Cerise: A Tale of the Last Century

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

Emerald enjoyed it as much as his master. When pulled up, he stopped willingly, his whole frame glowing with health and energy, his eye glancing, his ear alert, his broad red nostril drinking in the free moorland air like a cordial, and his bit ringing cheerfully, while he tossed his head in acknowledgment of the well-earned caress that smoothed the warm supple skin on his swelling neck.

The horse seemed a little puzzled too, looking round in vain for his friends the hounds, as if he wondered why he had been brought thus merrily over the moor, good fun as it was, without any further object than the ride.

In this matter there was little sympathy between man and horse. Sir George was thinking neither of hounds, nor hawks, nor any other accessories of the chase. He neither marked the secluded pool in which he had set up the finest stag of the season at bay last month, nor the ledge of rocks into which he ran his fox to ground last week. He was far back in the past. He was a young Musketeer again, with neither rank, nor wealth, nor broad acres, but with that limitless reversion of the future which was worth all his possessions ten times told. Yet even thus looking back to his earliest manhood, he could not shake himself free from the memory of Cerise. Ever since he could remember, that gentle face and those blue eyes had softened his waking thoughts and haunted him in his dreams; there was no period in his life at which she had not been the ideal of his imagination, the prize he desired. Even if he had not married her, he thought with a groan, he would still be cursed with this gnawing, festering pain that drove him out here into the wilderness for the mere bodily relief of incessant action. If he had not married her! Another thought stung him now. Perhaps then she might have continued to love him. Were they all alike, these women? All vain, unstable, irrational creatures; best acted on by the jugglery of false sentiment, alive only to the unworthy influence of morbid pique or unbridled passion, tempted to evil by an infamous notoriety, or dazzled by the glare of an impossible romance? He asked himself these questions, and his own observation afforded no satisfactory reply.

He had lived much at the Court of France, when that Court, with all its splendour and all its refinement, was little distinguished by self-denial in man, or self-restraint in woman. Amongst those of his own age and sphere, he was accustomed to hear conjugal fidelity spoken of as a prejudice not only superfluous but unrefined and in bad taste. The wife as a wife was to be considered a proper object of pursuit, the husband to be borne with as an encumbrance, but in right of his office habitually to be derided, out-witted, and despised. That a woman should care for the man to whom she had plighted her faith at the altar seemed an absurdity not to be contemplated; that a man should continue to love the girl he had chosen was a vulgarity to which no gentleman would willingly plead guilty. Such were the morals of the stage, such was the too common practice of real life. And George had laughed with the rest at the superstition of matrimony, had held its sanctity in derision, perhaps trifled with its vows en mousquetaire.

And now was the punishment overtaking him at last? Was the foundation of his happiness, like that of others, laid in sand, and the whole edifice crumbling to pieces in his very sight? It was hard, but he was a man, he thought, and he must bear it as best he might. As for the possibility that Cerise should actually love another, he dismissed such an idea almost ere it was formed. That was not the grievance, he told Emerald aloud, while he stood by the good horse on the solitary moor, it was that Cerise should not love him! He could scarcely believe it, and yet he could see she was unhappy, she for whose happiness he would sacrifice so willingly wealth, influence, position, life itself, everything but his honour. When he thought of the pale pining face, it seemed as if a knife was driven into his heart.

He sprang into his saddle, and once more urged his horse to a gallop. Once more the brown heathery acres flew back beneath his eyes, but Emerald began to think that all this velocity was a waste of power when unaccompanied by the music of the hounds, and stopped of his own accord to look for them within a bow-shot of the great north road where it led past the “Hamilton Arms.”

Ordinary people do not usually talk to themselves, but I believe every man speaks aloud to his horse.

“Quite right, old fellow!” said Sir George, as if he were addressing a comrade. “I may as well stop and have a glass of beer, for I am as hot as you are, and I dare say twice as thirsty.”