by Mary Shelley
“Thus incoherently I put down my thoughts as they rise — a tangled maze which I ask you to unravel. I will endeavour to abide by your decision, whatever it may be; yet I again ask you to pause. Is Elizabeth’s happiness as deeply implicated as mine? if it be, can I abide by any sentence that shall condemn her to a wretchedness similar to that which has so long been an inmate of my struggling heart? no; sooner than inflict one pang on her, I will fly from the world. We three will seek some far obscure retreat and be happy, despite the world’s censure, and even your condemnation.”
Falkner’s heart swelled within him as he read. He could not but admire Neville’s candour — and he was touched by the feelings he expressed towards himself; but pride was stronger than regret, and prompted an instant and decisive reply. He rebelled against the idea that Gerard and Elizabeth should suffer through him, and thus he wrote: —
“You have appealed to Mrs. Raby; will you suffer me to answer that appeal, and to decide? I have a better right; for kind as she is, I have Elizabeth’s welfare yet more warmly at heart.
“The affection that she feels for you will endure to the end of her life — for her faithful heart is incapable of change; on you therefore depends her happiness, and you are called upon to make some sacrifice to insure it. Come here, take her at my hand — it is all I ask — from that hour you shall never see me more — the injured and the injurer will separate; my fortunes are of my own earning, and I can bear them. You must compensate to my dear child for my loss — you must be father as well as husband — and speak kindly of me to her, or her heart will break.
“We must be secret in our proceedings — mystery and deception are contrary to my nature — but I willingly adopt them for her sake. Mrs. Raby must not be trusted; but you and I love Elizabeth sufficiently even to sacrifice a portion of our integrity to secure her happiness. For her own sake we must blindfold her. She need never learn that we deceived her. She will naturally be separated from me for a short time — the period will be indefinitely prolonged — till new duties arise wholly to wean her from me — and I shall be forgotten.
“Come then at once — endure the sight of the guilty Falkner for a few short days — till you thus earn his dearest treasure — and do not fear that I shall intrude one moment longer than is absolutely necessary for our success; be assured that when once Elizabeth is irrevocably yours, wide seas shall roll between us. Nor will your condescension to my wish bring any stigma on yourself or your bride, for Miss Raby does not bear my tainted name. All I ask is, that you will not delay. It is difficult for me to cloke my feelings to one so dear — let my task of deception be abridged as much as possible.
“I shall give my Elizabeth to you with confidence and pleasure. You deserve her. Your generous disposition will enable you to endure her affection for me, and even her grief at my departure. Never speak unkindly of me to her. When you see me no more, you will find less difficulty in forgetting the injury I have done you; you must endeavour to remember only the benefit you receive in gaining Elizabeth.”
CHAPTER XX.
The beautiful month of May had arrived, with her light budding foliage, which seems to hang over the hoar branches of the trees like a green aerial mist — the nightingales sung through the moonlight night, and every other feathered chorister took up the note at early dawn. The sweetest flowers in the year embroidered the fields; and the verdant cornfields were spread like a lake, now glittering in the sun, now covered over by the shadows of the clouds. It appeared impossible not to hope — not to enjoy; yet a seriousness had again gathered over Falkner’s countenance that denoted the return of care. He avoided the society even of Elizabeth — his rides were solitary — his evenings passed in the seclusion of his own room. Elizabeth, for the first time in her life, grew a little discontented. “I sacrifice all to him,” she thought, “yet I cannot make him happy. Love alone possesses the sceptre and arbitrary power to rule; every other affection admits a parliament of thoughts — and debate and divisions ensue, which may make us wiser, but which sadly derogates from the throned state of what we fancy a master sentiment. I cannot make Falkner happy; yet Neville is miserable through my endeavours — and to such struggle there is no end — my promised faith is inviolable, nor do I even wish to break it.”
One balmy, lovely day, Elizabeth rode out with her cousins; Mrs. Raby was driving her father-in-law through the grounds in the pony phaeton — Falkner had been out, and was returned. Several days had passed, and no answer arrived from Neville. He was uneasy and sad, and yet rejoiced at the respite afforded to the final parting with his child. Suddenly, from the glass doors of the saloon, he perceived a gentleman riding up the avenue; he recognized him, and exclaimed, “All is over!” At that moment he felt himself transported to a distant land — surrounded by strangers — cut off from all he held dear. Such must be the consequence of the arrival of Gerard Neville; and it was he, who, dismounting, in a few minutes after entered the room.
