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 (for such he considered it), 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."
Catherine blushed, and said deprecatingly. "You were not there, Griffith; or to be sure I had not danced with him."
"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."
"You do not discourage him," retorted Griffith, "or he would not be so hot after you. Were you ever the woman to say, 'I have a servant already that loves me dear?'—That one frank word had sent him packing."
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 (wiser perhaps in this than men) 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."
CHAPTER