The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866

Ryder retired with the spoil, and Mrs. Gaunt leaned her head over her chair, and cried without stint.

After this, no angry words passed between Mr. and Mrs. Gaunt; but something worse, a settled coolness, sprung up.

As for Griffith, his cook kept her place, and the priest came no more to the Castle; so, having outwardly gained the day, he was ready to forget and forgive; but Kate, though she would not let her servant speak ill of Griffith, was deeply indignant and disgusted with him. She met his advances with such a stern coldness, that he turned sulky and bitter in his turn.

Husband and wife saw little of each other, and hardly spoke.

Both were unhappy; but Kate was angriest, and Griffith saddest.

In an evil hour he let out his grief to Caroline Ryder. She seized the opportunity, and, by a show of affectionate sympathy and zeal, made herself almost necessary to him, and contrived to establish a very perilous relation between him and her. Matters went so far as this, that the poor man's eye used to brighten when he saw her coming.

Yet this victory cost her a sore heart and all the patient self-denial of her sex. To be welcome to Griffith she had to speak to him of her rival, and to speak well of her. She tried talking of herself and her attachment; he yawned in her face: she tried smooth detraction and innuendo; he fired up directly, and defended her of whose conduct he had been complaining the very moment before.

Then she saw that there was but one way to the man's heart. Sore, and sick, and smiling, she took that way: resolving to bide her time; to worm herself in any how, and wait patiently till she could venture to thrust her mistress out.

If any of my readers need to be told why this she Machiavel threw her fellow-conspirators over, the reason was simply this: on calm reflection she saw it was not her interest to get Father Leonard insulted. She looked on him as her mistress's lover, and her own best friend. "Was I mad?" said she to herself. "My business is to keep him sweet upon her, till they can't live without one another: and then I'll tell him; and take your place in this house, my lady."

And now it is time to visit that extraordinary man, who was the cause of all this mischief; whom Gaunt called a villain, and Mrs. Gaunt a saint; and, as usual, he was neither, one nor the other.

Father Leonard was a pious, pure, and noble-minded man, who had undertaken to defy nature, with religion's aid; and, after years of successful warfare, now sustained one of those defeats to which such warriors have been liable in every age. If his heart was pure, it was tender; and nature never intended him to live all his days alone. After years of prudent coldness to the other sex, he fell in with a creature that put him off his guard at first, she seemed so angelic. "At Wisdom's gate suspicion slept": and, by degrees, which have been already indicated in this narrative, she whom the Church had committed to his spiritual care became his idol. Could he have foreseen this, it would never have happened; he would have steeled himself, or left the country that contained this sweet temptation. But love stole on him, masked with religious zeal, and robed in a garment of light that seemed celestial.

When the mask fell, it was too late: the power to resist the soft and thrilling enchantment was gone. The solitary man was too deep in love.

Yet he clung still to that self-deception, without which he never could have been entrapped into an earthly passion; he never breathed a word of love to her. It would have alarmed her; it would have alarmed himself. Every syllable that passed between these two might have been published without scandal. But the heart does not speak by words alone: there are looks and there are tones of voice that belong to Love, and are his signs, his weapons; and it was in these very tones the priest murmured to his gentle listener about "the angelic life" between spirits still lingering on earth, but purged from earthly dross; and even about other topics less captivating to the religious imagination. He had persuaded her to found a school in this dark parish, and in it he taught the poor with exemplary and touching patience. Well, when he spoke to her about this school, it was in words of practical good sense, but in tones of love; and she, being one of those feminine women who catch the tone they are addressed in, and instinctively answer in tune, and, moreover, seeing no ill, but good, in the subject of their conversation, replied sometimes, unguardedly enough, in accents almost as tender.

In truth, if Love was really a personage, as the heathens feigned, he must have often perched on a tree in that quiet grove, and chuckled and mocked, when this man and woman sat and murmured together, in the soft seducing twilight, about the love of God.

And now things had come to a crisis. Husband and wife went about the house silent and gloomy, the ghosts of their former selves; and the priest sat solitary, benighted, bereaved of the one human creature he cared for. Day succeeded to day, and still she never came. Every morning he said, "She will come to-day," and brightened with the hope. But the leaden hours crept by, and still she came not.