He came up to Falkner, and held out his hand, saying, “We must be friends, Mr. Falkner — from this moment I trust that we are friends. We join together for the happiness of the dearest and most perfect being in the world.”
Falkner could not take his hand — his manner grew cold; but he readily replied, “I hope we do; and we must concert together to insure our success.”
“Yet there is one other,” continued Neville, “whom we must take into our consultations.”
“Mrs. Raby?”
“No! Elizabeth herself. She alone can decide for us all, and teach us the right path to take. Do not mistake me, I know the road she will point out, and am ready to follow it. Do you think I could deceive her? Could I ask her to give me her dear self, and thus generously raise me to the very height of human happiness, with deception on my lips? I were indeed unworthy of her, if I were capable of such an act.
“Yet, but for the sake of honest truth, I would not even consult her — my own mind is made up, if you consent; I am come to you, Mr. Falkner, as a suppliant, to ask you to give me your adopted child, but not to separate you from her: I should detest myself if I were the cause of so much sorrow to either. If my conduct need explanation in the world, you are my excuse, I need go no further. We must both join in rendering Miss Raby happy, and both, I trust, remain friends to the end of our lives.”
“You are generous,” replied Falkner; “perhaps you are just. I am not unworthy of the friendship you offer, were you any other than you are.”
“It is because I am such as I am, that I venture to make advances which would be impertinent from any other.”
At this moment, a light step was heard on the lawn without, and Elizabeth stood before them. She paused in utter wonder on seeing Falkner and Neville together; soon surprise was replaced by undisguised delight — her expressive countenance became radiant with happiness. Falkner addressed her: “I present a friend to you, dear Elizabeth; I leave you with him — he will best explain his purposes and wishes. Meanwhile I must remark, that I consider him bound by nothing that has been said; you must take counsel together — you must act for your mutual happiness — that is all the condition I make — I yield to no other. Be happy; and, if it be necessary, forget me, as I am very willing to forget myself.”
Falkner left them; and they instinctively, so to prevent interruption, took their way into a woody glade of the park; and as they walked beneath the shadows of some beautiful limetrees, on the crisp green turf, disclosed to each other every inner thought and feeling. Neville declared his resolve not to separate her from her benefactor. “If the world censure me,” he said, “I am content; I am accustomed to its judgments, and never found them sway or annoy me. I do right for my own heart. It is a godlike task to reward the penitent. In religion and morality I know that I am justified: whether I am in the code of worldly honour, I leave others to decide; and yet I believe that I am. I had once thought to have met Falkner in a duel, but my father’s vengeance prevented that. He is now acquitted before all the world, of bein
g more than the accidental cause of my dear mother’s death. Knights of old, after they fought in right good earnest, became friends, each finding, in the bravery of the other, a cause for esteem. Such is the situation of Rupert Falkner and myself; and we will both join, dear Elizabeth, in making him forget the past, and rendering his future years calm and happy.”
Elizabeth could only look her gratitude. She felt, as was most true, that this was not a cause for words or reason. Falkner in himself offered, or did not offer, full excuse for the generosity of Neville. No one could see him, and not allow that the affectionate, duteous son in no way derogated from his reverence for his mother’s memory, by entirely forgiving him who honoured her as an earthly angel, and had deplored, through years of unutterable anguish, the mortal injury done her. Satisfied in his own mind that he acted rightly, Neville did not seek for any other approval; and yet he gladly accepted it from Elizabeth, whose heart, touched to its very core by his nobleness, felt an almost painful weight of gratitude and love; she tried to express it: fortunately, between lovers mere language is not necessary ineffectually to utter that which transcends all expression. Neville felt himself most sweetly thanked; a more happy pair never trod this lovely earth than the two that, closely linked hand in hand, and with hearts open and true as the sunlight about them, enjoyed the sweetest hour of love, the first of acknowledged perpetual union, beneath the majestic, deep shadowing thickets of Belleforest.
