Falkland, Book IV

Falkland, Book IV by Edward Bulwer-lytton

Falkland's fourth book opens on an epistolary exchange as Mrs. St. John writes to Erasmus Falkland reporting that Lady Emily Mandeville has recovered from illness, warning him bitterly that his character is too fickle and hers too soft-natured for any further attachment between them to end in anything but Emily's ruin. Falkland demands to see Emily as a right; she assents, and their final meeting only deepens the bond rather than severing it. Falkland writes to bid her a resolute farewell, telling her he will not accept her offer to abandon home and honour for him unless being his constitutes her whole happiness, and that he is soon to leave England for another country he loves for its "afflictions and humiliation." Emily's answering letter collapses this resolve entirely: she declares herself wholly his and begs to flee with him anywhere. Falkland hurries back to her. Returning to E――, Falkland is tormented by memory of an earlier love who died through his agency, and by guilt at what he is about to do to Emily. A note warns him that Mr. Mandeville has returned and may suspect the affair; Emily and Falkland arrange instead to meet secretly by the lake to plan their flight. Mrs. St. John intercepts Emily's reply, reads it, and out of jealous passion rather than principle betrays the lovers' secret to Mandeville, letting him believe her motive is loyal friendship. That evening Falkland and Emily meet by the lake and are drawn into a final consummation of their passion, agreeing to fly together at daybreak. That night, alone at L――, Falkland is visited by a terrifying apparition of Emily's face as if in death, which he struggles to rationalize away. At dawn Falkland waits for Emily in vain, then goes to the house and learns she is dying or dead: a blood vessel has burst. He finds her already dead, kisses her once, and is later found unconscious on the very spot of their meeting. He falls into weeks of delirious, hallucinatory illness filled with visions of infernal and oceanic torment, always centered on the dead face of the woman he loved, and the narrative states his sentence is "never to forget." A retrospective passage reveals what happened at home that fatal night: returning from the lake, Emily is confronted by Mandeville with her intercepted letters; in his violent rage he seizes and flings her down, and she dies coughing blood in his arms, the clock striking half-past midnight — the same hour of Falkland's earlier vision. She is buried with her guilt undiscovered, mourned as blameless, on grounds that had witnessed her own bridal only four years before. The narrative shifts to Spain, where Falkland has joined Rafael Riego's constitutionalist forces alongside his uncle, Don Alphonso (D'Aguilar), seeking oblivion and danger rather than any political ideal. After a defeated skirmish at Lodar against French cavalry under D'Argout, the shattered remnant flees into the mountains; Falkland sees his uncle killed in the retreat. Riego delivers a long, fervent speech to Falkland on the indestructibility of the spirit of liberty even in defeat. The company presses on but is betrayed by two guides, the hermit and the peasant Lopez Lara, whom Riego had compelled to serve them. At a farmhouse ambush Falkland, sensing treachery, kills Lara but is fatally shot; Riego and the others are captured. Falkland is taken to a French officer's quarters at Carolina, mortally wounded and told recovery is hopeless. In his final night he meditates at length on death, the unanswerable mystery of existence, and the nature of the soul's fate beyond the grave. Near midnight his strength fails; attendants find him reaching toward the wall, then falling lifeless, an open locket of dark hair clutched convulsively against his heart. The text ends with his death.

By Edward Bulwer-lytton · First published 1834 · Genre: Romance, Gothic, Drama · 11,880 words

First lines

FROM MRS. ST. JOHN TO ERASMUS FALKLAND, ESQ.

At last I can give a more favourable answer to your letters. Emily is now quite out of danger. Since the day you forced yourself, with such a disinterested regard for her health and reputation, into her room, she grew (no thanks to your forbearance) gradually better. I trust that she will be able to see you in a few days. I hope this the more, because she now feels and decides that it will be for the last time. You have, it is true, injured her happiness for life her virtue, thank Heaven, is yet spared; and though you have made her wretched, you will never, I trust, succeed in making her despised.

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historical fiction · 19th century · British literature · adventure · political intrigue · romance · social commentary · military · colonialism · identity · betrayal · class struggle

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