Three sorrowful weeks went by; and he fell into deep dejection. He used to wander out at night, and come and stand where he could see her windows with the moon shining on them: then go slowly home, cold in body, and with his heart aching, lonely, deserted, and perhaps forgotten. O, never till now had he known the utter aching sense of being quite alone in this weary world!

One day, as he sat drooping and listless, there came a light foot along the passage, a light tap at the door, and the next moment she stood before him, a little paler than usual, but lovelier than ever, for celestial joy softened her noble features.

The priest started up with a cry of joy that ought to have warned her; but it only brought a faint blush of pleasure to her cheek and the brimming tears to her eyes.

"Dear father and friend," said she. "What! have you missed me? Think, then, how I have missed you. But 't was best for us both to let their vile passions cool first."

Leonard could not immediately reply. The emotion of seeing her again so suddenly almost choked him.

He needed all the self-possession he had been years acquiring not to throw himself at her knees and declare his passion to her.

Mrs. Gaunt saw his agitation, but did not interpret to his disadvantage.

She came eagerly and sat on a stool beside him. "Dear father," she said, "do not let their insolence grieve you. They have smarted for it, and shall smart till they make their submission to you, and beg and entreat you to come to us again. Meantime, since you cannot visit me, I visit you. Confess me, father, and then direct me with your counsels. Ah! if you could but give me the Christian temper to carry them out firmly but meekly! 'T is my ungoverned spirit hath wrought all this mischief,—mea culpa! mea culpa!"

By this time Leonard had recovered his self-possession, and he spent an hour of strange intoxication, confessing his idol, sentencing his idol to light penances, directing and advising his idol, and all in the soft murmurs of a lover.

She left him, and the room seemed to darken.

Two days only elapsed, and she came again. Visit succeeded to visit: and her affection seemed boundless.

The insult he had received was to be avenged in one place, and healed in another, and, if possible, effaced with tender hand. So she kept all her sweetness for that little cottage, and all her acidity for Hernshaw Castle.

It was an evil hour when Griffith attacked her saint with violence. The woman was too high-spirited, and too sure of her own rectitude, to endure that: so, instead of crushing her, it drove her to retaliation,—and to imprudence.

These visits to console Father Leonard were quietly watched by Ryder, for one thing. But, worse than that, they placed Mrs. Gaunt in a new position with Leonard, and one that melts the female heart. She was now the protectress and the consoler of a man she admired and revered. I say if anything on earth can breed love in a grand female bosom, this will.

She had put her foot on a sunny slope clad with innocent-looking flowers; but more and more precipitous at every step, and perdition at the bottom.

CHAPTER XXIII

Father Leonard, visited, soothed, and petted by his idol, recovered his spirits, and, if he pined during her absence, he was always so joyful in her presence that she thought of course he was permanently happy; so then, being by nature magnanimous and placable, she began to smile on her husband again, and a tacit reconciliation came about by natural degrees.

But this produced a startling result.

Leonard, as her confessor, could learn everything that passed between them; he had only to follow established precedents, and ask questions his Church has printed for the use of confessors. He was mad enough to put such interrogatories.

The consequence was, that one day, being off his guard, or literally unable to contain his bursting heart any longer, he uttered a cry of jealous agony, and then, in a torrent of burning, melting words, appealed to her pity. He painted her husband's happiness, and his own misery, and barren desolation, with a fervid, passionate eloquence that paralyzed his hearer, and left her pale and trembling, and the tears of pity trickling down her cheek.

Those silent tears calmed him a little; and he begged her forgiveness, and awaited his doom.

"I pity you," said she, angelically. "What? you jealous of my husband! O, pray to Christ and Our Lady to cure you of this folly."

She rose, fluttering inwardly, but calm as a statue on the outside, gave him her hand, and went home very slowly; and the moment she was out of his sight she drooped her head like a crushed flower.

She was sad, ashamed, alarmed.

Her mind was in a whirl; and, were I to imitate those writers who undertake to dissect and analyze the heart at such moments, and put the exact result on paper, I should be apt to sacrifice truth to precision; I must stick to my old plan, and tell you what she did: that will surely be some index to her mind, especially with my female readers.