All that had seemed so difficult, now took its course easily. They did not any of them seek to account for, or to justify the course they took. They each knew that they could not do other than they did. Elizabeth could not break faith with Falkner — Neville could not renounce her; it might be strange — but it must be so: they three must remain together through life, despite all of tragic and miserable that seemed to separate them.
Even Lady Cecil admitted that there was no choice. Elizabeth must be won — she was too dear a treasure to be voluntarily renounced. In a few weeks, the wedding-day of Sir Gerard Neville and Miss Raby being fixed, she joined them at Belleforest, and saw, with genuine pleasure, the happiness of the two persons whom she esteemed and loved most in the world, secured. Mrs. Raby’s warm heart reaped its own reward, in witnessing this felicitous conclusion of her interference.
Whether the reader of this eventful tale will coincide with every other person, fully in the confidence of all, in the opinion that such was the necessary termination of a position full of difficulty, is hard to say — but so it was; and it is most certain that no woman who ever saw Rupert Falkner, but thought Neville just and judicious; and if any man disputed this point, when he saw Elizabeth, he was an immediate convert.
As much happiness as any one can enjoy, whose inner mind bears the unhealing wound of a culpable act, fell to the portion of Falkner. He had repented; and was forgiven, we may believe, in heaven, as well as on earth. He could not forgive himself — and this one shadow remained upon his lot — it could not be got rid of; yet perhaps in the gratitude he felt to those about him, in the softened tenderness inspired by the sense that he was dealt with more leniently than he believed that he deserved, he found full compensation for the memories that made him feel himself a perpetual mourner beside Alithea’s grave.
Neville and Elizabeth had no drawback to their felicity. They cared not for the world, and when they did enter it, the merits of both commanded respect and liking; they were happy in each other, happy in a growing family, happy in Falkner; whom, as Neville had said, it was impossible to regard with lukewarm sentiments; and they derived a large store of happiness from his enlightened mind, from the elevated tone of moral feeling, which was the result of his sufferings, and from the deep affection with which he regarded them both. They were happy also in the wealth which gave scope to the benevolence of their dispositions, and in the talents that guided them rightly through the devious maze of life. They often visited Dromore, but their chief time was spent at their seat in Bucks, near which Falkner had purchased a villa. He lived in retirement: he grew a sage amidst his books and his own reflections. But his heart was true to itself to the end, and his pleasures were derived from the society of his beloved Elizabeth, of Neville, who was scarcely less dear, and their beautiful children. Surrounded by these, he felt no want of the nearest ties; they were to him as his own. Time passed lightly on, bringing no apparent change; thus they still live — and Neville has never for a moment repented the irresistible impulse that led him to become the friend of him, whose act had rendered his childhood miserable, but who completed the happiness of his maturer years.
THE END
The Short Stories
Ramsgate 1872 — Shelley went to a boarding school here for only six months. However, she studied from home for many years, with her father and his friends acting as her tutors. Her father did not like the idea of sending his children to school as he believed that his knowledge as a philosopher was enough to pass on to his children.
ON GHOSTS
I look for ghosts — but none will force
Their way to me; ‘tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Between the living and the dead.
WORDSWORTH
What a different earth do we inhabit from that on which our forefathers dwelt! The antediluvian world, strode over by mammoths, preyed upon by the megatherion, and peopled by the offspring of the Sons of God, is a better type of the earth of Homer, Herodotus, and Plato, than the hedged-in cornfields and measured hills of the present day. The globe was then encircled by a wall which paled in the bodies of men, whilst their feathered thoughts soared over the boundary; it had a brink, and in the deep profound which it overhung, men’s imaginations, eagle-winged, dived and flew, and brought home strange tales to their believing auditors. Deep caverns harboured giants; cloud-like birds cast their shadows upon the plains; while far out at sea lay islands of bliss, the fair paradise of Atlantis or El Dorado sparkling with untold jewels. Where are they now? The Fortunate Isles have lost the glory that spread a halo round them; for who deems himself nearer to the golden age, because he touches at the Canaries on his voyage to India? Our only riddle is the rise of the Niger; the interior of New Holland, our only terra incognita; and our sole mare incognitum, the north-west passage. But these are tame wonders, lions in leash; we do not invest Mungo Park, or the Captain of the Hecla, with divine attributes; no one fancies that the waters of the unknown river bubble up from hell’s fountains, no strange and weird power is supposed to guide the ice-berg, nor do we fable that a stray pick-pocket from Botany Bay has found the gardens of the Hesperides within the circuit of the Blue Mountains. What have we left to dream about? The clouds are no longer the charioted servants of the sun, nor does he any more bathe his glowing brow in the bath of Thetis; the rainbow has ceased to be the messenger of the Gods, and thunder longer their awful voice, warning man of that which is to come. We have the sun which has been weighed and measured, but not understood; we have the assemblage of the planets, the congregation of the stars, and the yet unshackled ministration of the winds: — such is the list of our ignorance.
