Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/452

 444  he was not prepared, perhaps, to look very favourably on the dowerless yeoman’s daughter of whose airs and graces he had heard so much. Family tradition does not say that Alexander St. George asked for the advice which, after half an hour’s conversation with Kitty, Doctor Maurice emphatically tendered as they drove home side by side.

“Don’t do it, brother, don’t!” reiterated the prebendary. “A beautiful creature, a lovely woman—who will play you a trick, depend upon it, Alexander!—who will play you a trick, if you only give her the chance.”

However, of course the young vicar married our heroine, and the sequel of their history verified my grandfather’s prediction; he,he [sic] probably saw that the girl did not love his brother, and knew that she was totally unfitted for the duties and position of a clergyman’s wife. She brought many disturbing qualities and great bitterness of spirit into the remote parsonage and quiet study at Stoke, but no children were born of their ill-starred union, and, unsoftened and undisciplined, remained the singular and selfish character which has left its subtle, but discernible traces among lineaments and colouring of so much refinement.

The name of Mrs. St. George had not been injuriously associated with that of any gentleman up to the hour of her disappearance; but she had been always discontented with her own lot, and very confident in the power of her beauty. At last she resolved to break away from every relationship and connection, to quit the scenes of her past life for ever, and to start afresh on another stage, unincumbered by any ties or duties. Two accounts are given concerning the manner of her departure: in the first it is stated that Catherine was present, with Mr. St. George, at a masquerade in the house of a friend whom they were visiting in London; and that during the course of the evening she walked from the crowded reception rooms, unobserved by her husband, with a mysterious companion, whose name and rank have never transpired, or been surmised. The second version says, that our heroine set forth from home alone, one fine day, without making any explanation, or leaving the vaguest clue behind by which her route or destination could be traced. She had taken all her measures with an extraordinary ingenuity and deliberation; the inmates of Stoke Vicarage watched and waited for her return, but she never came back to them alive. She has not been charged with defrauding Mr. St. George of anything besides herself: she must therefore have started on her enterprise with a very light purse and slender wardrobe. But here occurs a hiatus in her story which her husband’s family have never been able to fill up. It was reported that she frequented places of public amusement, and lived disreputably in London for a time. If this account be correct, she certainly never endured the hardships, or passed through the degrading vicissitudes to which she had rendered herself liable. However, the owner of that reticent mouth and able forehead was no common character among our unhappy sisters, who have “forsaken the guides of their youth, and forgotten the covenant of their God.” She speedily met with a powerful protector, and gained all that she had learned to covet in very early days; but nothing was heard of her at Stoke until the summer of 1752, and to find her again we must travel far away from the great farm, its corn lands and marine marshes; far from Mr. St. George’s parsonage on our eastern coast, to “Verona’s Champain,” as Dante and his faithful Carey have it, to a sick room in an Italian villa. On her deathbed lay the lost wife, and among the terrible bloom and brightness of hectic fever the haunted soul looked out in the anxious intensity of her glowing brown eyes, and mental emotion and physical suffering were indicated by the painful working of her thin nostrils. A young man knelt beside her, listening and watching for every word, symptom, or look. He remained there night and day, with his fingers linked in hers, and on one of them he had placed the only wedding ring which she wore then. His was that fearfully prodigal love which the reverent mind contemplates mournfully, since it is doomed to end in darkness—so idolatrous was his devotion to a human being, so complete and desperate his abandonment to an earthly passion: he had given all indeed—heart and spirit—to the perishing woman before him, and he never counted the cost, or reckoned how large was his venture, until she was taken, and he had made utter shipwreck.

John Viscount Dalrie might have been about twenty-five years of age: he was the heir to an earldom, and his countess-mother descended from the house of “proud Argyle.” Her son was distinguished for personal grace and beauty; he possessed a highly cultivated exquisitely sensitive mind, and the hapless young nobleman proved himself as gravely enduring and courageously faithful as the stoutest and most chivalric knight in the long rolls of his ancestry. He met Mrs. St. George during one of his visits to London; but tradition is silent as to how, or under what circumstances, he made her acquaintance. Her great beauty and charming grace of manner captivated him, and he appears to have accepted, without inquiry, the account which she found it convenient to give of herself. He actually married her, and they went abroad together immediately after the ceremony. It was not at all probable that this friendless, mysterious woman could be graciously received as a daughter by his noble parents, and concealment was everything to Catherine; a prolonged absence from England would give her far better chance of escaping detection, and, without doubt, she urged this plan upon him.

During the next four years they travelled over the greater part of Europe, never remaining long in any place, since Catherine was more restless than even in former days, and she now carried in her own bosom certain fierce pursuers, from whom there is no escape. Lord Dalrie’s confidence in her merit and truth was never clouded by suspicion or doubt; but the increasing delicacy of his dear companion’s health occasioned him great uneasiness. The keeping her guilty secret, the constant watchfulness, anxiety, and relentless