thought of that other and brighter life! that life in which there was passion, and poetry, and beauty, and rapture, and despair! Here among these meadows, and winding waters, and hedgerows, life was a long sleep: and one might as well be a brown-eyed cow, browsing from week's end to week's end in the same pastures, as a beautiful woman with an eager yearning soul.
Mrs. Gilbert thought of London—that wonderful West-End, May-Fair London, which has no attribute in common with all the great metropolitan wilderness around and about it. ”

“ George answered eagerly. "I shall have no thought except to make you happy, Isabel. I know that you are so beautiful that you ought to marry a very different fellow from me,—a man who could give you a grand house, and carriages and horses, and all that sort of thing; but he could never love you better than I, and he mightn't love you as well, perhaps; and I'll work for you, Isabel, as no man ever worked before. You shall never know what poverty is, darling, if you will be my wife." ”

“ Gilbert thought, as she looked at the bouncing red-elbowed young woman. She would marry some floury-visaged miller's man, most likely, and be happy ever after. But it was only a momentary thrill of envy that shot through Isabel's breast. Better to die for Roland Lansdell than to live for a miller's man in thick clumpy boots and an elaborately-stitched smock-frock. Better to have lived for the briefest summer time of joy and triumph, and then to stand aloof upon a rock for ever afterwards, staring at the wide expanse of waters, and thinking of the past, like Napoleon at St. Helena. ”

“ Solitude is not such a pleasant thing, and people do not go through the world alone without some sufficient reason for their loneliness. There must have been some sorrow in your life, dear old friend, some mistake, some disappointment. Remember that, and have pity upon me."
Mr. Raymond was silent for some minutes; he sat with his face shaded with his hand, and the hand was slightly tremulous.
"There was a sorrow in my life, Roland," he said by-and-by, "a deep and lasting one; and it is the memory of that sorrow which makes you so dear to me; but it was a sorrow in which shame had no part. ”

“ All the width of the universe cannot divide them more entirely than they are divided now. They have not one single sentiment in common. Charles Raymond, I tell you I am not entirely a villain; I do still possess some lingering remnant of that common instinct of which you spoke just now. If I had seen Isabel Gilbert happy with a husband who loved her, and understood her, and was loved by her, I would have held myself aloof from her pure presence; I would have stifled every thought that was a wrong to that holy union. I am not base enough to steal the lamp which lights a good man's home. ”

“ Why should I not love him; as we love the stars, that are so beautiful and so distant from us? Why should I not worship him as Helena worshipped Bertram, as Viola loved Zanoni? The wicked Graybridge people may say what they like; and if they tell George anything about me, I will tell him the truth; and then—and then, if I was only a Catholic, I would go into a convent like Hildegonde! Ah, Lady Gwendoline, you do not understand such love as mine!" added Isabel, looking at the Earl's daughter with an air of superiority that was superb in its simplicity. ”

“ What did she care for Lady Gwendoline now?—cruel jealous Lady Gwendoline, who had outraged and insulted the purity of her love.
"Isabel," Roland said, very gravely, bending his head to a level with hers, as he spoke, but looking at the ground rather than at her, "It is time that we ended this farce of duty and submission to the world; we have tried to submit, and to rule our lives by the laws which other people have made for us. But we cannot—we cannot, my dear. We are only hypocrites, who try to mask our revolt under the pretence of submission. ”

“ Roland Lansdell sighed.
"Ah, don't you understand, Isabel," he said, "that doubles our degradation? It is for the very reason that he 'doesn't mind,' it is precisely because he is so simple-hearted and trusting, that we ought not to deceive the poor fellow any longer. That's the degradation, Izzie; the deception, not the deed itself. A man meets his enemy in fair fight and kills him, and nobody complains. The best man must always win, I suppose; and if he wins by fair means, no one need grudge him his victory. I mystify you, don't I, my darling, by all this rambling talk? ”

“ What an enduring torture for a loiterer in fair Grecian isles—an idle dreamer beside the blue depths of a Southern sea—to know that Graybridge disapproves of him!"
"I had better go away, Roland," Mr. Raymond said, looking at his kinsman with a sad reproachful gaze, and stretching out his hand to take up the hat and gloves he had thrown upon a chair near him; "I can do no good here."
"You cannot separate me from the woman I love," answered Roland, boldly. "I am a scoundrel, I suppose; but I am not a hypocrite. I might tell you a lie, and send you away hoodwinked and happy. ”

“ It was only when Roland Lansdell had been dead more than two years, that she began to understand that no grief, however bitter, can entirely obscure the beauty of the universe. She began to feel that there is something left in life even when a first romantic love is nothing but a memory; a peace which is so nearly akin to happiness, that we scarcely regret the flight of the brighter spirit; a calm which lies beyond the regions of despair, and which is unruffled by those vague fears, those shadowy forebodings, that are apt to trouble the joyful heart. ”