Nor is the empire of the imagination less bounded in its own proper creations, than in those which were bestowed on it by the poor blind eyes of our ancestors. What has become of enchantresses with their palaces of crystal and dungeons of palpable darkness? What of fairies and their wands? What of witches and their familiars? and, last, what of ghosts, with beckoning hands and fleeting shapes, which quelled the soldier’s brave heart, and made the murderer disclose to the astonished noon the veiled work of midnight? These which were realities to our fore-fathers, in our wiser age —
— Characterless are grated
To dusty nothing.
Yet is it true that we do not believe in ghosts? There used to be several traditionary tales repeated, with their authorities, enough to stagger us when we consigned them to that place where that is which “is as though it had never been.” But these are gone out of fashion. Brutus’
s dream has become a deception of his over-heated brain, Lord Lyttleton’s vision is called a cheat; and one by one these inhabitants of deserted houses, moonlight glades, misty mountain tops, and midnight church-yards, have been ejected from their immemorial seats, and small thrill is felt when the dead majesty of Denmark blanches the cheek and unsettles the reason of his philosophic son.
But do none of us believe in ghosts? If this question be read at noon-day, when —
Every little corner, nook, and hole,
Is penetrated with the insolent light —
at such a time derision is seated on the features of my reader. But let it be twelve at night in a lone house; take up, I beseech you, the story of the Bleeding Nun; or of the Statue, to which the bridegroom gave the wedding ring, and she came in the dead of night to claim him, tall, and cold; or of the Grandsire, who with shadowy form and breathless lips stood over the couch and kissed the foreheads of his sleeping grandchildren, and thus doomed them to their fated death; and let all these details be assisted by solitude, flapping curtains, rushing wind, a long and dusky passage, an half open door — O, then truly, another answer may be given, and many will request leave to sleep upon it, before they decide whether there be such a thing as a ghost in the world, or out of the world, if that phraseology be more spiritual. What is the meaning of this feeling?
For my own part, I never saw a ghost except once in a dream. I feared it in my sleep; I awoke trembling, and lights and the speech of others could hardly dissipate my fear. Some years ago I lost a friend, and a few months afterwards visited the house where I had last seen him. It was deserted, and though in the midst of a city, its vast halls and spacious apartments occasioned the same sense of loneliness as if it had been situated on an uninhabited heath. I walked through the vacant chambers by twilight, and none save I awakened the echoes of their pavement. The far mountains (visible from the upper windows) had lost their tinge of sunset; the tranquil atmosphere grew leaden coloured as the golden stars appeared in the firmament; no wind ruffled the shrunk-up river which crawled lazily through the deepest channel of its wide and empty bed; the chimes of the Ave Maria had ceased, and the bell hung moveless in the open belfry: beauty invested a reposing world, and awe was inspired by beauty only. I walked through the rooms filled with sensations of the most poignant grief. He had been there; his living frame had been caged by those walls, his breath had mingled with that atmosphere, his step had been on those stones, I thought: — the earth is a tomb, the gaudy sky a vault, we but walking corpses. The wind rising in the east rushed through the open casements, making them shake; — methought, I heard, I felt — I know not what — but I trembled. To have seen him but for a moment, I would have knelt until the stones had been worn by the impress, so I told myself, and so I knew a moment after, but then I trembled, awe-struck and fearful. Wherefore? There is something beyond us of which we are ignorant. The sun drawing up the vaporous air makes a void, and the wind rushes in to fill it, — thus beyond our soul’s ken there is an empty space; and our hopes and fears, in gentle gales or terrific whirlwinds, occupy the vacuum; and if it does no more, it bestows on the feeling heart a belief that influences do exist to watch and guard us, though they be impalpable to the coarser faculties.
