Falkner: A Novel

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Falkner smiled at the desire to cure every evil that crossed her path, which is one of the sweetest illusions of youth, and asked, "Has he no mother?"

"No," replied Elizabeth, "he is an orphan like me, and his father is worse than dead, as he is so inhuman. Oh! how I wish you would save him as you saved me."

"That, I am afraid, would be out of my power," said Falkner; "yet, if you can make any acquaintance with him, and can bring him here, perhaps we may discover some method of serving him."

For Falkner had, with all his sufferings and his faults, much of the Don Quixote about him, and never heard a story of oppression without forming a scheme to relieve the victim. On this permission, Elizabeth watched for some opportunity to become acquainted with the poor boy. But it was vain. Sometimes she saw him at a distance; but if walking in the same path, he turned off as soon as he saw her; or, if sitting down, he got up, and disappeared, as if by magic. Miss Jervis thought her endeavours by no means proper, and would give her no assistance. "If any lady introduced him to you," she said, "it would be very well; but, to run after a young gentleman, only because he looks unhappy, is very odd, and even wrong."

Still Elizabeth persisted; she argued, that she did not want to know him herself, but that her father should be acquainted with him—and either induce his father to treat him better, or take him home to live with them.

They lived at some distance from the baths, in a shady dell, whose sides, a little farther on, were broken and abrupt. One afternoon they were lingering not far from their house, when they heard a noise among the underwood and shrubs above them, as if some one was breaking his way through. "It is he—look!" cried Elizabeth; and there emerged from the covert, on to a more open but still more precipitous path, the youth they had remarked: he was urging his horse, with wilful blindness to danger, down a declivity which the animal was unwilling to attempt. Falkner saw the danger, and was sure that the boy was unaware of how steep the path grew at the foot of the hill. He called out to him, but the lad did not heed his voice—in another minute the horse's feet slipped, the rider was thrown over his head, and the animal himself rolled over. With a scream, Elizabeth sprang to the side of the fallen youth, but he rose without any appearance of great injury, or any complaint, evidently displeased at being observed: his sullen look merged into one of anxiety as he approached his fallen horse, whom, together with Falkner, he assisted to rise—the poor thing had fallen on a sharp point of a rock, and his side was cut and bleeding. The lad was now all activity; he rushed to the stream that watered the little dell to procure water, which he brought in his hat to wash the wound; and as he did so, Elizabeth remarked to her father that, he used only one hand, and that the other arm was surely hurt. Meanwhile Falkner had gazed on the boy with a mixture of admiration and pain. He was wondrously handsome; large, deep-set hazel eyes, shaded by long dark lashes—full at once of fire and softness; a brow of extreme beauty, over which clustered a profusion of chestnut-coloured hair; an oval face; a person light and graceful as a sculptured image—all this, added to an expression of gloom that amounted to sullenness, with which, despite the extreme refinement of his features, a certain fierceness even was mingled, formed a study a painter would have selected for a kind of ideal poetic sort of bandit stripling; but, besides this, there was resemblance, strange and thrilling, that struck Falkner, and made him eye him with a painful curiosity. The lad spoke with fondness to his horse, and accepted the offer made that it should be taken to Falkner's stable, and looked to by his groom.

"And you, too," said Elizabeth, "you are in pain, you are hurt."

"That is nothing," said the youth; "let me see that I have not killed this poor fellow—and I am not hurt to signify."

Elizabeth felt by no means sure of this. And while the horse was carefully led home, and his wound visited, she sent a servant off for a surgeon, believing, in her own mind, that the stranger had broken his arm. She was not far wrong—he had dislocated his wrist. "It were better had it been my neck," he muttered, as he yielded his hand to the gripe of the surgeon, nor did he seem to wince during the painful operation; far more annoyed was he by the eyes fixed upon him and the questions asked—his manner, which had become mollified as he waited on his poor horse, resumed all its former repulsiveness; he looked like a young savage, surrounded by enemies whom he suspects, yet is unwilling to assail: and when his hand was bandaged, and his horse again and again recommended to the groom, he was about to take leave, with thanks that almost seemed reproaches, for having an obligation thrust on him, when Miss Jervis exclaimed, "Surely, I am not mistaken—are you not Master Neville?"

Falkner started as if a snake had glided across his path, while the youth, colouring to the very roots of his hair, and looking at her with a sort of rage at being thus in a matter detected, replied, "My name is Neville."