“ There is no dream so foolish, there is no fancy however childish, that did not find a lodgment in Isabel Sleaford's mind during the long idle evenings in which she sat alone in her quiet school-room, watching the stars kindle faintly in the dusk, and the darkening shadows gathering in the meadows, while feeble lights began to twinkle in the distant streets of Conventford. Sometimes, when her pupils were fast asleep in their white-curtained beds, Izzie stole softly down, and went out into the garden to walk up and down in the fair moonlight ”

“ Life can't be all rapture and poetry. Ah, Roland, it has pleased you of late years to play the cynic. Let your cynicism save you now. Is it worth while to do a great wrong, to commit a terrible sin, for the sake of a pretty face and a pair of black eyes—for the gratification of a passing folly?"
"It is not a passing folly," returned Mr. Lansdell, fiercely. "I was willing to think that it was so last autumn, when I took your advice and went away from this place. I know better now. If there is depth and truth anywhere in the universe, there is depth and truth in my love for Isabel Gilbert. ”

“ It is such an old, old feeling, this unwillingness to comprehend that there can be death anywhere upon an earth that is so beautiful. Eve may have felt very much as Isabel felt to-day, when she saw a tropical sky, serenely splendid, above the corpse of murdered Abel. Hero may have found the purple distances of the classic mountains, the yellow glory of the sunlit sands, almost more difficult to bear than the loss of her drowned lover.
There was the same solemn hush at Mordred Priory that there had been in the surgeon's house at Graybridge ”

“ Miss Sophronia Burdock did not long cherish the memory of the dark-haired barrister she had met in Baker Street. To do so would have been as foolish as to "love some bright particular star, and think to wed it," in the young damsel's opinion. She wisely banished the barrister's splendid image, and she smiled once more upon Mr. Gilbert when she met him coming out of church in the cold wintry sunlight, looking to especial advantage in his new mourning clothes. But George was blind to the sympathetic smiles that greeted him. He was not in love with Miss Sophronia Burdock. ”

“ And where was he all this time—the man who had judged Isabel Gilbert by a common standard, and had believed her quite ready to answer to his summons whenever he chose to call her to his side? Who shall tell the bitter sinful story of his grief and passion? Never once in all his anger against Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey, when she jilted him for the sake of young Lord Heatherland, had he felt so desperate a rage, so deep an indignation, as that which now possessed him when he thought of Isabel Gilbert. Wounded in his pride, his vanity; shaken in the self-confidence peculiar to a man of the world ”

“ Happily for us, the power to suffer, like every other power, becomes enfeebled and wears out at last by extravagant usage. If Othello had survived to marry a second time, he would not have dropped down in a fit when a new Iago began to whisper poisonous hints about the lady.
"I never loved any one but her," murmured Roland Lansdell, "I have been a hard judge of other women; but I believed in her."
"My poor boy, my poor impetuous Roland," Mr. Raymond said, softly, "men have to suffer like this once in a lifetime. Fight it out, and have done with it. ”

“ I can sympathize with a wasted love, Roland; but I cannot sympathize with a love that seeks to degrade its object."
"Degrade her!" cried Roland; "degrade Isabel! There can be no degradation in such a love as mine. But, you see, we think differently, we see things from a different point of view. You look through the spectacles of Graybridge, and see an elopement, a scandal, a paragraph in the county papers. I recognize only the immortal right of two free souls, who know that they have been created for each other." ”

“ Lady Gwendoline's cruel words were only cruel truths. It was no Dante, no Tasso, who had wandered by her side; only a dissipated young country squire, in the habit of running away with other people's wives, and glorying in his iniquity. There was no middle standing-place which Roland Lansdell could occupy in this foolish girl's mind. If he was not a demi-god, he must be a villain. If he was not an exalted creature, full of poetic aspirations and noble fancies, he must be a profligate young idler, ready to whisper any falsehood into the ears of foolish rustic womanhood. ”

“ You love me so, and prove your love by fooling me with tender looks and blushes, till I believe that I have met the one woman in all the world who is to make my life happy. Oh, Isabel, I have loved you because I thought you unlike other women. Am I to find that it is only the old story after all—falsehood, and trick, and delusion? It was a feather in your cap to have Mr. Lansdell of the Priory madly in love with you; and now that he grows troublesome, you send him about his business. I am to think this, I suppose. It has all been coquetry and falsehood, from first to last. ”

“ Isabel came to him in her pale young beauty, and all the latent sentimentality—without which youth is hideous—kindled and thrilled into life at the magic spell of her presence. The mystic Venus rises a full-blown beauty from the sea, and man the captive bows down before his divine enslaver. Who would care for a Venus whose cradle he had rocked, whose gradual growth he had watched, the divinity of whose beauty had perished beneath the withering influence of familiarity?
It was dusk when George Gilbert went to the chemist and received his parcels of drugs. ”