door again, and peeped in at him gaily, and said she, "Why not ask me who wrote the letter before you compared me to that French coquette?" And with this made him an arch curtsy, and tripped away.
Mr. George Neville opened his eyes with astonishment. This arch question, and Kate's manner of putting it, convinced him the obnoxious missive was not a love-letter at all. He was sorry now, and vexed with himself for having called her a coquette, and made her cry. After all, what was the mighty favor she had asked of him? to carry a sealed letter from somebody or other to a person who, to be sure, had been her lover, but was so no longer. A simple act of charity and civility, and he had refused it in injurious terms.
He was glad he had lent his horse, and almost sorry he had not taken the letter himself.
To these chivalrous self-reproaches succeeded an uneasy feeling that perhaps the lady might retaliate somehow. It struck him, on reflection, that the arch query she had let fly at him was accompanied with a certain sparkle of the laughing eye, such as ere now had, in his experience, preceded a stroke of the feminine claw.
As he walked up and down, uneasy, awaiting the fair one's return, her father came up, and asked him to dine and sleep. What made the invitation more welcome was that it in reality came from Kate. "She tells me she has borrowed your horse," said the Squire, "so says she, I am bound to take care of you till daylight, and indeed our ways are perilous at night."
"She is an angel!" cried the lover, all his ardor revived by this unexpected trait; "my horse, my house, my hand, and my heart, are all at her service by night and day."
Mr. Peyton, to wile away the time before dinner, invited him to walk out and see—a hog: deadly fat, as times went. But Neville denied himself that satisfaction on the plea that he had his orders to await Miss Peyton's return where he was. The Squire was amused at his excessive docility, and winked, as much as to say, "I have been once upon a time in your plight;" and so went and gloried in his hog alone.
The lover fell into a delicious reverie. He enjoyed by anticipation the novel pleasure of an evening passed all alone with this charming girl. The father, being friendly to his suit, would go to sleep after dinner; and then by the subdued light of a wood-fire he would murmur his love into that sweet ear for hours, until the averted head should come round by degrees, and the delicious lips yield a coy assent. He resolved the night should not close till he had surprised, overpowered, and secured his lovely bride.
These soft meditations reconciled him for awhile to the prolonged absence of their object.
In the midst of them he happened to glance through the window; and he saw a sight that took his very breath away, and rooted him in amazement to the spot. About a mile from the house a lady in a scarlet habit was galloping across country as the crow flies. Hedge, ditch, or brook, nothing stopped her an instant; and as for the pace,
She seemed in running to devour the way.
It was Kate Peyton on his piebald horse.
CHAPTER IV
Griffith Gaunt, unknown to himself, had lost temper as well as heart before he took the desperate step of leaving the country. Now his temper was naturally good; and, ere he had ridden two miles, he recovered it. To his cost: for the sustaining force of anger being gone, he was alone with his grief. He drew the rein half mechanically, and from a spirited canter declined to a walk.
And the slower he went the chillier grew his heart, till it lay half ice, half load, in his bosom.
Parted! oh word pregnant with misery.
Never to see those heavenly eyes again nor hear that silvery voice! Never again to watch that peerless form walk the minuet; nor see it lift the grey horse over a fence with the grace and spirit that seemed inseparable from it!
Desolation streamed over him at the thought. And next his forlorn mind began to cling even to the inanimate objects that were dotted about the place which held her. He passed a little farmhouse into which Kate and he had once been driven by a storm, and had sat together by the kitchen fire; and the farmer's wife had smiled on them for sweethearts, and made them drink rum and milk, and stay till the sun was fairly out. "Ah! good-bye, little farm," he sighed, "when shall I ever see you again?"
He passed a brook where they had often stopped together and given their panting horses just a mouthful after a run with the harriers. "Good-bye, little brook!" said he: "you will ripple on as before, and warble as you go; but I shall never drink at your water more, nor hear your pleasant murmur with her I love."
He sighed and crept away, still making for the sea.
In the icy depression of his heart, his body and his senses were half paralysed, and none would have known the accomplished huntsman in this broken man, who hung anyhow over his mare's neck, and went to and fro in the saddle.
When he had gone about five miles, he came to the crest of a hill; he remembered that, once past that brow, he could see Peyton Hall no more. He turned slowly and cast a sorrowful look at it.
It was winter, but the afternoon sun had come out bright. The horizontal beams struck full upon the house, and all the western panes shone like burnished gold; her very abode, how glorious it looked! And he was to see it no more.
He gazed, and gazed at the bright house till love and sorrow dimmed his eyes, and he could see the beloved place no more. Then his dogged will prevailed, and carried him away towards the sea, but crying like a woman now, and hanging all dislocated over his horse's mane.
Now about a mile farther on, as he crept along on a vile and narrow road, all woe-begone and broken, he heard a mighty scurry of horse's feet in the field to his left; he looked languidly up; and the first thing he saw was a great piebald horse's head and neck in the act of rising in the air, and doubling his fore-legs under him, to leap the low hedge a yard or two in front of him.
He did leap, and landed just in front of Griffith; his rider curbed him so keenly that he went back almost on his haunches, and then stood motionless all across the road, with quivering tail. A lady in a scarlet riding-habit and purple cap, sat him as if he had been a throne instead of a horse, and, without moving her body, turned her head swift as a snake, and fixed her great grey eyes full and searching on Griffith Gaunt.
He uttered a little shout of joy and amazement, his mare reared and plunged, and then was quiet. And thus Kate Peyton and he met—at right angles—and so close that it looked as if she had meant to ride him down.
How he stared at her! how more than mortal fair she shone, returning to those bereaved eyes of his, as if she had really dropped from Heaven.
His clasped hands, his haggard face channelled by tears, showed the keen girl she was strong where she had thought herself weak, and she comported herself accordingly, and in one moment took a much higher tone than she had intended as she came along.
"I am afraid," said she, very coldly, "you will have to postpone your journey a day or two. I am grieved to tell you that poor Mr. Charlton is dead."
Griffith uttered an exclamation.
"He asked for you: and messengers are out after you on every side. You must go to Bolton at once."
"Well a day!" said Griffith, "has he left me too? good kind old man, on any other day I had found tears for thee. But now methinks happy are the dead. Alas! sweet mistress, I hoped you came to tell me you had—I might—what signifies what I hoped—when I saw you had deigned to ride after me. Why should I go to Bolton after all?"
"Because you will be an ungrateful wretch else. What, leave others to carry your kinsman and your benefactor to his grave; while you turn your back on him—and inherit his estate?—For shame, sir! for shame!"
Griffith expostulated humbly. "How hardly you judge me. What are Bolton Hall and Park to me now? They were to have been yours, you know. And yours they shall be. I came between and robbed you. To be sure the old man knew my mind: he said