She went home straight to her husband; he was smoking his pipe after dinner. She drew her chair close to him, and laid her hand tenderly on his shoulder. "Griffith," she said, "will you grant your wife a favor? You once promised to take me abroad: I desire to go now; I long to see foreign countries; I am tired of this place. I want a change. Prithee, prithee take me hence this very day."

Griffith looked aghast. "Why, sweetheart, it takes a deal of money go abroad; we must get in our rents first."

"Nay, I have a hundred pounds laid by."

"Well, but what a fancy to take all of a sudden!"

"O Griffith, don't deny me what I ask you, with my arm round your neck, dearest. It is no fancy. I want to be alone with you, far from this place where coolness has come between us." And with this she fell to crying and sobbing, and straining him tight to her bosom, as if she feared to lose him, or be taken from him.

Griffith kissed her, and told her to cheer up, he was not the man to deny her anything. "Just let me get my hay in," said he, "and I'll take you to Rome, if you like."

"No, no: to-day, or to-morrow at furthest, or you don't love me as I deserve to be loved by you this day."

"Now Kate, my darling, be reasonable. I must get my hay in; and then I am your man."

Mrs. Gaunt had gradually sunk almost to her knees. She now started up with nostrils expanding and her blue eyes glittering. "Your hay!" she cried, with bitter contempt; "your hay before your wife? That is how you love me!" And, the next moment, she seemed to turn from a fiery woman to a glacier.

Griffith smiled at all this, with that lordly superiority the male sometimes wears when he is behaving like a dull ass; and smoked his pipe, and resolved to indulge her whim as soon as ever he had got his hay in.

CHAPTER XXIV

Showery weather set in, and the hay had to be turned twice, and left in cocks instead of carried.

Griffith spoke now and then about the foreign tour; but Kate deigned no reply whatever; and the chilled topic died out before the wet hay could be got in: and so much for Procrastination.

Meantime, Betty Gough was sent for to mend the house-linen. She came every other day after dinner, and sat working alone beside Mrs. Gaunt till dark.

Caroline Ryder put her own construction on this, and tried to make friends with Mrs. Gough, intending to pump her. But Mrs. Gough gave her short, dry answers. Ryder then felt sure that Gough was a go-between, and, woman-like, turned up her nose at her with marked contempt. For why? This office of go-between was one she especially coveted for herself under the circumstances; and, a little while ago, it had seemed within her grasp.

One fine afternoon the hay was all carried, and Griffith came home in good spirits to tell his wife he was ready to make the grand tour with her.

He was met at the gate by Mrs. Gough, with a face of great concern; she begged him to come and see the Dame; she had slipped on the oak stairs, poor soul, and hurt her back.

Griffith tore up the stairs, and found Kate in the drawing-room, lying on a sofa, and her doctor by her side. He came in, trembling like a leaf, and clasped her piteously in his arms. At this she uttered a little patient sigh of pain, and the doctor begged him to moderate himself: there was no immediate cause of alarm; but she must be kept quiet; she had strained her back, and her nerves were shaken by the fall.

"O my poor Kate!" cried Griffith; and would let nobody else touch her. She was no longer a tall girl, but a statuesque woman; yet he carried her in his herculean arms up to her bed. She turned her head towards him and shed a gentle tear at this proof of his love; but the next moment she was cold again, and seemed weary of her life.

An invalid's bed was sent to her by the doctor at her own request, and placed on a small bedstead. She lay on this at night, and on a sofa by day.

Griffith was now as good as a widower; and Caroline Ryder improved the opportunity. She threw herself constantly in his way, all smiles, small talk, and geniality.

Like many healthy men, your sickness wearied him if it lasted over two days; and whenever he came out, chilled and discontented, from his invalid wife, there was a fine, buoyant, healthy young woman, ready to chat with him, and brimming over with undisguised admiration.

True, she was only a servant,—a servant to the core. But she had been always about ladies, and could wear their surface as readily as she could their gowns. Moreover, Griffith himself lacked dignity and reserve; he would talk to anybody.

The two women began to fill the relative situations of clouds and sunshine.

But, ere this had lasted long, the enticing contact with the object of her lawless fancy inflamed Ryder, and made her so impatient that she struck her long meditated blow a little prematurely.

