Read Ebook: Griffith Gaunt; or Jealousy Volumes 1 to 3 (of 3) by Reade Charles

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Ebook has 3735 lines and 142033 words, and 75 pages

"Why, what matters it which of us has the dross, so that there is enough for both?" said Griffith, with an air of astonishment.

Catherine smiled approbation, and tacitly yielded that point. But then she objected the difference in their faith.

"Oh, honest folk get to heaven by different roads," said Griffith, carelessly.

"I have been taught otherwise," replied Catherine, gravely.

"Then give me your hand and I'll give you my soul," said Griffith Gaunt, impetuously. "I'll go to heaven your way, if you can't go mine. Anything sooner than be parted in this world, or the next."

She looked at him in silence; and it was in a faint half apologetic tone she objected that "all her kinsfolk were set against it."

"It is not their business; it is ours," was the prompt reply.

"Well, then," said Catherine, sadly, "I suppose I must tell you the true reason; I feel I should not make you happy; I do not love you quite as you want to be loved, as you deserve to be loved. You need not look so; nothing in flesh and blood is your rival. But my heart it bleeds for the church I think of her ancient glory in this kingdom, and, when I see her present condition, I long to devote myself to her service. I am very fit to be an abbess or a nun; most unfit to be a wife. No, no; I must not, ought not, dare not, many a Protestant. Take the advice of one who esteems you dearly; leave me--fly from me --forget me--do everything but hate me. Nay, do not hate me: you little know the struggle in my mind. Farewell; the saints, whom you scorn, watch over and protect you: farewell."

And with this she sighed, and struck her spur into the grey, and he darted off at a gallop.

Griffith, little able to cope with such a character as this, sat petrified, and would have been rooted to the spot if he had happened to be on foot. But his mare set off after her companion, and a chase of a novel kind commenced. Catherine's horse was fresher than Griffith's mare, and the latter, not being urged by her petrified master, lost ground.

But, when she drew near to her father's gate, Catherine relaxed her speed, and Griffith rejoined her.

She had already half relented, and only wanted a warm and resolute wooer to bring her round. But Griffith was too sore, and too little versed in woman. Full of suspicion and bitterness he paced gloomy and silent by her side, till they reached the great avenue that led to her father's house.

And, while he rides alongside the capricious creature in sulky silence, I may as well reveal a certain foible in his own character.

This Griffith Gaunt was by no means deficient in physical courage; but he was instinctively disposed to run away from mental pain the moment he lost hope of driving it away from him. For instance, if Catherine had been ill and her life in danger, he would have ridden day and night to save her; but if she had died he would either have killed himself, or else fled the country, and so escaped the sight of every object that was associated with her, and could agonize him. I do not think he could have attended the funeral of one he loved.

The mind, as well as the body, has its self-protecting instincts. This of Griffith's was after all an instinct of that class, and, under certain circumstances, is true wisdom. But Griffith, I think, earned the instinct to excess; and that is why I call it his foible.

"Catherine," said he, resolutely, "let me ride by your side to the house for once; for I read your advice my own way, and I mean to follow it: after to-day you will be troubled with me no more. I have loved you these three years, I have courted you these two years, and I am none the nearer. I see I am not the man you mean to marry; so I shall do as my father did, ride down to the coast, and sell my horse, and ship for foreign parts."

"Oh! as you will," said Catherine, haughtily. She quite forgot she had just recommended him to do something of this very kind.

Presently she stole a look. His fine ruddy cheek was pale; his manly brown eyes were moist; yet a gloomy and resolute expression on his tight-drawn lips. She looked at him sidelong, and thought how often he had ridden thirty miles on that very mare to get a word with her at the shrubbery gate. And now the mare to be sold! The man to go broken-hearted to sea; perhaps to his death! Her good heart began to yearn. "Griffith," said she, softly, "it is not as if I was going to wed anybody else. Is it nothing to be preferred by her you say you love? If I was you I would do nothing rash? Why not give me a little time? In truth, I hardly know my own mind about it two days together."

"Kate," said the young man, firmly, "I am courting you this two years. If I wait two years more it will be but to see the right man come and carry you in a month; for so girls are won when they are won at all. Your sister that is married and dead she held Josh Pitt in hand for years; and what is the upshot? Why, he wears the willow for her to this day; and her husband, he married again before her grave was green. Nay, I have done all an honest man can do to woo you; so take me now or let me go."

At this, Kate began to waver secretly, and ask herself whether it would not be better to yield, since he was so resolute.

But the unlucky fellow did not leave well alone. He went on to say, "Once out of sight of this place I may cure myself of my fancy. Here I never could."

"Oh!" said Catherine, directly, "if you are so bent on being cured, it would not become me to say nay."

Griffith Gaunt bit his lip and hung his head, and made no reply.

The patience with which he received her hard speech was more apparent than real: but it told. Catherine, receiving no fresh positive provocation, relented again of her own accord, and, after a considerable silence, whispered softly, "Think how we should all miss you."

Here was an overture to reconciliation. But unfortunately it brought out what had long been rankling in Griffith's mind, and was in fact the real cause of the misunderstanding. "Oh!" said he, "those I care for will soon find another to take my place. Soon; quotha. They have not waited till I was gone for that."

"Ah, indeed!" said Catherine, with some surprise: then, like the quick-witted girl she was, "so this is what all the coil is about." She then, with a charming smile, begged him to inform her who was his destined successor in her esteem. Griffith colored purple at her cool hypocrisy , and replied, almost fiercely, "who but that young black-a-vised George Neville, that you have been coquetting with this month past; and danced all night with him at Lady Munster's ball, you did."

