Griffith Gaunt; or, Jealousy: Volumes 1 to 3 (of 3)Reade, Charles
General
Griffith Gaunt; or, Jealousy: Volumes 1 to 3 (of 3)
Reade, Charles
Bigamy -- Fiction; English fiction -- 19th century
One evening Mrs. Gaunt rode by with Griffith and saw him watering
them. His tall figure, graceful, though inclined to stoop, bent over
them with feminine delicacy, and the simple act, which would have been
nothing in vulgar hands, seemed to Mrs. Gaunt so earnest, tender, and
delicate in him, that her eyes filled, and she murmured, "Poor Brother
Leonard."
"Why, what's wrong with him now?" asked Griffith, a little peevishly.
"That was him watering his flowers."
"Oh, is that all?" said Griffith, carelessly.
Leonard said to himself, "I go too little abroad among my people." He
made a little round, and it ended in Hernshaw Castle.
Mrs. Gaunt was out.
He looked disappointed; so the servant suggested that perhaps she was
in the Dame's Haunt: he pointed to the grove.
Leonard followed his direction, and soon found himself, for the first
time, in that sombre, solemn retreat.
It was a hot summer day, and the grove was delicious. It was also a
place well suited to the imaginative and religious mind of the Italian.
He walked slowly to and fro, in religious meditation. Indeed he had
nearly thought out his next sermon, when his meditative eye happened to
fall on a terrestrial object that startled and thrilled him. Yet it was
only a lady's glove. It lay at the foot of a rude wooden seat beneath a
gigantic pine.
He stooped and picked it up. He opened the little fingers, and called
up in fancy the white and tapering hand that glove could lit. He laid
the glove softly on his own palm, and eyed it with dreamy tenderness.
"So this is the hand that hath solaced my loneliness," said he: "a hand
fair as that angelical face, and sweet as the kind heart that doeth
good by stealth."
Then, forgetting for a moment, as lofty spirits will, the difference
between meum and tuum, he put the little glove in his bosom, and paced
thoughtfully home through the woods, that were separated from the grove
only by one meadow: and so he missed the owner of the glove; for she
had returned home while he was meditating in her favourite haunt.
Leonard, amongst his other accomplishments, could draw and paint with
no mean skill. In one of those hours that used to be of melancholy,
but now were hours of dreamy complacency, he took out his pencils and
endeavoured to sketch the inspired face that he had learned to preach
to, and now to dwell on with gratitude.
Clearly as he saw it before him, he could not reproduce it to his own
satisfaction.
After many failures he got very near the mark: yet still something was
wanting.
Then, as a last resource, he actually took his sketch to church with
him, and in preaching made certain pauses, and, with a very few
touches, perfected the likeness; then, on his return home, threw
himself on his knees and prayed forgiveness of God with many sighs and
tears, and hid the sacrilegious drawing out of his own sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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