The passage outside Mrs. Gaunt's door had a large window; and one day, while Griffith was with his wife, Ryder composed herself on the window-seat in a forlorn attitude, too striking and unlike her usual gay demeanor to pass unnoticed.

Griffith came out and saw this drooping, disconsolate figure. "Hallo!" said he, "what is wrong with you?" a little fretfully.

A deep sigh was the only response.

"Had words with your sweetheart?"

"You know I have no sweetheart, sir."

The good-natured Squire made an attempt or two to console her and find out what was the matter; but he could get nothing out of her but monosyllables and sighs. At last the crocodile contrived to cry. And having thus secured his pity, she said: "There, never heed me. I'm a foolish woman; I can't bear to see my dear master so abused."

"What d' ye mean?" said Griffith, sternly. Her very first shaft wounded his peace of mind.

"O, no matter! why should I be your friend and my own enemy? If I tell you, I shall lose my place."

"Nonsense, girl, you shall never lose your place while I am here."

"Well, I hope not, sir; for I am very happy here; too happy methinks, when you speak kindly to me. Take no notice of what I said. 'T is best to be blind at times."

The simple Squire did not see that this artful woman was playing the stale game of her sex; stimulating his curiosity under pretence of putting him off. He began to fret with suspicion and curiosity, and insisted on her speaking out.

"Ah! but I am so afraid you will hate me," said she; "and that will be worse than losing my place."

Griffith stamped on the ground. "What is it?" said he, fiercely.

Ryder seemed frightened. "It is nothing," said she. Then she paused, and added, "but my folly. I can't bear to see you waste your feelings. She is not so ill as you fancy."

"Do you mean to say that my wife is pretending?"

"How can I say that? I wasn't there: nobody saw her fall; nor heard her either; and the house full of people. No doubt there is something the matter with her; but I do believe her heart is in more trouble than her back."

"And what troubles her heart? Tell me, and she shall not fret long."

"Well, sir; then just you send for Father Leonard; and she will get up, and walk as she used, and smile on you as she used. That man is the main of her sickness, you take my word."

Griffith turned sick at heart; and the strong man literally staggered at this envenomed thrust of a weak woman's tongue. But he struggled with the poison.

"What d' ye mean, woman?" said he. "The priest hasn't been near her these two months."

"That is it, sir," replied Ryder quietly; "he is too wise to come here against your will; and she is bitter against you for frightening him away. Ask yourself, sir, didn't she change to you the moment that you threatened that Leonard with the horse-pond?"

"That is true!" gasped the wretched husband.

Yet he struggled again. "But she made it up with me after that. Why, 't was but the other day she begged me to go abroad with her, and take her away from this place."

"Ay? indeed!" said Ryder, bending her black brows, "did she so?"

"That she did," said Griffith joyfully; "so you see you are mistaken."

"You should have taken her at her word, sir," was all the woman's reply.

"Well, you see the hay was out; so I put it off; and then came the cursed rain, day after day; and so she cooled upon it."

"Of course she did, sir." Then, with a solemnity that appalled her miserable listener, "I'd give all I'm worth if you had taken her at her word that minute. But that is the way with you gentlemen; you let the occasion slip; and we that be women never forgive that: she won't give you the same chance again, I know. Now if I was not afraid to make you unhappy, I'd tell you why she asked you to go abroad. She felt herself weak and saw her danger; she found she could not resist that Leonard any longer; and she had the sense to see it wasn't worth her while to ruin herself for him; so she asked you to save her from him: that is the plain English. And you didn't."

At this, Griffith's face wore an expression of agony so horrible that Ryder hesitated in her course. "There, there," said she, "pray don't look so, dear master! after all, there's nothing certain; and perhaps I am too severe where I see you ill-treated: and to be sure no woman could be cold to you unless she was bewitched out of her seven senses by some other man. I couldn't use you as mistress does; but then there's nobody I care a straw for in these parts, except my dear master."

Griffith took no notice of this overture: the potent poison of jealousy was coursing through all his veins and distorting his ghastly face.

"O God!" he gasped, "can this thing be? My wife! the mother of my child! It is a lie! I can't believe it; I won't believe it. Have pity on me, woman, and think again, and unsay your words; for, if 't is so, there will be murder in this house."

