Running the Gauntlet: A Novel

by Edmund Yates

"He was mistaken," she said, very quietly and sadly; "I will remain here. Tell me what more passed between you, Captain Bligh."

"Indeed, not much, dear Lady Mitford. He was dreadfully excited and wretched, and looked fearfully ill,--he had been drinking deeply last night, I am sure,--and his manner was agitated and incoherent. He talked of his persecutions and his miseries, as every man who has the best blessings of life at his command and throws them away does talk; and his lamentations about this cursed infatuation of his were mixed up with self-reproaches on your account, and imprecations on the men who have tabooed him, and especially because he was rejected at the Maecenas."

"Poor Charles!" said Lady Mitford musingly; "all the enemies he has ever had could have done him little harm, had he not doubled in his own person the strength of his enemies to injure him. He began ill; and when he made an effort to do well, some gloomy recollection, some haunting fear, always seemed to keep him back. There was some evil power over him, Captain Bligh, before this woman laid her spells upon him--a power which made him moody and wretched and reckless. This was a subject upon which it was impossible for me to speak to him; and I accounted for it easily enough, and I have no doubt with tolerable correctness. You know, and I know, that the early years of Sir Charles's life were full of dark days and questionable associations. He was unfortunate at least as much as guilty; and not the smallest of the misfortunes of such a career is the power it gives to miscreants of every kind to embitter one's future and tarnish one's fame, to blight the hopes and the efforts with which one endeavours to rise above the mud-deposit of follies and sins repented and abandoned. There has never been a case, I am sure, in which a man who had gone extensively wrong, and who then tried to go right, and got a good chance of doing it, was not pursued and persecuted by harpies of the old brood, whose talons perpetually branded him, and whose inexorable pursuit kept him constantly depressed and miserable. Then he will be driven to excitement, to dissipation, to anything--which will enable him to forget the torture; but this very necessity deprives all his efforts of vigour, and renders him hopeless of success. I am confident that some such merciless grinding misery lay hidden in Sir Charles's life. I saw it very shortly after we came to town; and I had reason to suspect that he met with some annoyance of the same kind down at Redmoor. But he never told me, and there is no good in our speculating upon any matter of this kind. I can hardly consider myself entitled now to inquire into any affair of his. Did he give you any instructions, Captain Bligh? did he give you any address?"

"No," replied the good-natured Captain, quite saddened and distressed to witness her misery, and moved at the same time to great simple admiration by her composure and firmness, which the Captain denominated "pluck." "He did not say many words to me. He told me to come here and tell you what I have told you, and he said he would write. Let me leave you now, dear Lady Mitford, and let me return to-morrow and take your commands."

"Thank you," she said simply; and then he left her; and perhaps in the whole course of his chequered existence, and among his numerous and varied experiences, he had never felt so much pure and deep respect for any woman as for the deserted wife to whom he had had to disclose the full measure of her sorrow.

The days passed, and no tidings of Sir Charles Mitford came. Georgie had seen Banks, and had given him some directions relative to the things which Sir Charles required him to take to Baden, in an unconcerned and dignified manner, which had impressed that functionary as much as her conduct of the previous day had affected Captain Bligh.

"She's a deal too good for Mitford, and always was, even before he took to brandy and that ere Laurer 'Ammond," soliloquized Mr. Banks; "and I hope, for my part, he'll never come back."

Mr. Banks left town early in the morning of the day which succeeded the interview between Lady Mitford and Captain Bligh, and Georgie remained in her own rooms the entire day. An agitated restlessness was upon her, a feeling of suspense and apprehension, which deprived her of the power of thinking consecutively, and distracted her sorrow by changing its character. She expected to see Captain Bligh, and in her confused state of mind she had forgotten to say that no other visitors were to be admitted. At three in the afternoon, as she was sitting in her boudoir, striving, quite ineffectually, to fix her attention on some piece of feminine industry, a servant announced,

"Miss Gillespie."

Lady Mitford heard the name with unbounded astonishment. At first she associated no idea whatever with it; she felt certain she had never known any one so designated. But before the bearer of the name entered the room, she had remembered the handsome young woman whose superb singing and sudden disappearance had occasioned so much wonder and discussion at Redmoor. The association of ideas was not pleasant; and it was with a heightened colour, and something in her manner different from its customary graceful sweetness, that she rose to receive her unlooked-for visitor.