"And he toasts you by name wherever he goes."

"Can I help that? Wait till I toast him before you make yourself ridiculous, and me very angry--about nothing."

Griffith, sticking to his one idea, replied doggedly "Mistress Alice Peyton shilly-shallied with her true lover for years--till Richard Hilton came that was not fit to tie his shoes, and then--." Catherine cut him short: "Affront me, if nothing less will serve; but spare my sister in her grave." She began this sentence angrily, but concluded it in a broken voice. Griffith was half disarmed; but only half. He answered sullenly, "She did not die till she had jilted an honest gentleman and broken his heart, and married a sot, to her cost. And you are of her breed, when all is done; and now that young coxcomb has come, like Dick Hilton, between you and me."

"But I do not encourage him."

Miss Peyton colored, and the water came into her eyes. "I may have been imprudent," she murmured. "The young gentleman made me smile with his extravagance. I never thought to be misunderstood by him, far less by you." Then, suddenly, bold as brass, "'Tis all your fault; if he had the power to make you uneasy, why did you not check me before?"

"Ay, forsooth! and have it cast in my teeth I was a jealous monster, and played the tyrant before my time. A poor fellow scarce knows what to be at, that loves a coquette."

"Coquette I am none," replied the lady, bridling magnificently.

Griffith took no notice of this interruption. He proceeded to say that he had hitherto endured this intrusion of a rival in silence, though with a sore heart, hoping his patience might touch her, or the fire go out of itself. But at last, unable to bear it any longer in silence, he had shown his wound to one he knew could feel for him, his poor friend Pitt. Pitt, had then, let him know that his own mistake had been over-confidence in Alice Peyton's constancy. "He said to me, 'Watch your Kate close, and, at the first blush of a rival, say you to her, part with him, or part with me.'"

Catherine pinned him directly. "And this is how you take Joshua Pitt's advice; by offering to run away from this sorry rival."

The shrewd reply, and a curl of the lip, half arch, half contemptuous, that accompanied the thrust, staggered the less ready Griffith. He got puzzled, and showed it.

"Well, but," stammered he at last, "your spirit is high; I was mostly afeard to put it so plump to you. So I thought I would go about a bit, However, it comes to the same thing; for this I do know, that if you refuse me your hand this day, it is to give it to a new acquaintance, as your Alice did before you. And, if it is to be so, 'tis best for me to be gone; best for him, and best for you. You don't know me, Kate, for as clever as you are. At the thought of your playing me false, after all these years, and marrying that George Neville, my heart turns to ice, and then to fire, and my head seems ready to burst, and my hands to do mad and bloody acts. Ay, I feel I should kill him, or you, or both, at the church porch. Ah!" he suddenly griped her arm, and at the same time Involuntarily checked his mare.

Both horses stopped.

She raised her head with an inquiring look, and saw her lover's face discolored with passion, and so strangely convulsed, that she feared at first he was in a fit, or stricken with death or palsy.

She uttered a cry of alarm, and stretched forth her hand towards him.

But the next moment she drew it back from him; for, following his eye, she discerned the cause of this ghastly look. Her father's house stood at the end of the avenue they had just entered; but there was another approach to it, viz., by a bridle-road at right angles to the avenue or main entrance; and up that bridle-road a gentleman was walking his horse, and bade fair to meet them at the hall door.

It was young Neville. There was no mistaking his piebald charger for any other animal in that county.

Kate Peyton glanced from lover to lover, and shuddered at Griffith. She was familiar with petty jealousy; she had even detected it pinching or coloring many a pretty face that tried very hard to hide it all the time. But that was nothing to what she saw now. Hitherto she had but beheld the feeling of jealousy, but now she witnessed the livid passion of jealousy writhing in every lineament of a human face. That terrible passion had transfigured its victim in a moment: the ruddy, genial, kindly Griffith, with his soft brown eye, was gone; and in his place lowered a face, older, and discolored, and convulsed, and almost demoniacal.

Women take their strongest impressions by the eye, not ear. Catherine, I say, looked at him she had hitherto thought she knew; looked and feared him. And, even while she looked, and shuddered, Griffith spurred his mare sharply, and then drew her head across the grey gelding's path. It was an instinctive impulse to bar the lady he loved from taking another step towards the place where his rival awaited her. "I cannot bear it," he gasped. "Choose you now once for all between that puppy there and me," and he pointed with his riding-whip at his rival, and waited with his teeth clenched for her decision.

The movement was rapid, the gesture large and commanding, and the words manly; for what says the fighting poet?--

"He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small; Who fears to put it to the touch, To win or lose it all."

Miss Peyton drew herself up, and back, by one motion, like a queen at bay; but still she eyed him with a certain respect, and was careful now not to provoke nor pain him needlessly.

"Then give me your hand with that man in sight, and end my torments: promise to marry me this very week. Ah, Kate! have pity on your poor faithful servant who has loved you so long."

"I do, Griffith, I do," said she sweetly; "but I shall never marry now. Only set your mind at rest about Mr. Neville there. He has never asked me, for one thing."

"He soon will then."

Griffith did not believe one word of all this. "That is your answer to me," said he bitterly. "When the right man puts the question you will tell another tale. You take me for a fool, and you mock me: you are not the lass to die an old maid, and men are not the fools to let you. With faces like yours the new servant comes before the first one is gone. Well, I have got my answer. County Cumberland, you are no place for me. The ways and the fields we two have rid together, oh how could I bear their sight without my dear? Why what a poor-spirited fool am I to stay and whine! Come, mistress, your lover waits you there, and your discarded servant knows good breeding: he leaves the country not to spoil your sport."

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