Ryder was alarmed. "Don't talk so," said she hastily; "no woman born is worth that. Besides, as you say, what do we know against her? She is a gentlewoman, and well brought up. Now, dear master, you have got one friend in this house, and that is me: I know women better than you do. Will you be ruled by me?"

"Yes, I will: for I do believe you care a little for me."

"Then don't you believe anything against our Dame. Keep quiet till you know more. Don't you be so simple as to accuse her to her face, or you'll never learn the truth. Just you watch her quietly, without seeming; and I'll help you. Be a man, and know the truth."

"I will!" said Griffith, grinding his teeth. "And I believe she will come out pure as snow."

"Well, I hope so too," said Ryder, dryly. Then she added, "But don't you be seen speaking to me too much, sir, or she will suspect me, and then she will be on her guard with me. When I have anything particular to tell you, I'll cough, so; and then I'll run out into the Grove: nobody goes there now."

Griffith did not see the hussy was arranging her own affair as well as his. He fell into the trap bodily.

The life this man led was now infernal.

He watched his wife night and day to detect her heart; he gave up hunting, he deserted the "Red Lion"; if he went out of doors, it was but a step; he hovered about the place to see if messages came or went; and he spent hours in his wife's bedroom, watching her, grim, silent, and sombre, to detect her inmost heart. His flesh wasted visibly, and his ruddy color paled. Hell was in his heart. Ay, two hells: jealousy and suspense.

Mrs. Gaunt saw directly that something was amiss, and erelong she divined what it was.

But, if he was jealous, she was proud as Lucifer. So she met his ever-watchful eye with the face of a marble statue.

Only in secret her heart quaked and yearned, and she shed many a furtive tear, and was sore, sore perplexed.

Meantime Ryder was playing with her husband's anguish like a cat with a mouse.

Upon the pretence of some petty discovery or other, she got him out day after day into the Grove, and, to make him believe in her candor and impartiality, would give him feeble reasons for thinking his wife loved him still; taking care to overpower these reasons with some little piece of strong good-sense and subtle observation.

It is the fate of moral poisoners to poison themselves as well as their victims. This is a just retribution, and it fell upon this female Iago. Her wretched master now loved his wife to distraction, yet hated her to the death: and Ryder loved her master passionately, yet hated him intensely, by fits and starts.

These secret meetings on which she had counted so, what did she gain by them? She saw that, with all her beauty, intelligence, and zeal for him, she was nothing to him still. He suspected, he sometimes hated his wife, but he was always full of her. There was no getting any other wedge into his heart.

This so embittered Ryder that one day she revenged herself on him.

He had been saying that no earthly torment could equal his: all his watching had shown him nothing for certain. "O," said he, "if I could only get proof of her innocence, or proof of her guilt! Anything better than the misery of doubt. It gnaws my heart, it consumes my flesh. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't sit down. I envy the dead that lie at peace. O my heart! my heart!"

"And all for a woman that is not young, nor half so handsome as yourself. Well, sir, I'll try and cure you of your doubt if that is what torments you. When you threatened that Leonard, he got his orders to come here no more. But she visited him at his place again and again."

"'T is false! How know you that?"

"As soon as your back was turned, she used to order her horse and ride to him."

"How do you know she went to him?"

"I mounted the tower, and saw the way she took."

Griffith's face was a piteous sight. He stammered out, "Well, he is her confessor. She always visited him at times."

"Ay, sir; but in those days her blood was cool, and his too; but bethink you now, when you threatened the man with the horse-pond, he became your enemy. All revenge is sweet; but what revenge so sweet to any man as that which came to his arms of its own accord? I do notice that men can't read men, but any woman can read a woman. Maids they are reserved, because their mothers have told them that is the only way to get married. But what have a wife and a priest to keep them distant? Can they ever hope to come together lawfully? That is why a priest's light-o'-love is always some honest man's wife. What had those two to keep them from folly? Old Betty Gough? Why, the mistress had bought her, body and soul, long ago. No, sir, you had no friend there; and you had three enemies,—love, revenge, and opportunity. Why, what did the priest say to me? I met him not ten yards from here. 'Ware the horse-pond!' says I. Says he, 'Since I am to have the bitter, I'll have the sweet as well.'"