The Ordeal of Richard Feverel | Page 2

at the same time so biting in their
moral tone, that his reputation was great among the virtuous, who form
the larger portion of the English book-buying public. Election-seasons
called him to ballad-poetry on behalf of the Tory party. Dialer
possessed undoubted fluency, but did tittle, though Sir Austin was ever
expecting much of him.
A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in
moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now
that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and
her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively
responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a
fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first
entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband's friend.
By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her
chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.
"For I am not the first who found The name of Mary fatal!"
says a subsequent sentimental alliterative love-poem of Diaper's.
Such was the outline of the story. But the baronet could fill it up. He
had opened his soul to these two. He had been noble Love to the one,
and to the other perfect Friendship. He had bid them be brother and
sister whom he loved, and live a Golden Age with him at Raynham. In
fact, he had been prodigal of the excellences of his nature, which it is
not good to be, and, like Timon, he became bankrupt, and fell upon
bitterness.
The faithless lady was of no particular family; an orphan daughter of an

admiral who educated her on his half-pay, and her conduct struck but at
the man whose name she bore.
After five years of marriage, and twelve of friendship, Sir Austin was
left to his loneliness with nothing to ease his heart of love upon save a
little baby boy in a cradle. He forgave the man: he put him aside as
poor for his wrath. The woman he could not forgive; she had sinned
every way. Simple ingratitude to a benefactor was a pardonable
transgression, for he was not one to recount and crush the culprit under
the heap of his good deeds. But her he had raised to be his equal, and
he judged her as his equal. She had blackened the world's fair aspect for
him.
In the presence of that world, so different to him now, he preserved his
wonted demeanor, and made his features a flexible mask. Mrs. Doria
Forey, his widowed sister, said that Austin might have retired from his
Parliamentary career for a time, and given up gaieties and that kind of
thing; her opinion, founded on observation of him in public and private,
was, that the light thing who had taken flight was but a feather on her
brother's Feverel-heart, and his ordinary course of life would be
resumed. There are times when common men cannot bear the weight of
just so much. Hippias Feverel, one of his brothers, thought him
immensely improved by his misfortune, if the loss of such a person
could be so designated; and seeing that Hippias received in
consequence free quarters at Raynham, and possession of the wing of
the Abbey she had inhabited, it is profitable to know his thoughts. If the
baronet had given two or three blazing dinners in the great hall he
would have deceived people generally, as he did his relatives and
intimates. He was too sick for that: fit only for passive acting.
The nursemaid waking in the night beheld a solitary figure darkening a
lamp above her little sleeping charge, and became so used to the sight
as never to wake with a start. One night she was strangely aroused by a
sound of sobbing. The baronet stood beside the cot in his long black
cloak and travelling cap. His fingers shaded a lamp, and reddened
against the fitful darkness that ever and anon went leaping up the wall.
She could hardly believe her senses to see the austere gentleman, dead

silent, dropping tear upon tear before her eyes. She lay stone-still in a
trance of terror and mournfulness, mechanically counting the tears as
they fell, one by one. The hidden face, the fall and flash of those heavy
drops in the light of the lamp he held, the upright, awful figure, agitated
at regular intervals like a piece of clockwork by the low murderous
catch of his breath: it was so piteous to her poor human nature that her
heart began wildly palpitating. Involuntarily the poor girl cried out to
him, "Oh, sir!" and fell a-weeping. Sir Austin turned the lamp on her
pillow, and harshly bade her go to sleep, striding from the room